Arresting Poachers

"The quality of mercy is not strained

It droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed.

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

The two men were already in the water when I first saw them, struggling to reach the swamp's shore about 10 meters away. My initial alarm arose from the setting: we were boating through the Everglades-like watery wilderness of the Victoria Nile, an area known as the Delta, which was thick with crocodiles. Why would anyone go swimming in such an isolated and dangerous place?

Then I realized they were not swimming...indeed, didn't know how to swim! They were trying to bounce off the soft, mucky bottom of the swamp, taking their chances with drowning, because they were trying to escape from something scarier than drowning and crocs. What could be scarier than that? We were! They were more afraid of being arrested by Mugicis and Ivan, the two armed rangers with whom Kenneth and I travel, not so much the weaponry per se, but the authority they represented. Our motorized boat slowed and pulled up to them, hands offered and orders shouted for the men to put their hands on the gunwales. They had no chance to escape and were quickly hauled aboard and ordered to lie on the patrol boat's floor. Ivan waved a paddle menacingly. The men complied.

Quickly, the contents of their 'canoe' (a homemade craft cobbled of boards and nails) revealed a net and 31 illegally caught fish, two or three still struggling to respire in the inch or two of water that had leaked aboard. This was no simple case on having drifted too close to Murchison Falls National Park: we were several kilometers down the Victoria Nile, every bit of which was utterly forbidden. And 31 fish was not a bit of food for family food: these guys aimed to sell their catch. They had deserted their boat to escape arrest, counting on doubling back to a second canoe hidden in the bulrushes and papyrus. Towing the first canoe on one side, we found the second canoe and tied it to the other side.

The question was...NOW what?

The obvious next step was to deliver the law-breakers to the Uganda Wildlife Authority's nearest ranger station, which would summon a vehicle from HQ, leading to their formal arrest. As note above, this wasn't an "oops" type infraction where they could claim to have accidentally drifted inside the 200 meter no-fishing zone. And the men knew it full well, hence their desperate efforts to escape, sacrificing boat and catch even as they risked their lives.

On the other hand, one cannot avoid the moral ambiguity of the "Jean Valjean" Problem, namely the prospect of sending someone to jail for doing the one thing they know how to do (fishing, in this case) to feed themselves and their (large) families. I have never been so hungry, so desperate, that I felt obliged to break the law in order to survive. And I know that these rangers are continually tempted to look the other way, to hand out repeated "warnings" to chronic scofflaws. The two young men lying on the floor of the UWA boat were from the small fishing village that Mugicis and Kenneth grew up in, so they felt personally conflicted. But should THAT count at all?

Not for the first time on this trip did I reflect on Orwell's famous short story, On Shooting an Elephant, where the hat of authority weighs heavy on the brow of a person whose responsibilities place him in an impossible position. But here came Mugicis and Kenneth over to me, asking What would you do in this situation? Me?!! I punted, protesting that nothing in my life had ever presented me with anything like this dilemma. After all, these guys were caught red-handed committing a crime THEY KNEW was illegal (witness their desperation to escape and their subsequent failure to offer even the slightest excuse), so there should be SOME accountability...shouldn't there? I said nothing of use. And eventually, Mugicis decided he had a job to do.

Much later, I realized I had had some similar dilemmas with students cheating on tests in my university courses and had made the same decision by reporting/prosecuting them. In that context, I explained it to myself in terms of protecting the interests of non-cheaters who were graded on the same curve. Grades either mean something or they don't... and when it became clear to the OU Administration that I would prosecute cheaters (as many facuIty don't, I was promptly assigned to serve on, and eventually chair, the Academic Misconduct Board for the College of Arts and Sciences. Thanks a lot!

We began to long cruise back toward Mugicis's ranger station. Along the way, we came across ANOTHER poaching operation where the boat was deserted and the owners escaped on foot, so we acquired a THIRD captured ship! Two on one side, one on the other. We limped along slowly.

Eventually, out on the main river (out of the delta), we pulled up on a deserted island and had our two prisoners bash all three of the seized boats to smithereens, leaving the boat skeletons behind. Trimmer now, we still stopped a few poachers (now breaking the milder "within-200-meters" law and confiscated their fishing nets -- a decidedly nontrivial penalty! One such net came from two teenage boys we'd already warned two hours earlier! (Warnings seem to be of little effectiveness!)

Upon reaching the ranger station, the prisoners unloaded all the nets and confiscated fish (evidence) before being led off by the two on-shore rangers.

There was no point trying to find shoebills at this point, so Kenneth and I were escorted back up the kilometer-long inclined trail to Pakuba Safari Lodge. Nobody was feeling great about the day's work, which had zero value to science. But it's an experience I'll never forget. Cops must feel crappy like this all the time!