Tanzania: The Accidental Poacher
By Eden Robins

Poaching wild animals in Tanzania can land you in jail. While I would imagine languishing in an African prison is a horrific predicament, bribery and other shady hand-offs are far more common than served jail sentences. Perhaps this is why the Tanzanian government devised a clever alternative punishment—if caught poaching, the nefarious perpetrators are forced to eat the raw flesh of their prey.

I know this because I was nearly caught poaching. Of course, in my defense, I had no idea what I was doing at the time.

"We’re going to Eric’s farm in the bush," explained my Tanzanian friends who were always up for a last-minute adventure. It was late morning on a Sunday. "Come with us!" they implored. They knew I was a teacher and needed to return at a reasonable hour that night in order to be fully cognizant teaching a class of over 70 screaming students. I knew that they had no concept of 'time,' much less 'on time,' and so I was wary. They anticipated my hesitancy. "Don’t worry," they reassured me, "we’ll be back by seven."

In retrospect, it's apparent that they possibly meant seven the next morning, but at the time I was convinced that I would be back in time for dinner.

We all piled into William’s car, an ancient Land Cruiser, its shocks pulverized after years of negotiating Tanzanian streets, which are more pothole than road. There were eight of us squashed into the car, and intoxicated by our excitement and thirst for adventure, we could barely feel the onset of whiplash.

I started wondering if I had been misled about the distance to Eric's Farm hours into the trip when the Land Cruiser broke down in the middle of an Iraqw farming village. As everyone was busy trying to fix the car, it was difficult to get a straight answer. While standing there, a dozen or so local children inched towards me, but when I turned to greet them, they scattered helter-skelter. Perplexed, I watched a dozen blurs of dingy tee-shirts dispersing into the dusk.

As we piled back into the Land Cruiser, I managed to extract a vague answer from William.

"We’re almost there," he assured me, as the sun was growing sleepy in the sky. He pulled a long slender shotgun out from under the seat. My eyes widened like a gun’s barrel. He shrugged. "We’ll do a little hunting on the way. Bring our own dinner." And here I was, under the silly assumption I would be back home for dinner. He leaned the gun, barrel up, next to the driver’s seat, and I hopped into the back seat with everyone else.
The landscape was idyllic. The pink of the sunset painted the edges of the savannah grass and the acacia thorns, as dusk coated our eyes with its thin film. We could pick out only the outlines of zebra and the glint of their eyes in the light of the car’s headlights. I was having a hard time focusing on the bucolic scene, as I kept one eye on the shotgun, which was bouncing around violently with each bump. After the last pothole it had landed with the barrel directly in line with my head. However, before I or another bystander had our head blown off, the car stopped abruptly and everyone got out to shoot at some innocent four-legged animals.

Andrew, William and company were city boys, and for all their posturing about hunting in the bush, they quickly proved themselves to be horrible shots. I’m not a fan of hunting, but as a reasonable ecologist, I’m also not one to judge the sustainable utilization of natural resources. That said, there was nothing sustainable about this haphazard hunting:

Phase I: Graze flanks of several impala and zebra; miss others entirely; realize it’s because sun has set and there is no light.

Phase 2: Reconvene and discover a source of light: the Land Cruiser’s headlights. Hop back into car and speed through underbrush, maniacally pursuing animals that know better than to stick around.

Phase 3: An amendment to Phase 2: stop car; keep headlights on; figure it might be a little less menacing to skittish animals accustomed to being prey.

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