Hi everyone, this is Deb from Dying to be Found. Before we get started today, I just wanted to mention that episodes contain disturbing discussions on harmful acts and crimes against animals and or humankind.
Listener discretion is strongly advised.
Hi everyone, I'm Deb.
And I'm Beth.
Welcome to episode 2 of Dying to be Found. So Beth, how's your week?
It's been great. I answered the phone at work today and I kept saying, awesome!
I love that. What's their reaction?
I would say about 75% of the people laugh. It just makes their day.
That's great. Laughing makes you live longer.
Does it?
Yes. Get a little giggle in your day and you're good to go.
So here in America, we pretend to have, or we pretty much, what did I say, pretend? No, we don't pretend to have national days for everything.
We have national days for everything!
Like National Left-Hander's Day. And I'm pretty chapped because had I known back in the day that I could have gotten a college scholarship for just being left-handed,
my student loans are way out the roof, but I don't really want to talk about that.
Well, maybe you should get a second job. But before you say anything, I've never heard of I am chapped.
I was thinking you were going to talk about your chapped lips all the time.
For sure. I still have chapstick in my pocket. Just about 24-7. Have it on my bedside table.
My daughter is addicted.
She even did a school speech on being addicted to chapstick and it was a very interesting listen to.
Is it clinically proven?
I do recall that there's items in the chapstick to keep you having to use it.
Anyway, I'm chapped because had I known there was a Left-Hander's Day or a Left-Hander's scholarship for people that are left-handed,
in case you didn't know there, you could probably get a scholarship if you had a goat.
So there you get. We had a goat. Oh my gosh.
All right, so Beth, I had every intention of covering a story out of Canada today,
but while I was creating the marketing feeds for social media this week, I discovered something pretty interesting.
Did you know there is something called World Wildlife Day?
And don't worry, folks, I have every intention of looking up national whatever days between Canada and the United States
so Beth and I can both align our calendars.
I know that there is something to celebrate every day of the year.
So, of course, there's something different for everyone except for Boxing Day because we don't have that here.
We love it. It's an extra day off the day after Christmas.
Does everybody know the story behind Boxing Day?
As far as I know, it has to do with going into the stores and buying boxes of cards, maybe?
Okay, so I actually know what Boxing Day is all about.
Boxing Day is all about how, you know, in Downton Abbey, how they always had those servants, right?
Yes.
The servants, what were they doing on Christmas Day?
I don't remember, really.
They were serving their employers.
They had to work on Christmas Day is pretty much what that was all about.
So their employers gave them the very next day off and that's when they got their boxes.
Oh, that's neat.
Yeah, that's why they got Boxing Day.
So we do not have Boxing Day here.
I did while I was doing some research this week, I came across World Wildlife Day,
which is coming up on March 3rd.
And since this recording, I was planning on doing a totally different story.
But because of World Wildlife Day coming up, I kind of wanted to bring a little bit of awareness.
And this is where I'm talking about how we want to leave this podcast open to the interpretation of our listeners.
And it's looking like it's a little bit of open interpretation to me as well,
because I had talked about not just necessarily big name crimes or missing persons.
So it's all about true crime.
And so the topic I wanted to talk about today is about poaching and how crazy things get with illegal wildlife trade.
So you want to talk about that today?
Will that be okay?
Oh, for sure.
I was really excited when you came up with this topic.
Well, I know I'm throwing everybody for a loop, but again,
Me too.
Yep, like to keep people guessing on what we're going to be doing.
Why not?
It's true crime.
And this is just one of those things that does not seem to be going away,
because just in April of last year in 2021, two Spanish journalists and a conservationist were killed by Al Qaeda
while they were working on a documentary about illegal poaching.
So one of the most prized possessions that I found was the white rhinoceros is probably the biggest animal for poaching.
And these people are just trying to get their horns and their horns are worth around $368,000 just for its horn.
What do you think they use this horn for?
Now think about this, Beth.
You come across, I don't know, you're on a safari and you're out in the wilderness
and you come across a big carcass of a rhinoceros and they're just laying there and the horns been just sawed off their face.
What do you think they're using horns for?
I don't know, are they ivory? Like with elephants?
I don't know. If anybody knows, that would be great to let us know about that.
I have not really looked into that.
I mean, in my research, it never really mentioned ivory, but no.
Any other guesses?
Not a one.
Hangover remedies.
They want the horns of the white rhinoceros for hangover remedies.
The cheapest one would be just don't drink.
Yeah, for sure.
There are a ton of other animals that are poached, including the tiger for its penis, Beth,
and they collect around $400 for that so that they can use it in soup.
The whale shark is also used for soup and cosmetics and other health supplements,
along with the great white shark and other species of the rhinoceros.
So the rhinoceros seems to get the bad end of the deal here.
Elephants, like you had mentioned, are used for ivory tusks and polar bears for their fur.
And I'm sure the list goes on and on and on.
And I just want to kind of know how do these poachers keep getting away with it?
Well, it burns my butt.
This is a good time to mention about Diane Fossey.
Have you heard about her?
I know the name.
She was known for her extensive study of mountain gorillas.
Is she the one that taught the gorillas how to sign language?
Yes.
Wait, you're saying that what's she got to do with poachers?
Because they were the ones that unfortunately killed her.
She had a cabin in the mountains of Rwanda in December 1985.
They came upon her in their cabin dead.
Oh, she worked from 1966 until 85 with those gorillas.
Oh my gosh.
Did they poach the gorillas?
Yes.
While she was there?
Yeah, she came up.
She got very close to one of them.
And she was devastated when she found their hands cut off.
That's what they were poaching on gorillas because they made ash trays.
Ash trays out of gorillas' hands.
Mm-hmm.
This is disgusting.
Like how much more disgusting can this be?
Because, you know, I feel like I have a kindred spirit with animals.
I think that you can agree.
I've always loved my animals in my life.
Of course, I love my husband.
I love my kids.
Definitely, there's no comparison, but I absolutely love my animals.
So this story kind of hit home with me when I found out it was World Wildlife Day.
So I started Googling crimes against the wildlife.
I mean, I know this has been around for a really long time, but I had no idea.
The capacity and the extent.
And like I said earlier, those journalists who just a year ago were attacked because of poaching.
Well, I was reading up on some of this after I saw your posts and boy, does it make me angry.
It burns my butt.
It chaps your butt, huh?
Yes.
Hahaha.
Hey, so since we're talking about animals, do you remember watching the movie Bambi?
Yes, and you know what?
It was dad's favorite movie.
Really?
Could you believe it?
I had no idea that was dad's favorite movie.
How do you know that?
I don't remember, but I do remember that he really liked it.
Oh, so what's your favorite Disney movie?
101 Dalmatians.
Hey, I remember when that movie came out with Glenn Close.
Boy, was there a flood of people buying up these Dalmatians.
But then what people didn't realize is that Dalmatians aren't that friendly.
And they're very hard to keep.
Why?
They're a lot of work.
Are they like hypers like the little Jack Russells?
I don't think they're so much hyper.
I just think they, it's their personalities.
So they're just extra.
Yeah.
Okay, so I'm going to talk to you today about several cases that have to do with illegal
wildlife poaching, which is pretty insane because it does happen to all these beautiful
creatures.
You've got so many animals that are on the extinction list and yet it still happens.
I wanted to bring up some facts about poaching that are still occurring.
Two Rangers a week are killed protecting our wildlife.
And this is international beth between US and Canada because there's a, what is it called?
The Lacey law.
There's a law in effect that protects the animals worldwide.
Thousands of poachers usually mainly coming out of Africa.
Only six countries collect data on poaching right now.
How many countries are in the world?
I mean, I'm not asking you to ask.
People are turning a blind eye.
Yeah, for sure.
Illegal poaching is a worldwide business that brings in up to $23 billion a year.
A hundred million sharks are killed every year and I could go on and on and on and on
because I had mentioned some of the animals on that list with the rhinoceros, the tiger,
the elephant.
I'm going to put a link in our show notes so that you all can look it up and see what
the statistics are on that because it's actually quite interesting.
It's eye-opening and I just think that this is one of those moments where we just need
to bring awareness to the problem.
So I'm going to start talking a little bit about some cases of people actually getting
caught.
Hallelujah.
These people are getting caught.
There's one man named David Berry from Missouri in 2016.
He was cited or criminally charged.
I guess there's a big difference.
He was either cited like getting a fine, a ticket of some sort, or he was criminally
charged for over 70 times of poaching.
And that was going across borders.
He went into Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Canada.
Basically, he committed the crimes against the Lacey Act that was put into place in 1900
to protect these animals.
Now, this is what really angers me.
70 charges for one man.
If 16 hind charges, way too much.
This is a joke.
The system needs to be fixed.
So the authorities were already into all of David's shenanigans.
And so they were watching for him at this point.
They were able to get some search warrants for his phone.
And then through those records, they discovered that another person who was Cody Scott from
Missouri, he was also involved.
So according to cell phone records, these guys took a trip up your way back into Canada
to poach for mule deer bucks just to get their antlers.
I hear a lot about that.
What do they do with antlers because I saw a ton of pictures.
They go into medicines.
Okay, like herbals.
Okay.
And it seems like a lot of the animals that we've already talked about also go into those
herbal remedies.
Well, I ask you about these things randomly, but do you remember me asking you about Bambi?
Interestingly enough in this case, basically this guy, David Berry, he spent eight months
in jail for poaching and he was ordered to watch Bambi several times along with being
ordered to pay 16,000 over 16,000 in fines that was payable to the Lacey Act reward fund.
So at least the money is going back into the system to hopefully catch these poachers.
Not really sure why he was watching Bambi.
I have no idea neither.
I will say this.
When I was growing up, you all, I was quite sensitive and there were movies I was not
allowed to watch when I was a kid.
One of them was Old Yeller or is it Old Yellow?
No, Old Yeller.
Old Yeller.
I was not allowed to watch that because we all know what happens at the end, right?
Yeah.
And of all things, I was not allowed to watch Charlotte's Web at school.
Do you remember an assembly where everybody went into the gym just to watch Charlotte's
Web?
No, but I remember we did the King and I.
The King and I?
At the elementary school?
Wait, you said the King and I.
I was thinking of the Lion King, I'm still on the Disney movies.
I do remember going to the elementary school when we lived in the city too though, because
we got these neat tickets.
I feel like we saw, what is that movie about the kids in the Witches Mountain?
Was it called Witches Mountain?
We did.
Oh yes, I remember you being naughty.
How was I being naughty?
You were throwing popcorn down over onto the people below because we were on the second
level and one of the people who work there came up and scolded the three of us and said
if you don't stop it, you're being kicked out.
I do not remember that.
Oh yeah.
Okay, you ready for case number two?
Yeah.
So there's a father-son duo, David Majorcan and Ramon Torres Majorcan.
They were charged in 2017 for smuggling harvested sea cucumbers worth over $17 million into
the United States to sell to the Asian markets.
I hope not for soup because I don't really know much about sea cucumbers.
Do you know anything about them?
No.
I looked at a picture and it kind of looks like a cucumber, only think of trying to think
of how you would compare it to, I would say it's about three times bigger than a football.
What?
Yeah.
And I did have to go look up this little bit about it because, oh, I've heard of them,
but I don't know much about the ocean life because, you know, I grew up in Canada and
Lake Huron was my ocean and there's creepy things out there in the real ocean.
All right.
So sea cucumbers, they protect the coral reefs and they act as a filter on the ocean floor,
which I thought was pretty cool.
So think about the fact that the sea cucumber is poached for soup.
Did I say soup earlier?
No.
They're harvested to sell to the Asian markets.
I have no idea.
A lot of this stuff is medicinal or, you know, natural herbs and stuff like that.
But sea cucumbers are a natural way to filter the ocean floor so that it prevents algae
from growing.
And they also protect those coral reefs.
So well, we all know what lurks on coral reefs.
Have you seen Finding Nemo?
I don't know.
I might have.
Wait a minute.
Are you telling me you have never seen Finding Nemo?
I don't think I have.
With Dory the fish, Ellen Degeneres.
Keep on swimming.
No, I'm old.
I'm not.
I don't remember what I saw.
You need to go watch that one.
It's a good one.
Okay.
Sea cucumbers go for approximately $300 per pound.
Oh, they're used for medicinal purposes.
Also as an aphrodisiac.
That's sea cucumbers.
So the Mayorkans smuggled the sea cucumbers in from Mexico by falsifying their paperwork
in the shipping containers.
And I'll get into that in just a little bit because the more I look dug into poaching,
the more I found that a lot of people end up falsifying their paperwork when they're
moving their shipments from one country to another.
All right.
So let's talk about case number three, where crooks are really kind of stupid.
You ever see that show back in the day?
Crooks are stupid.
No.
Well, they are.
I'm just saying.
I mean, they are.
They just, they think they are so smart, but they're not.
So David Zajac, I'm going to say it's Zajac.
It's Z or Z-A-Y-A-C. And seven other people were poaching 39 deer, including 22 bucks
between 2013 and 2016.
Now what made it so bad is that the illegal hunting of animals is, you know, they're in
their natural habitat.
The animal itself is in their natural habitat.
And I think that's why some people can get in trouble for this because they shot the
animals by feeders that were triggered by motion sensor lights.
That's sad.
Sad, sad.
It is.
Isn't that like cheating?
Okay.
You can't.
You can't go out in the woods and sit there for eight hours and hope that an animal is
going to come up on you.
You got to use sensor lights.
And then earlier when I was talking about David Berry, he was shooting from the road.
Like he would just would sit there.
So I'm thinking deer in the headlights.
You know how, have you ever come up on deer driving down the back road or anything?
No, but Al has, and he had a huge dent in his car from running into a deer.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
That happened to me once.
I got out of the car and I never did see what happened to the deer.
I think it ran off because I didn't get out of the car at that very moment.
But when I got home, cause you know, I'm not going to stop, there's a video out there that
has some man who hit a deer and he put it in the back seat of his car and then the deer
woke up.
So he's calling nine one one.
Have you ever heard that video?
Yeah.
All right.
So David Berry was shooting from the road, basically using his headlights on his car,
and Zayac basically got caught because he decided he was going to go into the bar and
drink some true serum.
We all know that true serum in the bars, right?
And he started bragging to a stranger who happened to be an undercover agent and that
undercover agent was investigating John on the suspicion of poaching.
So he just kind of fell right into his hands.
All right.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
In all of the millennia cases, there are dozens of poachers out here.
Gosh.
So a lot of it happens when people just come on private property.
So let's just say I own three acres of land and then my next door neighbor decides to
come onto my property to hunt.
So that's considered poaching.
If somebody doesn't have a hunting license or if they have the wrong kind of hunting
license or if they use the wrong kind of equipment.
So if it's like turkey season, do you hunt turkeys with guns or arrows?
I'm not sure, but I mean, basically, if you're out there, I mean, I know here we've got hunting
season where you can only use bows and arrows or you can use at other times you're allowed
to use a rifle.
So if you're using a rifle during bow season, then that's considered poaching.
There are also people out there doing thrill kills.
They're just doing it for fun.
There was a man who was videotaped stabbing a deer, just stabbing it and then just dragging
it around until it died.
So I know it's crazy.
So I just don't know.
I don't know what is going through these people's minds.
I mean, there's no thrill about that.
And then there's a list of famous people or celebrities who have also been recognized
as poachers, but that would kind of follow along the lines of maybe not having the right
license or things like that.
Actually we're going to transition a little bit into how some of the processes they use
to catch serial killers can also stop elephant and wildlife poachers too.
You know how we use DNA these days, right?
Now they can use DNA.
Have you heard of familial searching?
No.
It is a way of, I want you to think about 35 and me, something like that.
So you take your DNA from your family members and you basically link relationships and match
it.
And what they've done is I'll just give you a really quick statistics.
Approximately 500 tons of raw ivory is shipped out of Africa every year.
So that would be just from elephants, right?
And so the genetic testing with familial searching is a big breakthrough in poaching investigations
because what they do is they look for that DNA of an elephant family.
Aren't they a social creature where they're always together?
They're not loners.
They're family units, right?
So if you had one elephant that was poached, I don't know, let's just say a year ago, there
was an elephant poached and then the authorities found the ivory.
Well, what they do is they link relationships between the elephant families to create a
match.
And so think about how on crime shows where you see a bulletin board and you've got a
map and then you've got these pins in the map and then you've got those little lines
of string that go from one pin to the next all over the map, right?
They do the same thing.
They are catching a lot of poachers that way.
Usually what happens is the tusks and whatever parts are being shipped illegally, then they're
usually being stopped whenever the shipments are being inspected.
You know, like you and me going between Canada and the United States when we were growing
up.
Do you remember going to grandma's house and how we always stopped in customs?
Oh, yeah.
So the familial searching works in a way that the investigators collect data on the seized
goods and they put it all into the system and they connect those dots all over the world,
kind of like that map that I just described.
But it's a little bit difficult because authorities can go back and link the DNA to known poachers.
But what the poachers are doing is they're kind of catching on.
So they're moving around to different areas now.
Scientists can still link the DNA from the ivory, just like they would with our human
teeth.
As of this month, authorities have been able to match around 600 genetically matched tusks
between smuggled shipments.
Once the DNA is identified, then officials can pinpoint locations of known smugglers
and then obtain those cell records or the bill of lading at the port site.
It's like shipping something over from America into Canada.
Well, every shipment has a bill of lading.
It's almost like, you know, you know how many people are on an airplane, right?
They have all the names.
So that's where people are just fudging the information going on to what's being shipped.
I mean, I know that you and I have passed packages back and forth and they always have
the little slip that you have to fill out and they want to know what's in it so that
when you get your package, you're not surprised because it's written on the front of the package
before you even open it.
Although the familial testing is a breakthrough of stopping illegal poaching, they have caught
on and are now working out of less conspicuous countries.
Africa is a really big country, so now they're moving to other places.
And then I will say in 2021, two suspects were arrested in Seattle, Washington, but
they were caught by using the DNA familial technique.
So here comes that Lacey Act again.
They falsely labeled their shipment from the bill of ladings, which violates that Lacey
Act.
If they're convicted, they'll face a maximum of 20 years in prison for smuggling, money
laundering and those Lacey Act violations.
That's kind of where we're at with poaching, Beth.
The list goes on and on and on.
And like I said, I'm going to put a link in our show notes just so everybody can just
get an idea.
It just doesn't look like it's going to stop soon, but I'm excited to know they're using
DNA.
I know it's probably highly expensive, but the World Wildlife Foundation is a really
good spot for you all to just kind of look things up.
And it's hopefully if we can get the word out there on this problem, then we will hopefully
say that we've done something about it.
I mean, it just doesn't seem like it's going to be going away.
Well, at least this is one step closer to catching these guys and getting them off the
streets.
I think what we should see happening is more jail time.
Maybe that will get out the word.
I hope so.
In the meantime, thanks for listening to Dying to Be Found, True Crime Podcast.
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And that's a wrap.
That it is.
Bye, everybody.
Bye.