He wrecks rental cars and saves rhinos
Meet a motormouthed wildlife ranger living his childhood dream.
By Dan Fletcher
Here’s the audio edition of today’s newsletter.
If there's ever a silence you need filled, Mark Kaptein is your guy.
During my recent trip to Estonia, Kaptein's ceaseless narration became our trip's unofficial soundtrack. The man simply doesn't run out of words. Just when you think he might pause for breath, he's already off on another wild tale from his work on a South African wildlife reserve. Silence, it seems, is the one thing Kaptein is afraid of—and he's evolved remarkable defenses against it.
But you never mind it because his stories are so good. Interrupt his flow to probe any casual detail — say, an offhand mention about his lifetime ban from a certain rental car company — and he'll launch himself off onto another insane tangent. In this case, how he repurposed a Toyota Corolla as his off-road vehicle during months traversing the African bush.
"I guess it was quite bad, eh?" he'll say, in Dutch-inflected English, with a shrug and a smile that suggests he knows exactly how bad it was.
Kaptein, 32, works as a guide for groups like mine in Estonia and Poland for about three months out of the year. The other nine he spends as a game ranger on a 150 square kilometer reserve in Africa, where he's on the literal frontlines of conservation, working to protect lions, leopards, cheetahs and other African animals from legions of poachers, their dogs, and snares that litter throughout his park.
Tough job? Certainly. But Kaptein's living out a childhood dream.
"When I was four years old, my grandma asked me what I wanted to do when I grow up," Kaptein said. "I don't remember this, but she says my answer was to go shoot poachers in Africa."
Kaptein doesn't actually shoot anyone (at least so far) but he's definitely in a battle all the same. In a week's time, Kaptein estimates he removes 500 snares from the park — thick coils of fencing wire designed to seize and strangle when an animal passes by a favored watering hole or game trail.
"It's not easy or quick for the animals at all," Kaptein says, while sharing pictures of a young male cheetah who lost his battle with a snare.
It's a relentless pressure against wildlife populations that's fought with limited resources — Kaptein admits they're never able to remove more than a fraction of the snares in the park, even with the anti-poaching unit he works alongside. And while in Estonia, his phone regularly dings with alerts and warnings from animals fitted with GPS collars who may be lingering too long in one spot, a telltale sign they may have fallen into a poacher's trap.
And that's just the struggle with poachers. Kaptein has to navigate human-wildlife encounters all the time too, with a local population of South Africans that views animals more as a threat and a resource than anything worthy of protection. He told a story of schoolchildren visiting his reserve and not knowing the names of any of the animals, just pointing to everything and using the local term for meat. In another case, Kaptein had to navigate a tense standoff with a local farmer who wanted to kill a lion that marauded through his farm, slaying many of his goats.
But what I appreciated most about Kaptein was his resilience toward the death that's inherent in his job. Even in writing this newsletter, it's hard not to get down sometimes — the scale of the conservation challenges we face often feels insurmountable and it’s a struggle to get humans to see wild animals as something to live alongside, and not as something to be ignored, feared or worse still, harvested.
And Kaptein deals with loss in much more personal ways. He forms bonds with big cats he's watched grow up, only to find them lost purposelessly in a poacher's snare. The physical dangers of his job are significant—rangers are frequently killed during encounters with poachers—but it's the emotional toll that would be too much for me to handle. Natural death, he says, he can deal with, but the poaching losses hit harder.
"I get upset for a few days," Kaptein says. "I rant to the team — I'm so f***ing done. In the night, after a really bad day, I drink a few beers. But the next day, I carry on because there's more to do."
He says his work in South Africa helps to put the rest of his life in perspective. After weeks freeing and losing animals to snares, life's other stresses don't seem too bad.
And that's good, because as we leave our last dinner to return to our van that Kaptein ditched directly in front of the restaurant's front door (everyone else parks in a lot), that's now caked in mud from driving through soggy spring Estonian fields (the rental company asked that it not ever leave pavement), I notice that there's also a few new tire tracks through the resort’s lawn.
"It's fine," Kaptein says, as we all crack up. "They can fix that easy, no problem.”
Want to support Kaptein’s work in Africa? You can volunteer or donate directly to his nature reserve, LEO Africa. He’ll also be a nominee for this month’s FUZZ Funds donation from our paying subscribers. If you want to contribute to conservation causes we choose together each month, you can upgrade your subscription below. 100% of your support goes directly to conservation, with no overhead or fees taken out by FUZZ.
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Quick links! 🔗
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