Episode 626 - Carel Verhoef || Fighting Elephants With Drones

Summary

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The Origins Foundation Podcast

Episode 626 - Carel Verhoef || Fighting Elephants With Drones

Date: March 3, 2026
Host: Robbie (The Origins Foundation)
Guest: Carel Verhoef, photographic tourism operator and conservation innovator, Serengeti, Tanzania

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Episode Overview

This engaging episode explores the innovative use of thermal drones in resolving human-elephant conflict in Tanzania. Host Robbie speaks with Carel Verhoef, who has developed and deployed nighttime drone operations to protect both elephants and agricultural communities. The discussion delves into the challenges of conservation, the pragmatic intersections of hunting, ecotourism, and community needs, and the critical role that connectivity and active management play in Africa’s protected landscapes. The episode is filled with practical wisdom, on-the-ground anecdotes, and an unvarnished look at the realities of African wildlife stewardship.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Carel Verhoef’s Background and Conservation Trajectory

• Raised in Kruger National Park, South Africa, in a family deeply entrenched in conservation.

• Early exposure to the realities of wildlife management, including elephant and buffalo population control.

• Moved to Tanzania, starting out in the photographic tourism sector but always maintaining a research and conservation foundation.

  • “The base has always been research and, and knowledge and what's going on.” (16:44)

• Early experiences in remote, poacher-dominated Serengeti lands shaped his passion for stabilizing and generating value in wild areas.

2. The Value of Protected Areas and Why Value Creation Matters

• Areas need to generate value to attract resources for protection—whether through tourism, hunting, or other sustainable use.
• Not all land is suitable for mainstream tourism; hunting and buffer zone protection are critical for less accessible or desirable areas.
• “You can't just duplicate things and assume that if they work here that they will work everywhere.” (24:19)

3. Hunting, Ecotourism, and Habitat Protection

• Pragmatic discussion on why multiple conservation tools—including hunting—are essential.
• Buffer zones protected by hunting often later become viable for tourism, ultimately benefiting all forms of conservation.
• "The work I'm doing now used to be done by hunting and hunters... Now I have to do it without hunting, which is a lot harder.” (79:43)

4. Human-Elephant Conflict: The Need for Innovation

• Conflict intensity has increased as both people and elephants compete for diminishing resources (notably water, especially during dry seasons).

• Real-life consequences: a Maasai herdsman recently injured in an elephant encounter when herding cattle after dark.

  • "Luckily he survived, was not too much damage...but this is competition for water... primary driver is water for, for elephants and cattle.” (05:42)

• Traditional conflict measures (e.g., chili fences, guarding) often fail due to elephants’ intelligence and persistence.

5. The Genesis and Impact of Drone-Based Elephant Management

• Inspiration sparked by a drone incident where elephants reacted strongly—idea simmered until thermal technology became affordable.

• Launch of a true pilot project in Umkumazi National Park, where drones equipped with thermal imaging map and move elephant herds by night, safeguarding crops and communities.

• “It worked...90% of deaths are probably killed done by breeding herds and breeding herd management with drones... it’s not even hard.” (42:12)

• Data shows dramatic reductions in both crop losses and human injury/fatalities in areas under active drone management.

Technical and Logistical Details

• Each drone team manages roughly 25-50 km of corridor, moving with mobile camps equipped for night operations.
• Scaling up: now operating 8-10 drones across more than 500 km of Tanzanian corridors and buffer zones.
• Models refined for government partnership, with rangers trained to operate drones, increasing buy-in and community trust.
  • "Rangers that are now in our Kazia Tembo projects are heroes in the community... it just makes such a massive difference if you have the right model." (59:31)

6. Corridor and Connectivity Conservation

• Elephant migration and genetic flow depend upon protected, connected corridors—often only viable because of hunting-managed areas.
• Drones now allow for strategic nocturnal movements, reducing conflict and facilitating elephant passage through human-dominated landscapes.
  • "For the first time... we've managed... to move big herds of hundred elephants over a 10 day period...120km. From substantial safe zone to substantial safe zone." (53:13)

7. Behavioral Insights from Drone Monitoring

• Monitoring thermal signatures: unique patterns (e.g., cold ears, footprints visible on thermal camera) provide scientific and practical movement data.
• Elephants can be guided using sound, scent, and novel stimuli—some even ‘understand’ shouted Swahili commands over drone speakers (71:07).

8. Scaling and Sustainability: Funding, Partnerships, and Community Buy-In

• Conservation models are self-financed via tourism business and commercial sector support; drone units are in high demand and short supply.
• Appeals for support highlight a pragmatic “wedding registry” approach—every contribution (drones, equipment, logistics) helps.
  • "It's okay. You know, we still need the cutting board...the quicker we get the drones, the more we can kind of COVID the whole area.” (70:17)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Conservation Pragmatism:
  "The underlying purpose of what we have done is always to stabilize areas and always to bring in a certain amount of tourism. There's value. And, and when we talk about value...it doesn't just fall out of the sky." (20:10)

• On the Role of Hunting:
  "So for me, there's very much...We have to say thank you for hunters sitting in in areas that no one else ever wanted to go. You know, we should be grateful for. For hunters protecting buffer zones and, and doing. The work I'm doing now used to be done by by hunting and hunters." (80:00)

• On Human-Elephant Conflict Reality:
  “The world of elephant, human, elephant conflict is unfortunately very unforgiving because your success rate is measured by whether people can harvest or not.” (44:26)

• On Elephant Corridors and Subspecies Risk:
  "If we don't have that connectivity, we will slowly develop an East African elephant subspecies and a southern African elephant subspecies, which I'm sure everyone would agree we don't want to create." (50:09)

• On the Immense Scale of the Challenge:
  “If you look at the conflict map of Tanzania, it’s every block, you know, of the country has human-elephant conflict. And we are working in three. Three dots, you know?” (78:21)

• On Technology and Local Talent:
  “We have incredibly skilled pilots, you know, that far better than, than myself or, or pro pilots that have come from the outside... Tanzanians... it's always all in." (57:32)

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Important Timestamps

• [05:42] – Story of Maasai herder’s elephant encounter highlights stakes of conflict
• [16:44] – Carel’s background; transition into research and guiding in Tanzania
• [20:10] – The necessity of value creation for conservation success
• [33:58] – Birth of the drone elephant project: pilot in war-zone conditions
• [42:12] – First breakthrough: drone herding works, especially with breeding herds
• [45:51] – Technical context; scaling operations to 500+ km of conflict zones
• [53:13] – Facilitating large-scale elephant movements safely with drones
• [70:17] – Funding challenges and the ‘wedding registry’ approach
• [79:43] – Reflection: innovations replacing what hunting once did
• [80:00] – Deep gratitude and respect for hunters as conservation allies
• [84:22] – The mathematical impossibility of replacing hunting with mass tourism

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How to Help

Carel’s organization is constantly seeking support: drones, equipment, funding, or even small operational items. Individuals or donors providing crucial gear are kept up to date with regular field reports and footage of their contributions at work.

• “Really, anything helps right now. But we have a whole list of stuff… it doesn’t matter if you can only do the cutting board. You know, it’s okay. You know, we still need the cutting board.” (70:17)

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Closing Reflections

The podcast closes with gratitude for Carel’s groundbreaking work and an open invitation for future updates. The conversation ends with a call to recognize the pragmatic, sometimes uncomfortable realities of conservation, the interconnected role of various stakeholders, and an insistence on ground-truth storytelling to build more effective, nuanced conservation narratives.

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For more information or to support Carel's work, reach out through his LinkedIn or The Origins Foundation Podcast.

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Transcript

[Robbie]

Carl Verhof is a photographic tourism operator in the Serengeti, Tanzania area. However, he took up a love for protecting humans, human wildlife conflict by two years ago coming up with a strategy of using thermal drones to push elephants away from human habitation and their crops. Well, if you follow him on LinkedIn, you'll see these thermal videos of elephants being pushed around at night, which is unbelievable, which got me super fascinated. I reached out to Carl and I said, please, man, let's have a conversation. And what you'll find is, again, Carl's not a hunter, but he thinks so pragmatically about elephants, human wildlife conflict, the role of hunting and protecting habitat. It's a fantastic conversation. You need to listen to it all the way to the end, because at the end, Carl puts some just nuggets of wisdom out there on the reality, on what's happening on the ground in Tanzania. So really enjoy this podcast. I had a fantastic conversation with Carl. So five years ago, there was a reason why I started this movement. And the truth then is the truth now that we need to champion our narrative. We need to champion the truth around what we do and who we are. There's a sweet spot with a gun, you know, too heavy, and it's a

[Carl Verhof]

burden to walk with. Too light and you whipping it.

[Robbie]

Why is the project so important to the hunting community?

[Carl Verhof]

It's. It's a. I think it's not only important, I think it's. I think it's vital. I think it's. It's just in time. It's like snakes and ladders. You guys are climbing the ladder, and then somebody does something stupid and you just slide down.

[Robbie]

That is such an amazing analogy. Snakes and ladders.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah.

[Robbie]

You know, ivory, in my opinion, was the plastic of its age. Okay.

[Carl Verhof]

The expenses were going up. It goes a long way with families. We are families that do need it.

[Robbie]

Let me close this door because I have a little wiener dog. What are you laughing? Because I said wiener.

[Carl Verhof]

I'm really glad you finished the sentence out.

[Robbie]

I'm sorry the first happened.

[Carl Verhof]

What are we doing here today?

[Robbie]

You're telling the whole world. I think when I first reached out to you, I told you, I said, look, the elephants take precedence. Like, just. I don't know of anybody who is. You're literally involved in, dare I say, chasing elephants daily.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah. This is the issue. And the end of the dry season is not making it any easier. And we've had some failed short rains, so there's a little bit of desperation up there. But the last few days it's been raining a bit, so, yeah, yeah, never ending, man. Never ending battle. So, yeah, thanks for, thanks for the opportunity to chat to you, man. And you're doing good work yourself, I see.

[Robbie]

Man, we're trying. We're trying. We're all trying, right? We all are just dealing with what we can. We've got limited amount of hours in the day. We wish we all had 30 hours in a day versus 24. And we are slowly plodding forward. You know, we. I was actually having a, A very amicable social media discussion with somebody who, who sees us and they see, oh, you guys convey the truth about sustainable use of wildlife or, you know, if you want to be more frank, sustainable use of hunting. And of course you're going to be biased, Robbie. And I said, I don't think we're biased. I think we just tell the truth. And if, if the truth means we shouldn't be hunting, we're going to say it.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robbie]

And it's all tied to this Florida black bear hunt that's happening right now. And obviously bears being as cute as elephants stirs emotions in people. And the guy that I was having this discussion with was like, well, you know, how do we know it's not going to go the way of 2015 and the abysmal hunt that it was? And I said, yeah, you're right, it was a dismal failure in 2015. It was terrible. And I think that he responded back going, oh, man, I didn't think that you would admit that it was a failure. I said, of course it was a failure.

[Carl Verhof]

Spoke to you. Not just like, yeah, yeah, we're reasonable.

[Robbie]

Exactly. Exactly. Well, Karl Faroof, welcome to the Origins foundation podcast. I'm super excited to have you. I know we've tried this a couple of times and the elephants have won a couple of times, but today they didn't win.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, it was the first call. But I'm happy to be here, Robbie, and thanks for your time and allowing me on the show. So, yeah, man, fire away. We, we're busy, busy. And this time of year, as you know, elephants never stop, you know, but it's not only isolated to elephants, you know, there are some, yeah. Bigger picture things always in the conservation world, you know, it's, it's the long game, as we, as you know, and it's, it's, it's that type of thinking that I think we all need a little bit in our, in our lives. You know, just 100% actual information that's based on longer term Goals and a little bit. Yeah.

[Robbie]

So today you said you nearly didn't make it. Today you sent me an email. It was 4:38 in the morning here and you're like, I may be 10 minutes late. And I was like, oh, here we go again. But that's okay, you made it. What was going on now that you nearly didn't make it?

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, we just had an incident of an injury actually of a Maasai herdsman that got injured last night. He was taking his cattle to water, unfortunately too late in the evening already, which he shouldn't do, and he got tossed around a little bit by an elephant. Luckily he survived, was not too much damage. He actually landed in his herd of cattle which probably saved him and the elephant couldn't find him again. Wow. Spruce. But this is competition for water and it's competition for. At this time of day, you know, the primary driver is water for, for elephants and cattle. And elephants and cattle actually.

[Robbie]

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[Carl Verhof]

Use the same path, you know. So from A to B, the shortest way you will obviously find elephant know the. The most comfortable and easier routes from water source to water source. And, and cattle herders actually absolutely follow the same. The same past because it just makes sense. But yeah, interesting. But here I am. So he's okay.

[Robbie]

Why did you say it was too late? Why'd you say that he went to the water too late?

[Carl Verhof]

It was already dark. It was already after dark. So he, he took his kettle to drink at 7pm last night, which is probably about maybe an hour and a half or two hours too late. Which, which he knows, you know, it's far better for him to. He's scheduled to drink and, and while the sun is still shining. And we also know, and he also knows that elephant having not had access to this only water point in the area that's kind of currently available, they are already thirsty towards the end of the afternoon. So they come in early evening already.

[Robbie]

Yeah. You're making an observation that we saw when we were in the. We went and filmed in the photographic zone of Indumet, right on the border of Tanzania and Kenya. And there was one long. There was one. One source of water out there. It was this pit that. There was this long Runway down to this thing. And the cattle obviously used it and the elephants obviously used it. Yeah, you can imagine the competition for water is serious.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah. Interesting that you mentioned Enginet, but we just signed the elephant management contract there. And as you know, Endumet is an extension of Ambassador a little bit. And it's also a corridor that connects kind of the Kenyan elephants a little bit with Ngorongoro, which is another area that we are working. So Endomet is becoming an area of operation for us. But for the first time, we're going to dabble a little bit into managing lions and carnival conflict with cattle. And we want to see if we can have a nighttime impact on protecting Maasai cattle while they're in their bomas, just to see if two drones could possibly do the trick there. And then obviously, we are working on the forest edges of Kilimanjaro, which is the actual national park, and Indomet is the buffer zone, just. And there's some commercial farming around the slabs of Kilimanjaro that we need to manage. And then we. While we're doing that, we helping with a bit of connectiv. Connectivity towards the interior of Tanden, you know, just to help some elephants through busy roads and things like that. So. Interesting area. Yeah.

[Robbie]

Well, Carl, introduce yourself. We've. We've jumped into the session without even introducing yourself. Who do you work for? What do you do?

[Carl Verhof]

Shucks, it's a. It's a long story, but in short,

[Robbie]

we're on a podcast. Form content.

[Carl Verhof]

Exactly. We don't have to do everything in five, five seconds like the requirement these days. But I. I'm a. I was born into. Kind of grew up in Kruger national park where my father was. Worked for sand parks his whole life.

[Robbie]

Where Kruger did you. Where did you grow up?

[Carl Verhof]

Skukuza. So in that little town which is there. I. Well, I was born in 1977, so I was there.

[Robbie]

Okay.

[Carl Verhof]

From then.

[Robbie]

When did you leave? Let me ask me that. When did you leave Kruger?

[Carl Verhof]

The late 80s. Okay. My dad was from. Went to headquarters in Pretoria for.

[Robbie]

Okay, okay.

[Carl Verhof]

So I spent a little bit of my last of my high school in. In the city. Big city, and then did some time in the military in the South African Navy and then came up to Tanzania straight after that because one of my Dad's early duties was to go and put up this film every Sunday evening at Davos, like an amphitheater in the Skukuza rest camp. And as a junior at the time, my dad had to go and put that film on for tourists to go and watch. Every Sunday I think it was 7pm or something like that, which was quite light for a little kid. But every Sunday then obviously I watched it and it was this Serengeti, amazing, over and over and over again. But later in my dad's career, he. He started struggling with elephants and conflict just in race camps and things like that. And then obviously one of his projects was to drop defenses into Mozambique to create more, more space for elephants and Kruger and I, I think there's currently again an elephant problem in Kruger National Park. There's just too many elephants there for the vegetation to sustain. So it's the same problems. And that brought us to conversations about open ecosystems and areas without fences. And that elephant work brought in people like Ian Douglas Hamilton that just passed away now and he worked up here in East Africa and there were conversations about elephants needing space to breathe and seasonal movements and baobab trees. And it's actually quite interesting, an indicator of seasonal movement is when baobab trees would survive the dry season in Tanzania and in East Africa we have no damage or loss of baobab trees just because there's space for seasonal movement. So it's actually so simple when you look at it, you know. And a part of the Tanzanian conservation model is based on open ecosystems that are then got buffer zones around them and those are controlled by and protected by hunting and problem animals are then absorbed in those buffer zones and then that allows or abundance, you know, and that's why we have the great migration and things like that. But yeah, in a nutshell, I didn't really have a choice, a choice to come up here, but I started obviously in the commercial end of, of tourism, as we would say. But just seeing how poor my, my dad has always been as a true conservationist. So I entered into the guiding career in my early 20s and then slowly, you know, always had a research project first of all, with lion numbers in the Serengeti, there were these super prides of over 50 lions in the Serengeti and wanted to figure out what was going on there. So then at small research camps in the Serengeti that I based myself from.

[Robbie]

And you're just working independently as a researcher at this point?

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, exactly. And. But dabbling in the safari world, okay, trying to Earn dollars and pay the bills and things and it was great. But the, the base has always been research and, and knowledge and what's going on. And to the extent that it's an interesting story but in 2005, I, I, I, I believe, which is what is that now, 20 years ago, the northern Serengeti like we know now, you know, the Mara river crossings on the, on the Serengeti side wasn't even known at the time. And I was doing some work on research work on those massive lion prides just in the northeastern corner of the Serengeti or the Lobo Valley. And that's where those huge line prides all the way to the sand river and the Bolognese spring, that's where there's really big prize of lines were. And that was literally 50 kilometers from the Mara river. But no one ever went there. And as you do, night after night, you sit around the fire and you start talking about, you know, you see it on the map, but why, why can't we go? And a good friend of mine, of my right hand man, really Machine, because he's a mechanic and now a guide and you know, a very good businessman. I had to convince him to let's go, let's go. 10 kilometers at a time. We, I convinced them and then we start driving north. We just go northwest towards the Mara river and we see some poaching and people running around. And that's when we kind of lost our carriage and then turned back because there were no mo. There was no even with radios. There was no one to talk to. We were too far from everyone. And there was this Tanzanian, famous Tanzanian poacher that got some arms from Uganda or Central Africa Republic at the time. And he was running that corner of the Serengeti a little bit as his own country. I found out later on, you know, and this is early 2000s, so it's not even that long ago.

[Robbie]

Yeah.

[Carl Verhof]

And then slowly, slowly we crept closer, we crept closer. It takes another week to convince Machine that yeah, you know, maybe let's just go again. And then there were obviously no real roads at the time. And eventually we got to the Mara river maybe a couple of months in and yeah, it was in the beginning quite depressing. There was, everything was snared and there was a lot of, you know how it is when you arrive in an area that's been actively used as a, as a perching field. You know, I remember lying.

[Robbie]

Are we in the national park at this point?

[Carl Verhof]

In the national park, right on the banks of the Mara, as we know now there, where you saw those pictures being taken of all those people that got out of there.

[Robbie]

Literally, right.

[Carl Verhof]

2005, I was like camping there all on my own. There was a ranger post that almost fortified with, you know, 12 foot walls, banged on the door. No one, Absolutely no. So. So for months we. We just had these areas that we. In the beginning was depressing because it was just putting animals out of their misery. And there was. I still remember the first line that I saw there was foaming in the mouth and he had his bottom canines literally had to work it through a snare. So it was clean couple. Anyway, so those types of scenes. And we just decided that, you know, how can we stabilize this? You know, how can we. Actually then I saw these river crossings my first week. There was literally in the bank of the Mara river. And I was just sitting there for those days. The crossings just kept on going and going and going for hours because there was just nothing stopping it. Anyway, so then drove back to the. The warden and, and just showed him these pictures and said like, I mean, this is just what's going on here. And then he told me the story about, no, it's actually really dangerous to Koda. But without drifting off too far, you know, I. The underlying purpose of what we have done is always to stabilize areas and always to bring in a certain amount of tourism. There's value. And, and when we talk about value, which is a conversation also in the bigger scheme of things, you know, is value has to come from somewhere. You know, it just. It doesn't just fall out of the sky. And even if a place is beautiful, even if it's the Serengeti, if you don't have stability and if you don't have an income that's being generated from an area, then there's no reason for people or the government or the people in the area to look after the resources there. You know, and it's just simple maths. And, and I'm using this northern Serengeti as an example because this is something that we all know and it's regarded as a high volume, a high tourism density area. But as 20 years ago, there were areas in the Serengeti where even tourism wasn't really viable. But through feet and creating this value, it stabilized and it generates money now. And it's important that areas generate money because otherwise there's no reason to protect it. And then governments generally start looking for other sources. You know, whether it's mining or, you know, what's underneath you know, because idle land, you know, the days of land just lying open for not generating anything for anyone, those days are absolutely over. You know, it has to have value. And it's not just value, one sided value. You know, any piece of land needs to have value for, for the government, first of all, whether it's spark fees or trophy fees or some sort of income that, that is generated to create the enough reason to put in resources and roads and then big infrastructure things. And then there must be value for the people around this kind of area. You know, whether it's a bit of job creation or whether it's protein or whether it's something it has still it has to have. Obviously kind of the private sector needs to be rewarded for, for risk and, and putting in beds for people to stay and visit, you know, because without that there is none of the other beneficiaries anyway. So that is kind of the principle of conservation. Generally speaking, when you're looking at non mainstream areas and without that someone creating that, it just doesn't happen. And you know, and that, that goes for any kind of area in sub Saharan Africa, you know, it doesn't matter. And then you look at like what's viable, you know, what things are viable, you know, what's the access in an area? You know, can people get there? What is the cost of getting there? What am I competing with? You know, are they tsetse fly? You know, is what's the weather like? You know, is it, is it possible to have mainstream tourism there? Is it possible to have people with mob phones coming to take pictures? You know, or will the Serengeti pull that type of clientele? You know, you can't just duplicate things and assume that if they work here that they will work everywhere. You know, and there's sometimes there's a huge misperception of logistics and the, the bearability and is it bearable be in

[Robbie]

an area something, does somebody even want to go there?

[Carl Verhof]

Right?

[Robbie]

That's the thing.

[Carl Verhof]

Like she doesn't allow it, you know, or testify. Just doesn't allow. You're not going to have the same type of person as a first time visitor to Africa going to the middle of nowhere in an area that has testify all the way around. And we absolutely drive for weeks and only see planes came up. Is that Serengeti model viable there? Yes or no? No. And it's that kind of misperception of, of what it's really like out there and the space, you know, that we're talking about. You know, if you look at Tanzania, which is only one country in East Africa in, you know, round numbers, you know, a million square kilometers, generally speaking of which 25% is protected, you know, and so that's 250,000 square kilometers and miles. I don't know what that would be. But it's, it's, it's big space, you know, and if you then look at a proportion of how much of that is protected by core national park type areas, and then it's like a third of it, you know, and then they have two thirds that is open areas, you know, open areas where habitat protection is still taking place. But there are different models, you know, of looking after what I, I think everyone can understand should be habitat, first of all.

[Robbie]

Yeah. I think that should be the most fundamental thing that everyone considers right. If we're losing, we're getting, we've got a burgeoning human population that's pressing on all of these wonderful wild areas. And the number one thing to keep wildlife around for our kids and our grandkids one day is habitat in the story. And we've only got limited tools in our toolbox to protect habitat, one of which is hunting, one of which is ecotourism, one of which is forestry. Why would you even in, in whatever theology that you have want to get rid of one of our limits, One of the only, you know, dozen, half dozen tools that we have in the toolbox?

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, so, so this brings me, brings us to all these kind of questions and it's actually a good conversation to have because I've always been an inside national park person. This is where I grew up and I can't change that. Yeah. So it's, it's, I've, I am not personally a hunter myself, although I shoot for the pot and I, and I, if I'm hungry, I have no.

[Robbie]

Well, then you're a hunter. If you shoot for the putt, you're a hunter.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, but interesting. Even though my, my father worked for the national park Sport in, in South Africa, part of his salary was to, to hunt impala each month just because shops were so far. You know, that was part of your setup. So, you know, we, we, we have to be realistic about if you are happy to eat a cow or anything else, you must be happy to eat a chicken. And if you're happy to eat a chicken, then we can also talk about a buffalo know, or an eland, which is very much similar to each other. And while a game meat is, is actually requires less looking after, you know, and dipping and, and medicine and things like that and Elon do wonderfully well on, on good land, you know, and, and I grew up on buffalo meat. You know, buffalo meat was sold inside,

[Robbie]

in Kruger.

[Carl Verhof]

In Kruger, you know, and beef, you know, and because those days we were still counting buffalo and elephant, you know, which obviously the reason why there's such a big problem with elephant and is because those practices are now not ethically allowed anymore. Now we are paying the price in habitat and recreation, you know, so we, we're having the same issues just literally 50 years later, you know, the same things we are talking about now was discussed when I was a kid and I just listened about a culling that's been forced to stop and how now to manage the overpopulation of elephants and Kruger. So it's just going around in circles, as you can see, because there's just such a big misunderstanding about the size and the space requirement for these large mammals and herbivores. And that is not like practically to just hand them around to each other and say, here's an elephant, please look after it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just not possible, you know, or have a thousand buffalo. You know, we, I mean just as sand parks, you know, regression to other areas. But obviously everything possible was done to try and find solutions for a foreign overpopulation of elephants. You know, they were relocations, there were little ones were kind of put in Burmas and they were sent to Pilansburg and all those elephant problems and cars being turned over.

[Robbie]

The rhino rapings of the early 1990s.

[Carl Verhof]

So absolutely every, everything was kind of tried. You know, there's no one that wakes up in the morning going like, I want to go, Kyle, 30. A whole herd of. Not if you work in the conservation world, you know, it's not fun, you know, it's not something that's pleasant. It's not a person, it's not a, you know, we, you know, so there's no one that's going to just wake up one morning and say, okay, let's go as an option. And similarly, I think with, with any kind of vulnerable area or area that needs protection, you know, it's, it's, it becomes more about what's practically possible and what pays the bills and what options there are. And, and then what is, what has the best return for the amount of impact? You know, how many, how many roads or bridges or lodges do we have to build in the middle of nowhere to sustain kind of a certain model? You know, and so if we look at the same numbers, you know, that 250,000 square kilometers that we're talking about, which is now currently being conserved by hunting. Hunting. So every national park in Tanzania has a buffer zone of hunting it. And then obviously you used to have the slu, which half of it or maybe a third of now is still being looked after by hunting. But it's a substantial amount of land and it's also land that no one else really wants. So people think that hunters go to prime areas and then they, they go to. No, you know, it's almost the opposite.

[Robbie]

They get given the areas.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah.

[Robbie]

And then those shit areas become prime areas. They become prime areas because of the protection. And then it's like, oh, thank you so much, we'll take that back now.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, exactly. You know, so I start any of these emotional arguments that we all kind of get dragged into online from time to time, you know, and it always turns out about someone thinking that there are other options and that the hunter stopping the tourism lodge from developing and blocking them and things like that. No, anyone is welcome. And I always start those arguments with any tourism. I'm a photographic tourism owner. I push camps into areas. I know how hard it is to create a new market in the middle of nowhere. So we welcome any given day. If you want to buy a hunting block, just bring your money and you can build a lodge. It's there I think at the moment.

[Robbie]

Come take it. Come put your money where your mouth is.40 blocks.

[Carl Verhof]

So any tourism photographic guy that would like to come and take on one of these areas, you are more than welcome. But we don't, in reality, you know, it's not a viable model. And I think once you get to the crux of let's put the money down, build your lodge and put the vehicles down and do the marketing, put in the airstrip and try and get the scheduled flights, you know, get the critical mass and people will just realize that it's not a. Not if you're competing with the Serengeti in the Massamar, where you see a hundred different lions in a day, literally Serengeti, you could in one day, just randomly driving around, see a hundred different lions, probably five, six different sightings. You know, when you have the migration and a few leopards and great beautiful plains and, you know, almost the perfect scenario. And then you, you want to compete with something, you know, on the Mozambican border with a six month season or a four month season that you can operate there and you're trying to duplicate the same kind of model and it's, it's Just not realistic, you know, and then I always go like, but, you know. Yeah, Carl, what happened 200 years. What happened 200 years ago? You know?

[Robbie]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Carl, so you're a photo. You're working in the photographic sector. But what I know you for are these amazing elephant drone videos that I see literally daily on LinkedIn. Is that a side hustle for you? Is that. Okay, okay. This is by Conservation Implementation, arm of who I am. What is that?

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, sorry, man, I think we just had a glitch there and then.

[Robbie]

No, no, I was saying, like, tell me a little bit about that business. It's. It's almost as like you online, you hide your photographic guide side of you. And this is like, I. This is what I do. Like, I chase elephants with thermal drones.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah. So this is an interesting story and I'm. I'm glad we have a little bit of time. But. But I was, you know, I, I do a lot of training in the photographic world and we are training guides and things like this. And I. And we've always tried to push tourism into marginalized parks. And one of these little parks right on the Kenyan border in northeast and Tanzania is a little national park called Kumazi national park, you know.

[Robbie]

Yeah, I know, in Kumazi.

[Carl Verhof]

Well, no, Kumazi, but it used to be a, Again, reserve that used to be like a management area. It didn't ever have the national park status, and it was at the brink of being lost to. To us forever. But it also includes the Eastern Arc Mountains, which is the Galapagos of kind of Africa. You know, it's endemic species and a whole lot of things. And I was literally just doing guide training there two years ago or two and a half years ago. And the warden at the time, we were in the lecture room and there was like a commotion going on at the back. And I invited the warden because he was a friend of mine, and we worked on projects to kind of market the park and get a trickle of tourism in. And I specifically did guide training there so that guides can take customers there. And he came to me and he

[Robbie]

said,

[Carl Verhof]

good to see you again. And he spoke to the students and he did all this thing. And I could just see the man is under enormous amount of stress. And afterwards I pulled him aside and he told me, no, I'm just about to get fired, you know. And I asked him why you're a good warden. And he says, no, it's political pressure from politicians in the area because elephants are just out of control. It's Dry. It's. Elephants are outside the park, they're not inside the park. And now it's becoming his problem because this is not a performance, internal park sport issue. This is, you know, high ranking politicians that will lose their jobs, political jobs, if they can't protect humans from elephants.

[Robbie]

Yep, yep.

[Carl Verhof]

I then told him, sorry to hear, man, life is hard. And let me think if we can figure something out. And while we were doing a few, few years earlier, also in Nkomazi, we did a filming project to, to market the park. And at the time we had a drone pilot. And he took this, started filming wildlife, which we thought was, we didn't want this unnatural movement of animals. You know, we tried to get the scenic shots and he tried to film an elephant. And while he did that, the elephant obviously shook his head and like storm off into a distance. And it was interesting. I told him, listen, we're not going to use that shot. But in the back of my mind, I realized that the elephant had a very strong reaction to the, to the drone. But this is also a long time ago, like in 2015 or something like that. And I then looked at drones and there was. We looked at scenarios and most of the conflict happens at night, and there were no drones at the time that could do the job at night. And I parked the idea and I said it wasn't going to work. But we kept an eye on the developments of drone technology and things like that. And we realized at a point that, that the moment a drone costs would become less than about $10,000, I figured it maybe becomes viable to give it a go. And this was the same time that that happened, that he had these issues and we were just running training and full on safaris in the Serengeti. And I told him, Emmanuel, the warden, I said, fine, let's try, but I'm not going to write any letters. You deal with the parks board. If you get a pilot project approved, I will bring resources, I will bring a camp, and I will, I will give it a proper go to see if it works, but only for a month. And this, this was the amount of time that I could allocate to this type of endeavor at the time. And I kind of left it. And then it's two years ago now or so, but in the middle of peak season. Emmanuel phones me and he says he got it approved. And I said, emmanuel, all my camps are full. He says, we only have August. And then I had to go to my wife and I had to say, listen, I need to pull a camp now from the Mara River. And she just looked at me and she said, crazy or elephants? And I said, unfortunately, but it's also for a friend to see if we can help him. I, we made a logistic arrangements, but I pulled a camp out and at the time we just rented a drone, still the thermal drone. I, I was still negotiating with guys and I said, okay, let's rent it. Thousand five hundred dollars. You put thousand five hundred dollars. And we couldn't even fly drones at the time, but off we went. And I said, we're going to give it a go. I took one of my, my chefs, Chef Alex, he's now actually a director in one of our food businesses. I took him with me and I said, come, are you gonna go and see what we can do? We arrived, I went to the warden and I said, where do we go? And now, two years down the line, I look at this area. He literally sent us into the, a war zone of elephants. And I still remember we launched this drone on the edge of the park, but in a, in a farming area which is a town called Karamba. And it had good irrigation, it had a dam. Because when that park was declared, they had to relocate people out of the park. And in that relocation process, they built a dam. And this is still today one of the only permanent water sources. But this dam is used for irrigation and there's dry season farming. Now imagine Duum Kumar, what an attraction. Tsavu landscape.

[Robbie]

And then ice cream in the landscape for the elephants.

[Carl Verhof]

And then you have people pumping and irrigating. And we got sent there with my little drone and we flew the first night and I just flew over this town and the irrigation canal on our right hand side. And it was just unbelievable.

[Robbie]

Unbelievable. Like you just saw lots of elephants.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, lots of elephants. But not just that, but it was almost like a war zone. So people were getting ready, people were protecting their farms with their lives. And it's still like that today. The fires were being made. People were drinking konyagi to get courage. You know, we talk about Dutch courage. You know, this is true meaning of it. You know, dogs were getting, you know, all psyched up to fight the battles in the evening so that our harvest can be secured and so that life can go on. And it was interesting because this burden was put on the younger generation, people that are still fit and strong. Obviously we kind of handed over responsibility for the greater community to be able to secure a harvest, you know, so. But one of the first, and we edited a badly edited, a little five minute Clip, you know, of this kind of type of scenario. And one of the guys, it was just absolute. These slings that you also perhaps saw.

[Robbie]

We guys are amazing. And that's like, that's the coolest video, is that you've got these guys running because it's a thermal drone. It looks like the 1800s, right? They've like, it's like a fireball around their head that they're swinging to try and like either throw at the elephant or just like dissuade him.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, exactly. So we stepped into this world probably at the time underprepared and trying things that's never been tried before, hoping that it would work to try and save a good warden's job, you know. And since that day, we were never able to leave, you know, just because that have worked.

[Robbie]

That night you must have seen something that you were like, whoa, this actually works.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, it worked. You know, and it didn't. It worked 95 fairly easily because all breeding herds are kind of very protective of their little ones. So they. So the biggest killers within those community would be the breeding herds, you know, because if you use a shock measure to chase elephants, they generally run too fast for the little ones to keep up. And then there's a separation. And then all of a sudden the matriarch turns around or the mother turns around and she's missing her little calf. And then she immediately turns back to go and look for it, and then she finds a farmer. So 90% of deaths are probably killed done by breeding herds and breeding herd management with drones.

[Robbie]

It's.

[Carl Verhof]

It's not even hard. You can do it from a hundred meters the moment. It's not even high risk flying that is required, you know, so. And that already negates kind of 90% of deaths. Very easy to control them. And then you left with the bulls. And 90% of the bulls are very easy to. To work with drones. And then you always remaining with like 1% of the population that are stubborn. Who knows, maybe the bull is deaf, you know, I mean, I didn't test his ears, you know, or what is the scenario or habituated or really addicted to, to the sugars and the things out there or just kind of. And. And those ones are the ones that we spend most of our time with now. The world of elephant, human, elephant conflict is unfortunately very unforgiving because your success rate is measured by whether people can harvest or not. It's not about you were successful 99 out of a hundred times. It's just whether people were able to harvest which is kind of unforgiving because you could be successful really a lot of the times, but if the guy doesn't get his harvest, that doesn't matter, you know. So we realized that it's, it's, yeah, you have to be 100% successful. And that is the issue with 90% of other measures that are being used, whether they're passive measures or chili fences or bi fences or whichever other way. If you're still only 95% successful, you still fail. Because the bottom line is just the farmer couldn't harvest. And if you lose your crop towards the end of the harvest, you've already spent the money on pumping water, you've already spent time on labor, and you've still lost your harvest. Now the, the knock on effect is not just you've lost your harvest, you now have to redo something to feed your, your family. So you're spending double the amount of energy and labor to get back to just subsistence living, where if you've had that harvest, you now have security, food security, and you can spend the other half of the year doing something else. So your growth within your security and your family, exponential. So much revolves around being able to get that harvest.

[Robbie]

So 10 years ago, you had this test flight in this war zone. Ten years on now, how big are you now? How many drones do you have? How many teams do you.

[Carl Verhof]

Years ago, this was two years ago, so thermal drones only became an option over the shelf, like we are now with, with DJI two years ago with the.

[Robbie]

Okay, okay.

[Carl Verhof]

With the tees being world. So the moment those drones, or luckily for the warden, as he was about to get demoted, we were mainly, we were able to kind of get our hands on a thermal drone. But we have been operating in that area where we've started now for two years. So we have two years of data, we have two years of stats. And because that's all what it's about really, it's not about whether I think we are successful as whether the data shows, but it's better, better than static or passive measures. And this certainly is the case in our area of operations, which is now just around the, the western border of umkumazi is a 200 kilometer stretch. So there's no one that can operate on our scale.

[Robbie]

How many drones are you flying to cover 200km?

[Carl Verhof]

So we're flying four drones. So you're looking pretty much at about 25km active area, and then with a little bit of traveling, you double that. So you can probably look at around 50 km. That you can manage with a drone, okay, if you allow mobility. And that's the other aspect. So it's not just drones, but it's also being able to have a mobile camp that can support that drone and still shift with seasonal movements, you know. So just within that operational area of 50km, you still have seasonal absolutely obligations and different crops down, different drivers, primary drivers and secondary drivers that happen seasonally in those areas. And two years down the line, we are far more now in tune with, with what's happening when and what the drivers are and which water sources are drying up in what sequence. And then combined with that, we also work with a national park and planning the water network inside the park. So the more elephants we can keep in the park, keep in the park, the less we have to deal deal with outside the park. So we are now strategically working on a water network that unfortunately has to be artificial. So we're getting back to artificial water. So we getting back.

[Robbie]

But it's still an open system.

[Carl Verhof]

Still an open system. But we have to consider that the catchment area of the rivers, which is now the Pare Mountains and the Usambari Mountains, are so inhabited by people. You have 300,000 people living in the mountains and then you have rice farming in between the mountain and the park. So there is no more water going into the park. So we will have to supplement at some point. Otherwise the elephants just go into the mountains and where the water is anyway. And that, that brings us to the current scenario where you have more elephants outside the park than in. So those are kind of the long term. And we just finished, we just finished drilling a borehole on a very strong Nagadjuri route that's coming out of Tabu through Nkomazi. So we two boreholes on that Nagaji Pass, then there's one on the park border. Then they get to one of the first of our observation points, you know, so it's, it's very much more than just chasing elephants. It's, it's do about planning it. And, and, and what is the, the longer term plans. And then a, a huge amount of, of work is going into corridor integrity. You know, which corridors are still viable, which ones are not viable anymore. That's Leslie just, I think that's the

[Robbie]

coolest part of what I've learned about elephants in Tanzania. I, I saw some data from some coloring efforts done by Tawiri and the corridors between say Arusha and the Endermit system and Arusha and Tarangiri and the Inderit system and Then I think the coolest corridors with west of Endermet up out across into Natron and then north up into Kenya, they were just very distinctive. Just like it was so cool to see.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah. So, so, so this brings us now to what hunting, what value does hunting bring to open systems and, and core area integrity? And then what value does it bring with regards to connectivity? So when we look at elephants, connectivity is probably as important as habitat. And just if you consider that we have, let's say 30,000 elephants in the Amboseli Tavu ecosystem and we have another 60,000 elephants in Tanzania, and then if you consider the Nyata tunduru corridors, that's the connectivity from that we have with East African elephants that can connect to southern African elephants. So if we don't have that connectivity, we will slowly develop an East African elephant subspecies and a southern African elephant subspecies, which I'm sure everyone would agree we don't want to create. So these corridors of the connectivity is super important so that we can have the Amboseli Tavu elephants still mixed with the Tarangire, Ngorogoro, Rua Sudhu Nyasa elephants, and then to those ones further south, at least the genes need to stay connected.

[Robbie]

And a lot of those corridors are these gmas that nobody wants except the hunters.

[Carl Verhof]

Exactly. Because those are difficult areas to one manage. They marginalized people are marginalized in those areas. And it's just generally not areas that are suitable for commercial farming, otherwise farming would have happened there already. So there are no clear economic kind of model that works. And these are also then areas that are used by wildlife, you know, they generally are because there are less dense and human or livestock or any of those, those are then corridors generally. So around the Umkumazi ecosystem, the western border is now the Pari Mountains. And those Pari Mountains have these gaps through them. And there are not many gaps through the Pari Mountains. There's one that goes north to Lake Jipe and that connects into Tsavu again. And there is the connection south of Moshi that that connects to Tarungiri National Park. So there's a very distinctive corridor there. That corridor's getting thin and farmed in a lot and quite populated. So it's getting harder for elephants to move through there. Then the corridor south of that is the Lembeni corridor that we talk about sisal farming, big commercial sisal farm. So there's conflict there, but there is still some easier movement of elephants through there. That goes also west towards Terengui. But then you have the same Corridor that's now not viable anymore. There's a town right in the middle of that corridor, although one or two elephants. So that's just a conflict zone. Then you have a long stretch of mountain. Then you get the main corridor between the South Pari Mountains and the North Usambara Mountains and that goes down to the coast. That Corridor is about 50 km wide and it goes all the way down across the main road into the Goa swamps and from there into the Pangani river basin. Excuse me. So this, because it's such a wide corridor, is now becoming the only real viable corridor. So the traffic there of elephant is a lot more now than I could imagine. It also has mountains on both sides, so there's water and it's cool. So in the dry season there's a lot of traffic through there. Elephant wise, the issue we have now is that the, the next safe zone, as we would refer to it, or space available for elephants to not have conflict is 120km away from Kumazi National Park. So that corridor is a huge distance. Now it's getting harder for elephants to get through there because it's a two week journey for them to get through there now. And I heard of 70 or 100 elephants that just had this seasonal movement, cause a lot of kind of damage through the water areas where people are also now still farming, but with these drones for the first time now we've managed methods that we can move these elephants through that corridor now mainly at night because that's when cat livestock are enclosed, people are in the houses and we can kind of maneuver elephants through there. And we do it. We do it. And it's not even work that's possible with a helicopter because you. Except maybe with a thermal device or something, but with one motor, two motorbikes and two rangers and a drone. We've managed to now move big herds of hundred elephants over a 10 day period and we were able to move them 120km. Wow. From substantial safe zone to substantial safe zone. So in order for us to kind of keep this connectivity going and then because you're doing it peacefully and safely and no one gets injured, you can then start negotiate kind of with people for the first time. We can negotiate. Where can elephants drink? Where can we? Because we can allow them to drink and then safely for them to move on. It's not uncontrolled drinking, you know, but it's a lot easier to work with an elephant that's not thirsty than it is was one that's thirsty. He's Kind of far more forgiving in his behavior.

[Robbie]

Yeah, no, that's, that's amazing. The technology is amazing. I think the coolest part about these videos that I've noticed in the, in the last couple of months is obviously it's thermal drones. And so you pick up different signatures on these elephants. And there's been elephants that have like one hot ear, one cold ear, the coolest one. So tell me, number one, I want to hear about those kinds of things. But the other thing that I noticed was that their feet, so obviously they were sitting, standing in water that cooled their feet and then they started walking and you could literally see their footprints. Well, number one, you could see the socks right on their feet, but then you could see where they stepped.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah. And the step kind of disappears as it returns to normal. But yeah. So that got us to what is now the Kazia Tembo. Kaziya tembo and Swahili is just elephant work, you know. So my staff started asking me, where are you going? And it's like, elephants are for you. What's. You know, so it's not like that's where the name came from, you know, and it's Swahili. So it's never been intended to be anything else than I'm going to work, you know, so that's where that started. And it's been hugely effective, you know, and everyone has asked, so there's always been skepticism and there are always people that would say things will never work. You know, so far there are two types of people. You know, some people that give something a go and some people that will always say, no, it will never work, you know, so we are unfortunately the type of, the half full, type of glass people. And we gave it a go and we had hugely positive results. But some of the comments we had earlier on were Tanzanians will never be able to fly drones. It's going to get crashed. And unbelievable that we still have those type of comments from extraordinary.

[Robbie]

Listen, those types of comments should be directed at people like me.

[Carl Verhof]

Like, I'll pressure you 50I in a moment. Yeah, I know that. But just the assumptions that, that, you know, people from a certain area won't be able to fly drones. You know, it's just kind of so limiting and thoughts, you know, that in the, in the contrary, we, we have incredible, incredibly skilled pilots, you know, pilots that are unbelievable, you know, that far better than, than myself or, or pro pilots that have come from the outside, you know, so it's just Tanzanians and you can see it in every Tanzanian's life. There's a complete commitment to something, whether it's welding gates or whether it's transporting rice or. It's one of the best qualities that I've seen from Tanzanian people is that it's always all in and that type of character or quality is extremely helpful when it comes to kind of

[Robbie]

the

[Carl Verhof]

finer type of skills that you need to acquire to be successful. So we have pilots and most of pilots that we train, you know, just take it so seriously that this is my cv, this is my, I'm a pilot, this is my flight record, this is my log, this is I, you know, I've. And it's just unbelievable how good these ranges now are. And, and it's not, I'm not selecting generally people that are going to get trade. I get sent. We, we have a, obviously a memorandum of understanding of a public private partnership relationship with the Tanzanian government where we work closely with the parks board and authorities. But we also get human resources from, from, from Tanapa, which what. That's what makes this model work. You know, it's not a NGO model where we are away from government and we're looking for money.

[Robbie]

These guys, these drone operators are Tanapa employees.

[Carl Verhof]

Yes. I want them to fly the drones because they're sensitive information. I prefer to have rangers during the job and, and I don't have to pay those salaries. So it's very much, you know, a win, win for everyone. Rangers now are empowered, you know, where rangers would not be able to integrate into society to go and play football with the community because they always were just seen as people that would come and arrest me. The rangers that are now in our Kazia Tembo projects are heroes in the community. You know, they play football every afternoon. Well, now we have time, even the community now has time for football because normally that was occupied by making fires, chasing elephants and getting ready for, you know. So it just makes such a massive difference if you have the right model in an area with the right human putting it. And we just have hardware, we provide hardware and training and making sure that logistics are in place.

[Robbie]

So how many drones do you have out right now, Carl?

[Carl Verhof]

Yes, we always have too few. So you know how it goes that if you are successful and we have a five year plan for Umkumazi, what was a five year plan always gets pulled quicker than we have to. So we wanted to have one corridor each year. We wanted to add same thing. But the moment you're successful in your first corridor, people start phoning from further away.

[Robbie]

So yeah, because you got like you're doing some work in Angora Gora right now.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah. So we have I think about 8, 10 drones flying again on a daily basis of which is now in three different areas. You know, Ngorogoro added was Karatu, that has a very hard conservation kind of farm border. So that area operation is constant, continuous work. Every night elephants exit into farmland even in the diocese, even if there are no crops on the field. So and then obviously Mukumazi, which is a huge area that's I think eventually that will be 400 km of straight line corridor that we boundaries that we need to work in. Endomet is another at least 120km of southern endomet. And then the senior western border, we at least we have a hunting block to absorb something. And then on the eastern border close to Kilimanjaro, and then we have the whole Ngorogoro southern border where there are huge commercial farming. So under our management, I would say it's probably now close to 500 kilometers that recovery with eight drones or so, you know.

[Robbie]

Wow, that's so cool.

[Carl Verhof]

Five, six mobile units, you know, so very effective, you know, but it's takes planning, dedication and a complete commitment. And I think the government has realized that you can't have ranges that kind of have their normal duties. And then if someone phones, they then need to react. It really became a realization that it's almost a full time job and if you're not going to dedicate resources to it, you're not going to, you're not going to win the battle. And luckily, now that we have methods, that one gives us the ability to work at night, first of all, safely. Secondly, you can work in any conditions, rain or shine. It's no point in you telling the farmer, I can't work tonight because it's raining. And then the third point is that you can move elephants a substantial distance. It doesn't help you clap and they shift to your neighbor and the same elephant then just does damage all along the line and actually does damage on five arms instead of one. So the ability to move that elephant really a substantial. But if it's 10 km, we can move them 10 km, it doesn't matter. You just add a battery. So the combination of all those aspects is what makes the method successful one. It's with government. Human resources are with our government ranges. Yes, I own pilots also. Hardware is in our control. Because my meeting with the parks authorities is the moment I give you the drone, some politician is going to phone you and Then your drone is gone. And then the warden will say, yes, you write, and I go, like, so for us to be operational, I will keep the hardware with me. And then you send your human resources to our mobile camps. And that model works because it needs to be consistent. If you're not consistent, then you might as well not even start. Yeah. So those are the realizations. And the model is now so refined that it becomes easy to scale it from here. You know, that's. We can work now on Ngoro Guru, because, you know, we've done the two years of hard yards we've proved that we can help from. We can just work in a straight line and really. Then be effective, because you only really realize how effective you are if you

[Robbie]

have

[Carl Verhof]

eyes all across the conflict zone. Otherwise, you just increase conflict somewhere else.

[Robbie]

Somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Carl Verhof]

And then what's the point of that? You know, it's almost borderline unfair that that farmer now has double the elephants and this farmer has none.

[Robbie]

Yeah, no, dude, like, again, the reason I reached out to you is I was. It's almost like the thing that I look forward to watching on LinkedIn every morning. Like, I open it up and I was like, let me see what video Carl has. Has submitted. It's just. It's really, really cool. I think you're doing amazing work. We have a lot of people that listen to this podcast that I've had a couple of times. People are like, how can I help? So how can people help? Carl? You. I assume you're always, Always looking for drones, always looking for support. How does that work?

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, absolutely. So we, just to reiterate, we are not in India, and. And I don't think we ever would want to be one. We are very much an implementing partner, and we work on a public private partnership with it. And then you have a mother. And of course, I use. We use our tourism side of our business to fund a lot of what we do. So, yeah, I never wanted to compete for other people's money or go into the donor kind of funding world, because it's a. It's not. You know, we. We. We've started this to save a friend's life, you know, and it's worked. And now. Now we're continuing, but obviously that's. Our funding model is based on our own safari company. My poor wife just, you know, has to look at how we finance it. But we bring in the private sector, so commercial farmers that has direct benefit. And then obviously, at Ngorongoro, it was fairly easy to finance our first Drones there because the private sector just stepped in the lodges right on the boundary. But we have problems funding Enemit for example, which is there's not so much commercial interest there with regards to lodges and so forth. And it's also a kind of an area that has had lots of failures, so people don't believe that things will work. So it's harder for us to get drones there. And then Kumadi, it's just so large that I don't think we will ever have enough resources to manage everything. So for us, we, before we move into an area, we want to be fully equipped with regards to transport, mobility and drones so that we don't have loss of hardware. So we understand what it takes to keep operational effectivity and we don't want to do high risk things just for the sake of taking on a new area. So for indumet in the next two years, we need to deploy five mobile units there, of which each unit needs two drones, for example. And then slowly, slowly, the quicker we get the drones, the more we can kind of COVID the, COVID the whole area.

[Robbie]

And a mobile unit is comprised of. Did you say motorbikes as well?

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, it's a trailer with solar power. So power is obviously a main component in drone work, is constantly charging batteries. So we have beefed up solar systems in these trailers and then it provides a bit of comfort for rangers. So if you've worked the whole night, I didn't want a ranger to come back and cook his own meal, you know, so I have a cook there for him that he gets his meals. I don't want him to kind of do other work. And I give each of these mobile camps, Internet, for example, so that the guy can get in contact with his family, he can watch football or whatever, watch a movie. So this is for us a minimum requirement. And I think that's why from a human resources point of view, we've been successful because we understand me having working with these rangers most nights alongside them. I understand how tired you are after a month of flying, you know, and I think that's why the model works is we look after our, not even our staff, but we look after ranges that work in this spectrum. We understand that it's dangerous work and we, we want to provide them with a minimum kind of standard and we also want to provide them with the right equipment to be able. I can't expect you to do the job if you need to do it with your own eyesight, with your small little ears and work at night, you know, we are just not equipped to do it. So without this layer of protection and thermal capability to one keep our staff safe and then to it having the ability to move elephants a substantial distance in any weather conditions is for us minimum. Otherwise, you know, what, what are we doing? So we are constantly battling with drones. So yes, anything, really, anything helps right now. But we have a whole list of stuff, you know, people can get involved on, on any level. You know, it's like, it's almost like what we call that. Sometimes you get these guys getting made and then they send you this.

[Robbie]

Yeah. Wedding register.

[Carl Verhof]

So it doesn't matter if you can only do the cutting board. You know, it's okay. You know, we still need the cutting board. You know, we. And if we bringing scent based measures in. And now that one of the biggest issues was, was drone uses is big trees, for example, has a limitation then on our voices.

[Robbie]

Yeah, yeah.

[Carl Verhof]

Now we have speakers and spotlights and we increase delivery distance of, of drone noise and things like that. All works. But we also work with send based measures, you know. So now each camp has a, a little paintball gun. I don't know if you know this game that. Yeah, yeah, those shoot each other. But now you get little balls of tear gas or.

[Robbie]

Wow.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, you get, you know, for self defense. You know, these things are used for self.

[Robbie]

Yeah.

[Carl Verhof]

In South Africa, so for us to get that elephant from under the the trees, we just pop a hundred meters away, two of those little balls in there. And then very quickly you get the elephants out from under the trees and then the drone takes over from them and it keeps them moving and things like that. Every day we have ways to minimize risk and to keep drones flying for longer and to make pilots more successful. So it's actually quite interesting the work that we do. So out of Ngorogora forest, for example, now you have these very clearly defined elephant pass, you know, because obviously an elephant needs to fit through and you can see where the elephants come out. And now with all our data, we know exactly where they walk. So if I want that elephant to turn at this junction, we go at night now and we just spray two lines of kind of pepper spray on this particular junction where we don't want him to turn into. And then slowly, subconsciously, we are working with these elephants on a scent based measure just to minimize the amount of elephants that come out. So now instead of having to deal with 30 again, we're now just having to deal with 10. You know, so it gets very interesting. We are starting to work with what frequencies of propeller pitch, you know, what noises are more effective than other noises. You know, some elephants understand Swahili, for example, you know, the ones that are more outside, you know, so they are so used to farmers shouting at them, go, go, go. You know that if you deliver that over a speaker, it has a far better effect than perhaps any other noise that becomes really interesting. And, and then it also our rate of failure. So with the most stubborn bulls, you know, so if you go through that LinkedIn profile and you look at the Ngoro Goro, three months that we've flown there now, we bumped into a bull that, that it's just extremely stubborn. And I haven't seen him and it became, and I didn't, I didn't go and step in, you know, I didn't go and we didn't go and use, use guns and, and chased him with helicopter. We, I, I told my pilots there and I said, fine, we'll give you a month. Apply pressure on this elephant for a month and we see if we can, if we could. He needs, it's, it's very behavioral change. He doesn't need to have any reward for his effort. So for him it becomes a, Every night I walk out, I go to the farm and I get nothing in return. So that subconscious battle and almost remapping the minds of elephants for us as far better long term. So that same town that we started two years ago, Karamba town, that was that war zone. Today people have forgotten elephants because we just continuously started flying over this area, even if it's surveillance flying. So the constant subconscious battle that we've had there just in noise and irritation and no reward for energy spent. No reward for any energy spent. We don't have elephants in that area anymore. But the corridor right next to that irrigation zone is the corridor that we want them to be in. And that corridor goes to the, the lake or the dam that was created. And we, that's the drinking point that we have now negotiated so we don't fly over that corridor. And even if we do fly over it, it's at 250 meters just to do observation. So these, we don't have any subconscious pressure on, on those elements. And now we're almost remapping the minds of elephants of, you know, the primary

[Robbie]

for that bull, that bull and Ngoro Goro, has he changed his mind?

[Carl Verhof]

He has, he has literally three or four days ago. So he's been gone for four days. So let's see, you know, but now the bigger question is this where did he go? So now we are waiting for the neighbor to phone and going like, hey, I have this really stubborn elephant, you know. But that just explains the importance of having no gaps in line and just having active management of, of these animals. It's gonna never stop, you know. Yeah, yeah, it gets less. And you, you, you kind of, and, and then you have to look at what are the other options. And those are fences and those are electrified fences, you know, and then we get back to that we're losing the connectivity that spoke about earlier, you know, and then we're going to sit with subspecies of elephants, you know, and we're gonna, and then, you know, back to the larger kind of purpose. What are we doing? You know, why are we doing all of these things? And especially, you know, to have the connectivity, but also to secure someone's harvest and to be able to do it consistently and to be able to do it safely and in any weather conditions. And if you consider the two years, there's a lot of money in elephant conservation, you know, and we stepped into this world with nothing. And if you, if you look at the areas that we've been now given to work and it's almost incredible, you know, that abuseli endomet ecosystem, you know. You know.

[Robbie]

Yeah, it's the hotspots of elephants in Tanzania, if not in the, in Africa.

[Carl Verhof]

But it's also high profile areas, you know, we.

[Robbie]

Yeah, that's what I meant. That's what I meant.

[Carl Verhof]

You would have imagined that someone would have sorted it out already. You know, if you consider how many NGOs that are already working there. And then. I don't want to say anything really, but when we go out at night, there's nobody else, there's no one coming in. And this was almost the sobering big realization. I think in my subconscious mind I expected everyone to be there, you know, lots of NGOs.

[Robbie]

Yeah.

[Carl Verhof]

And in reality there's no, there's no one. And there's a whole lot of static passive measures, you know, that, that are obviously not effective, otherwise I wouldn't have had to go in the first place, you know, and we just realized the scale of the problem and if we fail, what the consequences would would be, you know, not just on a, on a food security point of view, but also on a larger habitat. Yeah. And connectivity point of view, you know. So, yeah, man, without talking too much about these things, you know, it's just humbling first of all. And then if you're looking at the scale of the problems, you know, this 500 kilometers that we're covering is still a drop in the bucket, you know? Sure. If you look at the conflict map of Tanzania, it's every block, you know, of the country as human elephant conflict. And we are working in three. Three dots, you know?

[Robbie]

Yeah.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah.

[Robbie]

Well, you're doing great work, Carl, and that's why I wanted to have you on. I wanted to have a conversation.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah.

[Robbie]

Please know that this window, this door is always open.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah.

[Robbie]

I'm a big fan of your work.

[Carl Verhof]

Thank you, man. And it brings us back to a little bit your biggest story and what you are trying to achieve, you know, and it's just the. The reality. The realities of. Of the problems we face, you know, and it does.

[Robbie]

The realities of the problem. Exactly.

[Carl Verhof]

It doesn't have to be sugar coated and it doesn't have to be made something it's not, you know, and we also don't have to be ashamed of our past, you know, so if hunting or that habitat conservation model, if we inherited it because it was the only method that was viable a hundred years ago, why are we now? So what is the guys doing? So ungrateful. I want to say, why are we so. We. We have to say thank you for hunters sitting in. In areas that no one else ever wanted to go. You know, we should be grateful for. For hunters protecting buffer zones and, and doing. The work I'm doing now used to be done by. By hunting and hunters. You know, it's always sorting out problem. You know, hunting, the original form of hunting is like, here's a leopard eating my livestock. Who has a gun? This is how it started. Not, I'm a hunter, I want a leopard on my wall. No, it was like. And someone went like, you have a gun, you have to go. And then you go, like, I'm gonna bring a friend, you know, because it's much better to go, you know, and people like almost push you into the bush, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And then it became this, this almost job, you know, of whenever there are problem animals between the core area and human habitation, that's where buffer zones existed. And this is where hunting has always taken part, you know, and this is where I'm still now working every day. Now I have to do it without hunting, which is a lot harder. And, you know, hunting has looked after this habitat for so long and no one is saying thank you, you know. Yeah. And it's also very natural. So now we're looking at, you know, Tanzania, right. And you know, the southern Serengeti, and, you know, the Masswa areas around the southwestern Serengeti. And we know the Friedkin family that is invested in that hunting block, and we know that they've changed it to photographic. Why? Because it's only now become viable to do so. So it's even a hunt.

[Robbie]

Because why? Because why? Because somebody has makes more money, but somebody has decided over the last 10 years to protect it, to get to the point where it's now viable for photographers.

[Carl Verhof]

If it was never protected by hunting, that step would never have been possible in the first place. Then it would have been a farm now.

[Robbie]

Exactly.

[Carl Verhof]

So for me, there's very much. I don't understand why people don't understand the part.

[Robbie]

Oh, we've done a terrible job. We've done a terrible job of explaining this thing that you've just explained. And that's my job.

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, exactly. So the communication and then telling the stories is very much important, but also to just stay with the bigger conversations about habitat and connectivity and all of that far more relevant in natural. And then there's also this. I think there's this perception that animals live forever. And I don't get it, man. Because it's not the case, man. Look at me, I'm going old. And it's very. Everything dies, you know, at some point. And whatever way you want to kind of wish it away, it just doesn't ever change, you know, so it does. And I wish just people would just really kind of take a moment and just think about it that, you know, this elephant that is walking here now today, it doesn't matter what or where or who loves it or whatever, at some point it's not going to be there anymore, you know. And I think that's why the habitat then becomes far more, much more important than the individual animal, you know. And I think if we can separate those two things just from a conversational point of view, we could have far more constructive conversations, you know, so. And this coming from someone that are working in these areas every day, and this is coming from someone that also have worked inside national parks and also comes from someone that are looking at it at. From a scale point of view, you know, if we are looking at this 250,000 square kilometers and we are considering that it takes, let's say, 30 lodges in the Serengeti, which is 15,000 square kilometers, 15 lodges to look after that kind of prime photographic area. How many lodges is it going to take to look after the next 250,000 square kilometers of tsetse flag? So then you do a few mass and you look at like, let's say we, we. We pull the, the plug on hunting today. We still need to find 2, 000 large owners, you know, that's going to occupy the space. Then all of them need to bring their $2 million, you know, so we're not going to find those type of. And all in kind of areas that need to compete with the Serengeti and the Massamara and those kind of prime areas, you know. So. Yeah, what other options do we have?

[Robbie]

Yeah, well said. Well said. All right, Carl, I'm gonna let you get back to fighting elephants.

[Carl Verhof]

Thanks.

[Robbie]

Yeah, thank you so much for everything that you've done and please don't hesitate to reach out. You know how to get a hold of me now?

[Carl Verhof]

Yeah, we'll give an update, you know, especially on the newer areas. We would love to just let your listeners know how it's going there and yeah, please let us know if there's a drone or something or even. Sure, that would really be helpful. We have already private sector guys and families and the Tom Smulders Family Trust, you know, from, from Holland is flying a drone with us, you know, so there's very much. We send those families and individuals regular updates and we keep them in the limit efforts, you know, and they can see what their drones are doing, you know, so very much we open and transparent with what we do.

[Robbie]

Thanks, Carl. Appreciate you.

[Carl Verhof]

Thanks, Robbie. Have a good one.

[Robbie]

All right, well, that's it for today. I appreciate you listening as always. Leave a review, share it with your friends and most importantly, do what's right to convey the truth around hunting.