Ryan Tate is a Marine Corps Veteran who had learned some valuable and tough lessons in life at a young age. After serving in the Marine Corps, he worked for the US Department of State, but there was no job satisfaction.

Tate realized what he wanted to do in life when he saw a wildlife documentary on CNN. It was about poaching in Africa and how it provides revenue for crime syndicates and violent extremists. The documentary showed images of elephants and rhinos with their faces cut off by poachers to procure tusks and horns. The barbarity of the practice hurt him very badly and he took up the mission to fight poaching.

Tate gave up his job in the U.S. Department of State and started his non-profit called Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife( VETPAW).

Training Rangers

The goal of Tate and his team was to pass along skills to improve the safety of rangers and conservationists and to increase the survival rate of wildlife in Africa. They train the rangers in battlefield medical skills, night operations, leadership skills, and marksmanship. VETPAW also employs techniques like behaviour pattern recognition, which teaches rangers how to think like a criminal or a poacher. After the first training session itself, the rangers were able to recognize and apprehend eight poachers.

Missions

VETPAW has undertaken several missions like Operation Tanzania which Tanzanian government develop an intelligence-based task force to combat poaching. Then there was Operation Rhino Shield which aimed to repopulate Limpopo province in South Africa which didn’t have black rhinos for the past 200 years. Now, there is a growing population of both black and white rhinos.

Thanks to the efforts of Ryan Tate and his team, incidents of poaching has considerably come down and led to the conservation of wildlife in Africa.