WILLIAMS: On a misty mountaintop weapons of war are being primed for a new battle, to save Cambodia’s wildlife. This is what they’re aiming to protect, some of Asia’s last wild tigers. It’s an urgent mission. In Cambodia the few remaining tigers are targets of a deadly trade that threatens to wipe them out.

SUWANNA GAUNTLETT: In the eighteen months preceding our programme thirty-seven elephants were killed and twelve tigers. There’s so much demand from China that the farmers know very well they’ll get a lot more money by selling the wildlife. That’s the problem.

WILLIAMS: Suwanna Gauntlett heads a well-funded conservation group called ‘WildAid’. Its mission? To take the fight for the environment to the poachers. Rising a thousand metres above Cambodia’s humid plains, Bokor National Park is as breathtaking as it is unique. Dotted with the ruins of an old French Hill station, Bokor’s forest is a vital rain catchment often covered in cloud but that doesn’t deter Australian ex-solider, Mark Bowman.

MARK BOWMAN: Well we’re going to go over the next couple of days is a bit of revision for the instructors.

WILLIAMS: He’s funded by WildAid to arm and train these rangers.

MARK BOWMAN: Recently we had a whole lot of rangers kidnapped by the military. They’ve been shot at before, thrown grenades. They went out there unarmed, everyone would just do what they wanted – cut the trees down, destroy the forest because they’d say you know what are they going to do?

WILLIAMS: Stopping wildlife trade means targeting the traders and two years ago WildAid launched its Cambodia campaign with this raid. They found sunbears going crazy from thirst and tiger cubs from the Cambodian jungle.

WildAid’s Cambodia director and major benefactor, Suwanna Gauntlett, organised the raid.

SUWANNA GAUNTLETT: I conducted two underground investigations followed by two sting operations. It netted seven tigers and two bears.

WILLIAMS: These are those same tiger cubs today, protected here at WildAid’s sanctuary. If she hadn’t saved them, they would have had their bones crushed for medicine, their meat eaten and skins sold on the black market operating from Cambodia through neighbouring Vietnam to China. The saved tigers have even reproduced. This powerful cub is their offspring. He’s a prime example of what is being lost to the poachers who are hunting for profit, not for food.

SUWANNA GAUNTLETT: If you have a population of fourteen million people in Cambodia, 75% of which are doing hunting every night, you can easily see that this is not sustainable and most of the hunting is for the wildlife trade because the wildlife trade is so big.

WILLIAMS: Other animals are targets too. Rare wild cows called gaurs, monkeys and sunbears are all in demand as pets or dinner. It’s a trade in rare creatures protected by the powerful.

SUWANNA GAUNTLETT: The biggest problem in the wild life trade is the involvement of Government at highest levels who are helping the wild life traders establish a powerful network often at times protected by the military and facilitated by foresters so that wildlife can be kept in key government offices, protected by the military, in military vehicles, controlled at the borders at the international checkpoints.

WILLIAM: To challenge habits, WildAid is going global with a campaign to reduce demand.

TV ADVERTISEMENT: There’s only one way a champion long jumper can clear an entire herd of elephants.

WILLIAMS: Slick TV ads aimed to shame and are soon to target Chinese consumers in the run up to Beijing’s Olympics.

TV ADVERTISEMENT: When they’ve been butchered for their ivory. Help put an end to the illegal wildlife trade before it’s too late.

WILLIAMS: But in such vast areas of isolated forest, just finding out what’s left in Cambodia is a challenge.

TIM REDFORD: [Instructing rangers] Okay so we did this section of evergreen forest outside the park boundary there before.

WILLIAMS: Tim Redford is a WildAid conservationist with a passion for big cats.

TIM REDFORD: [Instructing rangers] Okay so we know we got the leopard and tiger pictures from down here in the southwest.

WILLIAMS: He’s training rangers to survey the forest with camera traps, and they’re getting results. There are still wild animals out there, lots of them.

TIM REDFORD: A lot of people have written off parks in Cambodia saying there’s too few tigers around but we’re getting quite a lot of signs of tigers and leopards and which proves to us that the tigers aren’t past saving here.

WILLIAMS: Getting the cameras out there requires a mission deep into Cambodia’s north-east. It’s an area rarely seen by outsiders, close to the frontiers of Vietnam and Laos.

TIM REDFORD: All of the parks in Cambodia have got tremendous hunting pressure. The people who live around the parks rely on the parks for forest products but in some places they’re turning to poaching, you know valuable wildlife like tigers just because there’s so much money to be earned. You know the poacher who’s selling it perhaps to the middle man might be getting more than a thousand dollars, maybe two, three thousand dollars and it will work up to there and right up to maybe if you take all of the body parts, I’m sure more than twenty thousand dollars for a dead tiger.

WILLIAMS: With that sort of money in this sort of area, saving the last tigers is a battle of the bush and getting evidence they’re here is the first step. This is what the cameras have trapped – rare birds, wild cows, poachers and then the prize, an Asian leopard and a large Asian tiger filmed just a few months ago. For a man who loves these animals, it was gold.

TIM REDFORD: There are tigers here. We’ve been finding tiger tracks and things like that but that’s the real sort of first tangible proof and it as a bit like sort of scoring a goal in an FA cup final or something. It was an amazing feeling.

WILLIAMS: The feelings are not so pleasant down here at the local market. Tim Redford says wild animals are sold openly here even though it is illegal. Amid the fresh fish and meat of domestic animals, a wild deer is gutted.

TIM REDFORD: The value of that deer meat is probably 50% more than the beef and chicken that we’re seeing so it’s not subsistence poaching and sale. This is commercial business.

WILLIAMS: To clamp down on consumers, mobile units are another step. Backed by armed police they target restaurants, markets and traders, confiscating any wild products they find. Today they’ve found a few kilos of wild boar meat, a protected animal.

WOMAN WITH CAGED BIRDS: [To policeman] Why are you grabbing the cage? You’re acting like a gangster.

OTHER WOMAN: You can make a better arrest than that.

WILLIAMS: Even these tiny birds, captured and released for good luck are liberated in a campaign to change perceptions that wild creatures are money-spinners.

WOMAN IN MARKET: I know it’s illegal, but what can I do? I bring them here to be released, not to be killed.

WILLIAMS: The mobile unit does find bigger fare and this is what they’re most worried about. This raid on a private zoo in central Thailand saved a few listless tigers and they had a more gruesome catch. The skin of an adult tiger and bears paws, already hacked off, ready for dining as a Chinese speciality. At times the bears are kept alive as each paw is hacked off, so the meat is still fresh.

SUWANNA GAUNTLETT: Eating wildlife has been a habit for Cambodia for hundreds of years. When we arrived, eating bear paws after a golf tournament, having tigers in your living room as a status symbol, was a way of life.

WILLIAMS: But as we leave the northeast we discover evidence of another main threat to Cambodia’s wildlife. Protected forests are being cleared and while some of it is small scale, it all adds up and is fast destroying what’s left of wild animal habitat.

TIM REDFORD: Well countrywide it’s enormous. I mean what was contiguous forest you know endless patches of forest in all of northeastern Cambodia is now turning into fragmented islands of forest and that’s going to play havoc to the wildlife populations as well.

WILLIAMS: This is what they’re trying to protect. In Cambodia’s south, the Cardomom Mountain Range, once home to Khmer Rouge patrols, lies in undisturbed beauty. It’s eco-tourism potential is enormous and for WildAid’s Delphine Vann Roe, it is in fact vital.

DELPHINE VANN ROE: The biggest threats to the forests of the Cardomoms are land encroachment and forest fires.

WILLIAMS: So that’s people claiming the land?

DELPHINE VANN ROE: People are claiming the land for different reasons. We have the scenario where a powerful businessman would grab land just for speculation reasons.

WILLIAMS: We don’t have to go far before we find evidence of what she’s talking about. This is meant to be protected forest but a well-connected local businessman has cleared it in order to claim the land as his own. It’s happening all over Cambodia right now and it’s happening fast.

DELPHINE VANN ROE: So legally they’re not allowed to do it and the only means to stop them is to send them to court.

WILLIAMS: We also fly over areas of the park that have been cleared by poor farmers. WildAid is funding this experimental village so small scale landholders don’t need to encroach on the forest. They’re given money, seeds and most importantly title over the land they occupy. Back over the forest we soon find an illegal logger, small scale but targeting valuable tropical hardwoods.

MAN TO LOGGER: Pull the oxcarts here… bring them together!

WILLIAMS: On the ground, the reality of stopping logging is brought into sharp relief.
Thirty five year old father of two, Vy Than, says he can make about twenty US dollars selling this log and he badly needs the money as drought has killed his animals and rice crop.

VY THAN: Yes, it’s difficult, but what else can I do? I’m really poor right now… really, really poor… and worrying about the rain.

WILLIAMS: As it’s a first offence, Vy Than is let off with a warning but he’s just one of thousands eating away at the park. Deep inside the forest, rangers continue to practice their anti-poaching drills.

SUWANNA GAUNTLETT: We believe for wildlife it’s the last moment. There is no more time. Most of the wildlife has already disappeared from Cambodia. If you walk in the countryside you do not see deer anymore. You do not see elephants.

WILLIAMS: Endangered animals versus the rights of poor farmers, it’s a delicate balancing act that must be perfected before time runs out for Cambodia’s wildlife.