By Karen Paolillo 
DAILY MAIL, UK, August 16th 2003

The dark-skinned poacher takes aim with his bow.  His heavy arrow tip points straight at my heart.  Tonight, with the full moon shining down, I know I face death.
A scream erupts from my mouth as my husband, Jean-Roger, edges forward to try and calm the tall bowman who has so much hatred in his eyes.
As he does so, the attacker puts down his bow and hurls a rock at me.  The missile whistles past my head.  Suddenly, the bowman turns and disappears back into the shadows of the bush.

In the stillness of the African bush, I can hear my hippos, the hippos he was after, calling to me, ‘hunh,hunh hunh’, and I count my blessings..
We escaped that night, a night that became just another chilling episode of our life in today’s Zimbabwe.

As the country’s so-called war veterans take over more farms of white landowners, the country is descending still deeper into danger and chaos.

Here in the bush where we live, poaching is completely out of control.  Almost half of Zimbabwe’s treasured wild animals have been slaughtered in three years by poachers.

At the haven I run for hippos in Turgwe, 300 miles from the capital of Harare, I watch everything around us from the wildlife to the beautiful landscape being destroyed.

A warthog can be smoked out of his home, a hole in the ground.  A group of men will stand waiting holding spears and sharp axes, or anything capable of hacking at the little piggy.
They will probably eat him.

A protected African python will writhe in agony as it is staked through the head and tail then left to die slowly, very slowly.

Tortoises are opened like a tin while they are still alive and scooped out of their shells.

An elephant is caught by his trunk in a poachers wire snare, which cuts through the flesh as he struggles.  He escapes when his trunk is completely severed, only to face a lingering death because his trunk is now too short to enable it to squirt water into its mouth to drink.

Nothing is spared in a new Zimbabwe with no law and order. 
It is a land of turmoil, of hunger, poverty and the utmost cruelty.
It breaks one’s heart to find a kudu, a large African antelope, hanging by her neck from a snare with her tongue rolling from her choked mouth and her slim neck stretched by the wire noose.

One mother discovered the other day even had teats still full of warm milk.  She had desperately tried to break the three-strand wire encircling her neck, and her legs were dangling on the surface of the earth. But she did not survive.

Her baby lay about 50ft from her side.  I tried for four days to catch him.  He finally disappeared.

For my sanity, I like to believe another herd of female kudus adopted him.  I do not want to think that a poacher caught this newborn calf to make another meat sale – although that is his probable fate.

Our new neighbours are the black “settlers” who have brought their donkeys and cattle.  They use ox carts to take freshly killed wildlife out of the area to sell to the highest bidder or to organized middlemen.

Everything is up for grabs.  It is no longer just one African poaching to feed his family.

Here, there are untold riches for successful poachers.  Here, every kind of wild animal is being killed for money.

I have collected 490 cruel snares on my hippo trails alone.  No one does anything about it.

I arrived in a very different Africa in 1977, an English girl aged 22 in search of a job with wild animals after being entranced by the film Born Free about Elsa the lioness when I was a teenager.

I had been born and raised in Britain.  The only hippos I had ever seen were at the zoo. As a child, I thought there were much more exotic animals to watch on days out.

My Welsh Mountain pony was called Kuchek and my mother, a widow, ran the pet’s corner at Woburn Abbey.
It was an idyllic childhood.  Animals were part of my upbringing and, at 15, I even got a holiday job with the Circus Hoffman.  I groomed the elephants and dreamed of moving to Africa.  I could never have predicted that in 1990 I would be living in a wonderful area in the south-east Lowveld of Zimbabwe, set in a Conservancy area of one million acres of pristine African bush, with wild elephants part of the backdrop.

It had come about almost by accident.  I applied to become a croupier at the Victoria Falls casino in Zimbabwe, because the casino paid the airfare out there.

I got the job, but was desperate to be with wild animals and eventually persuaded a hunter here in the Lowveld to teach me about Africa’s wildlife.

With his help, I became the first woman in this country to be a professional safari guide, taking groups of tourist photographers into the bush.

In the meantime, I had been writing to my childhood inspiration George Adamson the famous lion man of Kenya portrayed in the film Born Free and before long he invited me to join him.

This was years before he was murdered in 1989, protecting his lions and homestead from Somali bandits who cut him down in a hail of bullets.  But just as I was about to move from Zimbabwe to work as his assistant, fate played a hand.

Holidaying on the Indian Ocean, I met Dr Jean-Roger Paolillo, a French oil geologist.  It was love at first sight, we married and I reluctantly told George Adamson I was turning down his offer.

Instead Jean-Roger and I lived briefly in Gabon, until eventually we decided to settle in Zimbabwe at our small thatched homestead where I continued with my wildlife interests while he carried on traveling with his geological work.  Our small home was beautifully remote.

When we arrived the closest neighbours were 27 Turgwe hippos living in two groups.

The nearest human beings, at this bush camp where we have electricity for only three hours a day served up by our creaking generator, were more than 12 miles away.  Yet we did not live in fear, as we do today.

We had no intention really of creating a hippo haven, it came about through natural causes.

Hippos in Turgwe were already declining because of the lack of water.
A hippo will dehydrate quickly because he is semi-aquatic and needs to remain wet.

When the rains failed in 1991, it was the most severe drought in Zimbabwe’s history. I could not just stand by and watch the hippos die.  I decided to help.

They are wild animals.  They were not used to being fed by man, but they were starving.  The pod of hippos at Turgwe had actually dispersed from the river area to search for food. 
We began to put out rations for them on March 3.  By March 18, four came back to feed.

Then it was as though word went out.  Soon it was 11.  Before long, 13 of them came to take my offerings.

Each night, I laid out nearly a ton of soya bean hay and game pellets.  When the Turgwe River totally dried up, we built the hippos a large cemented pool and diverted borehole water from miles away. We raised money for the food, cement and labour, with the help of British charity, Care for the Wild.

Ten months later, the 13 hippos who took my food had survived. 
I still remember the day the drought broke in 1992.  That joyous morning, I took a photo of wet hippo feet in the mud on my way down to the pool.  The hippos were already in the river and behaving just like excited children.  They were bouncing like dolphins.  It was unbelievable.

By then, I had become addicted to these glorious animals and realized I must protect them from the next drought, which would inevitably come in this rain-starved part of Africa.

It was the beginnings of my haven for hippos and the Turgwe Hippo Trust, which was created officially in October 1994.

Up until Zimbabwe’s present troubles, we felt we were coping with natural problems, such as the droughts and water shortages.  By early 2000, more than 33 hippos lived with us at the haven.  Of course, we knew what was going on in the rest of the country; we’d heard of the settlers taking white farmland, but we thought we would be too remote to be affected.

Then, one day, the “war veterans” – Government supporters who have been told the land is their own to do with what they wish- moved in next door.

Five minutes down the road from us today, their skinny hunting dogs chase any remaining animal that has survived the snares.

Fires are being set in the heart of the great 50-year-old Mopane trees, so that the land can be cleared for crops.  All the bush and the smaller trees are being hacked out with machetes.

In the past year, 60 men have moved in close by.  Tragically, they are clearing land for crops that will never grow because there is no surface water.
Their chief, Robert Mamungaere, has told me personally that all the land, and the wild animals, belong to him.  If a hippo strays there, he will kill it.
He says his men do not poach.  He says the wicked wire snares are nothing to do with him.

Whatever the truth, there are poachers out there.  These law-breakers are allowed to roam wherever they like.  They know they are safe from the police who do not arrest them.

I patrol every morning and late afternoon.  With Jean-Roger, I cover 2,000 acres each day, searching in the undergrowth for the wicked three-stranded snares that can only be cut through by my metal pinchers.

It takes five hours, and by dusk I am exhausted.  My throat gets dry.  The crack of a piece of wood in the bush no longer holds the joy of chance encounter with a wild animal. These days it is more likely to be a poacher.

The time of the full moon that I have always loved is now filled with a sense of foreboding.  This is when poachers go out to hunt with their bows, arrows and dogs.
Tragically, they believe that the animals of Africa will never run out.  But nothing could be further from the truth.

We still see the antelopes, the warthogs, the bush pigs.  The elephants occasionally come along.  There were 650 in these parts, but many have been shot or snared.

Even a year ago, there were kudu, impala, eland, wildebeest, zebra.  Today, they are scarce, wary of man who they already realize is their enemy.  If we were lucky in the old days, there was the odd cheetah too.
But 3,000 have been killed for their coats in Zimbabwe by the gangs who hunt them down with dogs and spears on the confiscated white farmlands.  The figures make ghastly reading. 
 In the Save Valley Conservancy – established as a huge area for wildlife on which our haven stands, more than 14,560 snares have been discovered.

That’s in the areas that can be patrolled.  By earlier this year, 1,089 animals, including 456 impala and 245 kudu, have been found dead or dying from gangrene in snares.

The poachers don’t always bother to return to collect their trophies.  Sometimes the stench of rotting animal carcasses pervades the whole area.

Or they take the bits they want.  They leave the feet, other times just the skin.  I came across the head of a female waterbuck lying with her unborn baby.

We have counted up 60 miles of boundary fence that has been stolen, enough for 827,000 lethal wire nooses.

Endangered species have also been found dead: five elephants, one black rhino and seven rare painted hunting dogs.  Four of my own hippos mysteriously disappeared immediately after the land occupations started.

Try and imagine what is happening here.  It is like a part of Britain being returned to the dark ages.  Take a small town in England and give those people the right to break all laws, walk into your home or garden, take away the chair from your lawn or the radio from your house.

When you get mad and try and arrest them, they laugh at you, or at worst, kill you.  Protest at the nearest police station (a good two hours away) and be told:  “Sorry these people are now in charge.  That’s politics” Now tell me what would you feel?

When the poacher with the bow pointed his arrow at me that night of the full moon, I screamed to save my life.

Less than one month later, we were patrolling when our lives were threatened again.  We bumped into four men carrying a rifle and a shotgun.  One armed with the AK-47 pointed it at us.  We hit the ground and they left.  We came home pretty shaken.

One day, I found a young man of about 17 standing at the hippo pool.  He had a catapult and had packed it with granite stones and was trying to hit a young hippo male, Tembia, between the eyes.

As Tembia surfaced in the water to breathe, the kid tried to whack him with a stone. The youth, a “war veterans” son, could easily have provoked Tembia into attacking him.  As it was, he ran away as I approached.

I live with adrenaline pumping through my veins.  Sadly, it is not wild animals who frighten me, but man. I only thank God that most of my hippos are still alive, including the two babies born last year.

The first we called Hope.  The second is Sabi.  They join Blackface, Cheeky, Lace, and the 20 others who live happily here today.

Only Bob, our big bull has gone.  Thankfully, he died from old age and another bull attacking him, not a poachers snare.

Every moment that goes by without one of my hippos killed is a bonus.  I have never voted in my life.  I am totally apolitical.  But that matters not a jot today in Zimbabwe.

This beautiful nation was once the pearl of Africa.  It is still a gem.  In one single day recently, I heard a lion roar very early in the morning.
At lunchtime, two majestic bull elephants strolled past in front of my home.  That night, a leopard’s rasping call was heard.

But as I sit here in the late morning by the Turgwe River watching the hippos splashing in the water, I cannot predict the future of my poor benighted country.

What I do know is that I will never leave the wild hippos that I have grown to love.  Whatever the carnage created around me, I will not desert them.

I have been warned that as a woman I should get out now. Yet I remember my friend George Adamson, who died protecting his lions.  I am prepared to do the same for the animals I have grown to love.

Inquiries and donations to the Turgwe Hippo Trust, Hippo Haven, P.O Box 322, Chiredzi, Zimbabwe.