Talking to Poachers

My previous article explored what burglary research can teach us about wildlife crime. A central lesson from that work is the value of talking directly to offenders not only about why they offend, but how they plan, act, and make decisions.

That same principle underpins my own research. Much has been written about why people poach, but less about how they do it and from a crime-prevention perspective, that distinction could help identify opportunities for reducing and preventing wildlife crime.

The real turning point came during an early pilot project. I had assumed poachers would use the intersections of cell-signal coverage and forest logging roads as drop-off and pick-up points. In reality, there was barely any signal at all - unless one stood balanced on top of a rare anthill. When I mentioned the project to a local researcher, he simply replied: “Oh no, they have pre-arranged drop-off and pick-up points.” It was a humbling reminder that assumptions can only go so far, and that the best way to understand criminal methods may be to ask the people who know them first-hand.

This article begins a three-part series that draws directly on the findings of my doctoral research. Each part looks at a different layer of offender behaviour: first, motivation and opportunity; next, decision-making and spatial patterns; and finally, law-enforcement models and intelligence integration.

This first piece focuses on why people poach, examining what current research in both criminology and conservation tells us about offender motivation, and then comparing those ideas with what emerged from my own fieldwork. The aim is to move from theory to application: understanding how existing insights can translate into more practical tools for preventing wildlife crime.

Criminology has spent decades asking why people break the law. The answer is rarely simple. Most offending grows from a mix of pressure, opportunity, and the stories people tell themselves to justify what they do.

Rational choice and opportunity theories see crime as a kind of decision-making. People weigh risk, effort, and reward and act when the balance looks favourable. As earlier articles showed, the same logic applies to poaching: decisions depend on access, patrol presence, and potential gain. These models explain when people act, but not always why.

To get closer to the why, other perspectives step in.

Strain theory suggests that when people can’t reach accepted goals like keeping a family, earning a living, or maintaining status through legitimate routes, crime can become a form of adaptation. It’s not moral collapse so much as frustration with blocked opportunity. In urban settings that means burglary or drug sales; in conservation contexts, it can mean turning to wildlife for income when other options are closed or unfairly distributed.

Neutralisation theory looks at how people justify their behaviour: by denying harm, blaming authorities, or appealing to higher loyalties such as feeding a family. These rationalisations protect a sense of being a “good person” even while breaking the law. Many wildlife offenders use similar language, seeing themselves as providers or traditional hunters rather than criminals.

Social learning adds that people don’t just learn the techniques of offending; they also learn its acceptability. Behaviour spreads through friends and relatives who show how it’s done and pass on stories that make it seem reasonable. Small groups or hunting networks can normalise the act in the same way that peer groups do in urban crime.

Together, these ideas show that motivation isn’t fixed or purely economic. It grows from social context, perceived fairness, and the justifications people find to live with their choices.

Research within conservation has explored the same question from a different angle, looking less at psychology and more at livelihoods, governance, and culture.

Poverty and basic need are the most frequently cited drivers. Many studies describe poaching as a way to get food, medicine, or school fees when legal incomes are scarce or access to resources has been cut off by protected-area rules. In this view, wildlife use is economic coping, not deliberate law-breaking.

Profit and market incentives add another layer. As demand for ivory, horn, and bushmeat grew, some people began treating wildlife as a commercial resource. The motivation shifted from survival to entrepreneurship, taking a calculated risk for a potentially high return.

Cultural and subsistence traditions complicate the picture further. In many places, hunting long predates modern conservation boundaries. Taking an animal for food or ceremony may not be seen locally as wrong at all. Law enforcement then becomes less about catching criminals and more about negotiating legitimacy between systems of value.

Governance and legitimacy also matter. Where state authority is weak or distrusted, conservation law can look arbitrary or exploitative. In such settings, poaching sometimes becomes an act of quiet resistance rather than greed.

Finally, social networks and peer influence link many of these factors together. People are drawn in by friends or relatives, by local traders, or by others who promise to buy what they supply. Involvement grows through trust and familiarity rather than formal recruitment.

Taken together, conservation research shows that wildlife crime is driven by a mix of need, opportunity, social pressure, and questions of legitimacy. It fits closely with what criminology has found in urban contexts but grounds those insights in specific landscapes and economies.

My own interviews weren’t designed to re-test these theories, but they add a little extra texture.

When offenders described how they became involved, the accounts revealed a more intricate reality than the simple poverty narrative often repeated in policy discussions. Across the interviews three broad themes appeared consistently: need, aspiration, and opportunity, with most respondents combining at least two.

Need was the most visible and the most familiar. Roughly a third of respondents spoke about short-term pressures such as hunger, school fees, illness, or debts:

“I started poaching because of hunger. My children needed money for school fees.”

“I wanted to raise tuition fees for my child.”

In these cases, poaching appeared to function as a temporary fix rather than a way of life. This has parallels with the way payday loans operate in other contexts: not a permanent solution, but a stop-gap that meets an urgent need while creating other risks.

Aspiration reflected a different kind of motivation. About seven percent of respondents spoke about wanting to improve their circumstances, to build houses, open small businesses, or raise money for marriage.

“I wanted to open my own barbershop but had no capital. My friend said we could go hunting once, sell the meat, and I’d have the money.”

“I took a loan to buy a pangolin, planning to sell it for a profit.”

These accounts suggest an element of entrepreneurship, where poaching was viewed as a means to advance personal prospects. It shows that participation cannot be explained solely through poverty: ambition and perceived opportunity also played a role.

Opportunity was the broadest and most significant theme, appearing in nearly two-thirds of responses. It encompassed circumstances where the chance to offend arose or was created through contact with others. Within this, three sub-categories emerged:

• Inducement — where a respondent said they had been prompted, persuaded, or arranged by another person to commit the offence.

“A woman came to my farm saying she was buying gold and ivory or pangolins.”

“An informer arranged for me. He said we’d share the money.”

These examples highlight how some offences originate through external prompting. In several cases, inducement appeared to involve manipulation or partial entrapment, revealing gaps in how law-enforcement intelligence identifies and monitors intermediaries. The frequency of inducement (around one in five respondents) also points to weaknesses in intelligence collection and limited awareness within enforcement agencies of the information value such interactions hold.

• Proximity — where respondents described chance events or encounters that made participation possible.

“I was herding cows and was asked by friends to carry meat for them.”

“I found a porcupine hit on the road and picked it up.”

These examples show that opportunism, rather than intent, can trigger involvement when everyday activities bring people into contact with wildlife products or others engaged in hunting.

Relational links — where friends or family were directly involved.

“I was invited by my friends to go and hunt.”

“A friend gave me the ivory to sell because I worked for a Chinese firm.”

These accounts underline the social dimension of offending. Relationships create access, transmit information, and provide a degree of protection or legitimacy that allows the activity to proceed.

Taken together, these patterns indicate that while poverty is a factor, it is not the defining one. Economic pressure, ambition, social connection, and inducement interact to shape behaviour.

Of particular importance is the dominance of opportunity, not only in terms of physical access, but as a social and informational condition. Understanding how those opportunities arise, and how inducement and relational ties operate, has direct implications for law-enforcement in terms of identifying starting points for collection of information that can be incorporated into the intelligence cycle, and providing insights on the effectiveness of law enforcement methods.

A notable feature of the interviews was the near absence of stigma attached to wildlife crime. When asked how they expected to be received after release, almost all male respondents said their families and communities would welcome them back. Many emphasised that they had “not offended anyone” or had “done nothing wrong.” Several reported that church members continued to visit them and that prison staff treated them with trust, reinforcing the sense that wildlife offences occupy a different moral category from other crimes.

Women, by contrast, expressed more uncertainty about their reception. Their responses suggested greater anxiety about social judgement and family reintegration. This may reflect the sharper social penalties attached to female offending generally, but it also points to how gender shapes the moral landscape around wildlife crime — male offenders are potentially viewed as resourceful or unlucky, while women may risk being seen as having transgressed both law and gendered expectations of responsibility.

Across both groups, knowledge of the law was high, although recognition of moral wrongdoing was low. This separation weakens deterrence: imprisonment may be physically punishing, but if the moral basis of the offence is not accepted, it fails to achieve its corrective intent.

There was also a marked contradiction between this belief “I didn’t offend anyone” and the frequent acknowledgement that families were struggling in their absence. Some described children withdrawn from school or spouses unable to cope financially, yet did not connect those outcomes to their own actions. The harm was displaced outward, treated as misfortune rather than consequence. This selective moral reasoning mirrors Sykes and Matza’s techniques of neutralisation: denying injury, denying the victim, or appealing to higher loyalties such as providing for one’s family.

Sixty-seven percent of respondents said they knew what they were doing was against the law, yet that knowledge didn’t stop them. The threat of prison clearly wasn’t enough to deter action. This reflects what decades of research have shown across other crime types; it isn’t the severity of punishment that matters most, but the likelihood of being caught. Where enforcement is thin on the ground and wildlife crime is widely accepted, the perceived risk of capture is low and the deterrent effect disappears.

That same acceptance makes it harder to collect intelligence. If neighbours or relatives don’t see the act as wrong, they have no reason to report it, and information dries up at the community level. Deterrence through imprisonment can only go so far; enforcement depends on people recognising the law itself as legitimate and worth supporting.

Understanding why people offend can change where to look for intelligence. When opportunity and persuasion play a big part, the useful information may not be in carcasses or arrests but in information flows: who is recruiting, who is arranging, who knows what. However, enforcement still focuses mainly on catching offenders after the fact rather than anticipating when and where offences will occur.

This is most obvious in the accounts about the use of arranged purchases or offers made through informants. In several of the cases described by offenders, someone approached them saying they wanted to buy ivory, pangolins, or bushmeat and offered to help organise the deal. The “buyer” might be working with enforcement officers or simply testing the market. Either way, these arrangements can blur the line between detection and creation of crime. If used as a broad policing tool rather than with scalpel-level precision they can target people with limited involvement in the market. The results are arrests that demonstrate activity but add little to the intelligence picture in terms of who the prolific and committed offenders are.

Taken together, the findings show that poaching rarely stems from poverty alone. Offending happens when need or ambition meets opportunity and social acceptance. A clearer grasp of how those forces interact could open new ways to target information gathering and strengthen intelligence development without risking the unintentional creation of crimes that might otherwise not happen. Next month’s article shifts from why to how - looking at decision-making about routes, terrain and hunting practices, and what these patterns reveal about predicting and preventing wildlife crime.

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