There was something both ceremonial and strangely underwhelming about seeing our first poached elephant carcass. Approaching the scene of a crime one expects a certain furore, tickertape, cameras and a number of people telling you to move on. This particular type of criminal act has been significantly glorified in my head through the last few months, owing to our constant exposure to thoughts and conversation on the matter, however as Godfrey the Zambian Ranger led us around

We’ve just come to the end of 6 days in Liuwa Plain National Park. We had two objectives. To film for Time and Tide Foundation, a short promotional film highlighting their educational community outreach programme, and to film frontline anti poaching rangers. These 6 days took us to Kalabo Secondary Schoool, Munde Primary, to interviews with a number of Zambian Wildlife Police Officers, scouts on the ground in the bush and interviews with two convicted poachers in Kalabo Jail.

Hurtling through a forest on top of a Landrover, ducking and diving out the way of the branches overhead, battling fiercely not to get thrown off, was not how I pictured arriving at our second filming location. Yet as we have discovered with almost every part of this adventure thus far, nothing normal can be expected. During our time at Painted Dog Conservation (PDC) we made it through a 4 hour anti-poaching patrol in shorts and flipflops; darted and recovered one of the most