Fifteen years ago, Thomas Snitch fell in love. Not with a human being, however: he and his wife had been trekking in Uganda and encountered some gorillas in the wild. And that sparked a passion for finding ways to protect these creatures from increasingly frequent attacks by poachers.
Initially, Snitch, a University of Maryland trustee, supported the dizzying multitude of wildlife funds that have sprung up in the west in recent years. But then he had a brainwave. As an adjunct to his academic work, Snitch advises the US military on how to predict the movements of insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, with a view to using satellite devices to foil roadside improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
One day, as Snitch was staring at his satellite maps of Iraq, he spotted a similarity to something he recognised from his wildlife passion. For just as insurgents tend to move across landscapes in predictable ways in order to plant landmines, poachers follow familiar patterns to place snares too. The professor started testing algorithms and satellite-mapping techniques – including material gathered from drones via his consortium known as GeoEye – and became convinced that he had stumbled on a powerful new way to prevent animal deaths. “We have found that terrorists are to poachers as IEDs are to animal snares [and] as US troop targets are to tigers, rhinos and gorillas,” Snitch says passionately. “Simply stated, the models work for either situation.”