Karl Ammann risks his life to expose wildlife criminals. His search for tiger traffickers may be his most dangerous mission yet.
Ammann first heard that name in early 2014. He’d been tracking two tiger cubs that had disappeared before he could buy them from a Lao poacher. His investigation had brought him to central Laos, where Vinasakhone, the country’s biggest farm, stored hundreds of tigers behind concrete walls near the Mekong River.
Over the coming months, the investigator, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety, would often call Keovised at Ammann’s prompting. The two men soon developed a friendship. The investigator would take Keovised out for drinks, then secretly record their conversations about women, beer and tigers. “It always cost me,” Ammann later groused. “A lot of alcohol and meals on my invoice.
Boiled or frozen, Ammann realized, dead or alive — tigers had been sold. The operation expanded until 2016, when a new Lao administration came to power and, yielding to international demands, announced in a statement that the farms would close, accusing them of illegally “trading tiger products to international buyers.” Soon after, 300 of Vinasakhone’s 400 tigers vanished.
Ammann later told me he’d had the urge to turn on his camera and confront him, just like he had confronted so many others. He wanted to tell him that he’d actually exported tigers — and accuse him of still doing it. “We breed them to get their babies” to sell, Keovised had recently told Ammann’s investigator, illegal trade an investigative Vietnamese agency has discovered as well.
Every now and then, a worker would pull open a side door connecting the cages, and in would come another tiger. The two would mate then separate, an act that Ammann and I witnessed three times in less than an hour. Standing here, I realized, the existence of the tiger had been reduced to this: endless pacing, speed breeding and an afternoon meal of raw chicken hurled into its cage at 5 p.m.
Ammann took one last look at him. Then he finished his drink, turned off his camera and got up from the table. He’d had enough. He left Keovised to his beer and his tigers and descended the hill, as the day’s last light bloomed orange and red above the mountains.Then it was morning. Ammann directed his driver to take him to the capital to present his findings to the local office of CITES, the regulatory authority of international wildlife trade.
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