What is a Ranger?
By: Gerry Coney
Tags: Poaching, African Wildlife, Wildlife Conservation, Conservation, Anti Poaching

What is a Ranger?

As a first step in an examination Conservation Law Enforcement (LE) it might help to begin by looking at what a ranger actually is. Often they are presented as pseudo-soldiers. In my view this is dangerous and wrong. In this short article I will touch on my overall philosophy of what conservation LE is and how it should be done. My twin themes are efficiency and avoiding reputational risk. The description of a ranger that follows is shaped by those themes.

The actual word ‘ranger’ was probably first coined in England in the 1660s. It seems to refer to a roving policeman of some sort. There are all sorts of people doing ranger-type work as we would understand it, with various titles: Eco-guards, game scouts, forest rangers, fishery guards — the list goes on. In the US military ‘ranger’ is a synonym for a commando, a usage unknown in the UK and the Commonwealth.

Most rangers are government employees — federal (or national in those countries blessed with a monarchy), provincial or even municipal. Some are employed by private entities and others are a bit of an amalgam; nominal government employees whose wages are paid or supplemented by a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) into which category I also include Not for Profits. This latter category is surprisingly common and is also, roughly, the category into which fits the rangers in Nepal and the Democratic Republic of Congo who brought such angst to WWF recently. For this article I am going to concentrate on the rangers employed directly or indirectly by NGOs as the legal status of government agencies is very different.

Nowadays probably the most common mental image of a ranger, at least in the West, is of someone who fights poachers in Africa. And I use the word ‘fights’ deliberately. This has not always been the case. The early rangers were jacks of all trades and covered all sorts of functions within a Protected Area (PA). The first Section Rangers in the Sabie Game Reserve, which later became the Kruger National Park, were involved in everything from collecting entrance fees to road construction as well as protecting the wildlife within the park. Rangers in North America often have a strong tourist facing focus and are there to help visitors as much as to protect wildlife. Generally, though, there is an implied protective purpose to the role of a ranger.

Recently, by which I mean probably the last 20 years or less, there has been a shift in perceptions of what a ranger is. Since the renewed surge in rhino and elephant poaching that originally began roughly in the 1970s, rangers have been associated more and more with the counter-poaching effort to the exclusion of all else. This is still not the entire case and many rangers worldwide never go near a firearm or encounter a poacher. But, and this is fairly important, the view among the donating public in the West is that a ranger is someone who is involved in the daily and ongoing war against poachers.

So, what actually is a ranger? Here’s my opinion.

A ranger is a law enforcement operator. His job is to maintain the integrity of the PA to which he is assigned by enforcing the law or acting as an auxiliary to those who are actually empowered to enforce the law. This is absolutely crucial. At the risk of slipping into negatives, rangers are not policemen. Nor are they soldiers.

Not Policemen

The matter of law enforcement bears examination. The basic job of the ranger is to provide deterrence. He must be part of a coherent scheme of actions and barriers that aims to keep criminals out of the PA. I am using ‘criminal’ in the widest sense of the word. While elephant and rhino poaching has the public eye, by far the most common poaching crime by volume and I would say ecological seriousness, is bushmeat poaching because this just empties landscapes of animals. Other criminals are those who are entering the PA to trap animals to sell as juju or to harvest valuable timber. Still others are those who are coming into the PA for plants or fungi to use as medicine or food. Or they might be pastoralists who want to graze their animals in the PA. Who constitutes a criminal is entirely defined by the law of that particular country. What is worth remembering is that not everyone who enters a PA is a swivel eyed psychopath intent on murdering elephants. In reality, ivory poachers are in a very small minority by numbers although, of course, the physical threat they pose cannot be discounted. It’s also worth mentioning that some activity is only unlawful within the PA and some activity is not a criminal offence even within a PA. Grazing might well come under that latter heading. So might simple trespass.

National customs about powers of arrest will vary. In some countries, anyone has the power of arrest; the police simply exercise that power professionally. In other countries, powers of arrest are only vested in specially commissioned persons. The (private) Lewa Conservancy in Kenya enrolled its rangers in the Kenya Police Reserve which gave them legal powers of arrest. I am not aware of any other examples of this sort of approach but they may exist. I have worked with so-called Community Rangers in Asia and they are emphatically not empowered to make arrests, even if they wanted to. They are more akin to a neighbourhood watch in the UK than, say, a Special Constable. Therefore, the average private ranger will not necessarily have formal powers of arrest within his PA. Following on from this, he is also unlikely to have the power to detain as a given. It may well be that special arrangements have been made between the ranger’s employer and the government but this cannot be presumed. Usually there will be some sort of arrangement whereby a ranger can detain someone until they are handed over to the competent authority but be conscious that unlawful detention is a serious matter.

Only in very specific circumstances do rangers have any authority whatever outside their PA and this is always when they are direct employees of the government. ‘Raids’ by private LE staff outside the PA, which I have seen done, are simply illegal.

Nor Soldiers

Rangers do not fight wars. With anyone. Be that a War on Poaching or as an adjunct to the national forces doing Border Control. Once you get into this line of thinking you are on a hiding to nothing. Far better to think of rangers as privately hired security guards which is exactly what they are when you strip away the berets and camouflage. And, incidentally, in most countries this is exactly how non-government rangers are legally classified. Be very conscious of this. If you delude yourself that your rangers are a private army, you will be seduced into unnecessary training and mission creep that leads your rangers into tasks for which they are not suited or authorised. Not only will you waste money on training and gear you do not need, you will risk being pulled into situations that you really don’t want to be in.

A ranger may be armed but if he is, then he is armed solely in self-defence. I will cover this later but make sure you are absolutely certain what the laws of self-defence are in the territory in which you operate. The English Common Law does not apply in Francophone Africa, for example. Be certain also, what the rules are for carrying arms. I worked in park where it turned out we had no legal right to bear arms at all, despite assurances to the contrary from our HQ. When I pressed the matter the famous Presidential dispensation was nowhere to be found, with potentially horrifying consequences for everyone in the LE department.

The ranger’s job is to maintain the integrity of the PA, to deter those who would enter the PA to commit wildlife crimes of whatever sort and to legally apprehend those who are not deterred. Where it is legal, the ranger should be armed to meet the level of threat which he may reasonably be expected to face and no more. On a Big 5 reserve in Africa this might mean he, or one of his immediate comrades might carry enough gun to deal with an irate buffalo. In Central Africa he might be obliged to carry a military-type weapon if that’s what the threat groups carry. (I would actually question this and I’ll deal with it in another article). In other parks he might not have to carry anything more lethal than a whistle or pepper spray.

The majority of my work has been in parks at the higher-risk end of the scale but not all of it. Some parks, indeed some entire countries are almost entirely benign, even countries in quite dangerous neighbourhoods. Wildlife crime goes on, it is even rampant in these countries but the criminals are not themselves armed and the necessity of carrying defensive weapons is minimal. One or 2 weapons per patrol is all that’s needed, even in the highest risk areas on the international borders. I have worked with establishments that included medium machine guns. The management of another PA was seriously trying to obtain underslung grenade launchers and DShKs. I will come back to this in a later post because I feel very strongly that this is utter lunacy. Weapons are carried, when they’re carried, to allow a ranger to get out of trouble. That is it.

Many people in the conservation LE sector, especially trainers, will disagree with what I’ve written. They will be adamant that the ranger role is a paramilitary function that has to be carried out by steely eyed young men or women with modern weapons and all sorts of fascinating accessories. That, in my humble opinion, is dangerous nonsense, mainly peddled by those with no understanding of, or interest in, the context within which they operate. There is an argument that in some parks the threat is so high that rangers must be trained and equipped to operate on pseudo-military lines. I have worked in a couple of parks that fitted that description. My answer to that argument is simply not to go those places. Quite apart from the legal and possibly moral issues of using rangers to do border defence or internal security, to train and operate units of that type is simply beyond the remit and competence of an NGO. Full stop. Any attempt to do so will lead to dead staff and, almost inevitably, fatal damage to your NGOs’ reputation.

Conclusions

So what are the conclusions to be drawn from this ramble?

The first is that if you accept your rangers are security staff the training requirement is a lot lower. This is good because it really is impossible to replicate even basic military training in a private capacity, despite what your training provider will tell you. So you can dismiss all those assault courses and trainasiums from the get-go and spend your limited funds on things that are actually useful.

The next conclusion is that your bill for equipment of all types will be lower. Again, while there is any amount of gucci kit available to the modern soldier, very little of it is a necessity for the ranger as security guard. The same principle applies to weapons and even down to things like rucksacks and uniforms. I will talk about this in later articles as well. For now, I will put down a marker that things like Image Intensifiers, Thermal Sights and, God forbid, drones, should not be at the top of your shopping list. Not even in the middle.

The third is that accepting your rangers are not the 5th squadron of the SAS changes who you select and how. There is no need to fill the unit exclusively with young men who will tend to rashness and aggression, causing you problems in the long run.

Lastly, and to hammer the point, if you accept the truth that your rangers are law enforcement operators you will not be dragged into the delusion that you are capable of fighting a war with them. I say this because I have seen it tried. And it always ends in tears.