One Rwandan's surprising idea to protect wildlife: Recruit poachers

At long last the killing stopped.

As a boy growing up in the late 1990s after genocide, Emmanuel Mugendashyamba ventured into the protected rainforest near his home, a mountainous region in Rwanda’s southwest. How many days had he and his father spent illegally hunting antelopes and wild pigs to get food for the family? Or killing monkeys to sell precious skins? They also cut wood for heat and set swaths of the forest on fire to reach beehives and steal honey.

Amid the desolation that followed the massacre of some 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, poaching was often a matter of survival. Locals like Mr. Mugendashyamba as well as refugees returning home after the violence ate away not only the Nyungwe Forest, but also Rwanda’s two other

Launching his nonprofit and ecocenter‘Filling in a gap’Other groups protecting animals