"We Raid the Farms at Night"

For security reasons, we are not identifying this individual or the organization they work for. They have spent 14 years conducting undercover investigations into the illegal wildlife trade across Southeast Asia, including raids on bear bile farms, pangolin trafficking operations, and tiger farms. The following interview was conducted via secure communications.

When people imagine wildlife crime investigations, they imagine something like what you see in movies—sting operations with undercover agents and dramatic raids. The reality is different. The reality is months of surveillance before you ever see an animal. It is sitting in a van for twelve hours watching a barn that might contain ten tigers or might contain nothing. It is building a relationship with an informant over coffee for three months before they tell you anything useful. It is paperwork, logistics, and fear—the kind of fear that never fully goes away.

The bear bile farm we raided in northern Vietnam in 2023 is the one I think about most. We had been tracking it for eleven months. Our informant was a former farm worker who had been fired and wanted revenge. He gave us the layout, the guard schedules, the owner's routine. We coordinated with local wildlife authorities for weeks to make sure they would be ready. The raid itself was almost anticlimactic: we arrived at 3 AM, cut through a fence, and found 31 Asiatic black bears in cages that were barely larger than their bodies. The owner was there, came out of his house in his pajamas, and did not resist. He seemed unsurprised.

The bears were in terrible condition. Several had open wounds from the catheter sites. One had a severe eye infection. All of them were stereotyping—pacing in the same circle, over and over, the same route in their tiny cage. I have seen a lot of animals in bad situations in this job. You develop a kind of protective numbness for the first few years. Then one day you look at an animal performing a stereotypic behavior and you think: this is what we have done to them. This is what our demand for bear bile has created. And you feel something that no amount of professionalism can keep down.

The problem with bear bile farms is that they are not illegal in the way people think they are. In China, there are government-licensed bear bile farms with thousands of animals. In Vietnam, there are farms that operate under grandfathered licenses from before the 1992 ban. The farms that are illegal are the ones operating without licenses—and those are often the worst-run, the most overcrowded, the most neglected. When we raid an illegal farm, we rescue the bears and we shut the operation down. But the demand is still there. The consumers are still buying. So the farm reopens somewhere else, under a different name, managed by the same networks.

Pangolin trafficking is the worst I have ever seen. I have worked ivory cases, rhino horn cases, tiger bone cases. None of them compare to pangolins in terms of scale. We intercepted a shipping container in Laem Chabang port in Thailand in 2022 that was supposed to contain frozen fish. It contained 40 tonnes of frozen pangolin meat and scales. Forty tonnes. At an average pangolin weight of about 5 kilograms, that was approximately 8,000 animals. Eight thousand pangolins, packed into a container like cargo, with no food, no water, most of them already dead. We could smell the container from 200 meters away.

The people who run these operations are not small-time criminals. They are sophisticated logistics operators with supply chains that span multiple countries. They have corrupt customs officials on speed dial. They have encrypted communications. They know the wildlife laws in every country they operate in better than most of the enforcement officers who are trying to catch them. We are playing catch-up in a game where the rules change every time we think we have figured them out.

The thing I want people to understand about this work is that it is not about heroes and villains. The wildlife traders are not monsters. They are people making economic decisions in a system that creates massive incentives for illegal behavior. The consumers of bear bile and pangolin scales are not monsters. They are people who have been told, by systems they trust, that these products will make them healthier. The solution to wildlife trafficking is not to arrest our way out of it. It is to change the economic systems and the cultural beliefs that make it profitable. That is a much harder problem than any raid we will ever conduct.

But raids matter too. Every time we shut down a farm, rescue an animal, and disrupt a trafficking network, we send a message: this is not cost-free. There are risks. There are consequences. I have spent 14 years sending that message, one raid at a time. Some nights, it feels like we are losing. But some nights, I think about the bears we rescued in that barn in northern Vietnam, and I think: they are somewhere else now, somewhere where no one will ever put a needle in them. That has to count for something.