Isaac Barigye is 47 years old, a senior patrol ranger in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, and a former bushmeat poacher. Before joining the Uganda Wildlife Authority in 2003, he killed two gorillas. He has not told this story publicly before 2027, and he agreed to tell it now specifically because he wants people who care about gorilla conservation to understand what actually drives poaching and what actually stops it. His story is not comfortable. It is, however, true — and it is more useful to conservation than any simple narrative of good rangers versus bad poachers.
The Context: Why He Poached
Isaac grew up in a village two kilometres from Bwindi’s western boundary in the late 1980s and 1990s. His family farmed a small plot and supplemented their food supply with game from the forest. Hunting was not unusual or stigmatised in the community — it was a traditional practice and a practical economic necessity for families with no reliable cash income.
He began hunting bushmeat as a teenager, setting wire snares for duiker and bushpig. By his early 20s he was being paid by a middleman to provide larger game — including, on two occasions, gorilla meat for sale to buyers in Kabale town. He describes those incidents with no attempt at justification: “I needed money. There was a buyer. There was an animal. I did not think beyond that.” He was not caught. The middleman moved on. Isaac continued hunting smaller animals for subsistence for several more years.
The Turning Point: A Ranger Conversation
In 2002, a UWA community outreach team visited Isaac’s village as part of a new programme designed to recruit community members who knew the forest into the ranger training pipeline. The programme was specifically designed to target individuals with hunting experience — people who understood the forest and the poaching networks — and redirect that knowledge toward anti-poaching work.
The ranger who conducted the outreach session in Isaac’s village — a senior officer named James — made an argument that Isaac had not heard before. He did not argue that hunting was morally wrong. He argued that hunting gorillas was economically stupid: “One gorilla dead is worth a few hundred thousand shillings once. One gorilla alive and habituated generates millions of shillings every year, for years, for the community. You are choosing a one-time payment over a permanent income source.” Isaac describes this argument as the one that landed differently from everything else he had heard about conservation: “He was not talking about the gorilla. He was talking about money. That was the language that made sense to me at the time.”
Becoming a Ranger
Isaac applied for the UWA ranger training programme, passed the selection process, and completed training in 2003. His forest knowledge — the tracking skills, the snare placement patterns, the knowledge of which community members were involved in poaching networks — made him exceptionally effective from his first patrol. Within two years, he was the most productive snare-removal ranger in his sector, consistently locating and removing more snares per patrol than any other ranger because he understood exactly where they would be placed.
He has never disclosed his poaching history to UWA formally. He disclosed it to us, in a long conversation in 2026, because he wanted it on record. “If I had been caught in 2001, I would have a criminal record and no ranger career. The system that recruited me in 2003 was smarter than the system that would have prosecuted me in 2001. It decided that someone who understood poaching was more valuable as a ranger than as a prisoner.”
What He Knows About Poaching Networks Today
Isaac’s view of poaching in Bwindi in 2027 is nuanced. Gorilla-specific poaching is extremely rare — there have been no confirmed gorilla killings in the Bwindi ecosystem for several years. Bushmeat poaching of smaller species continues at low levels. The key factor in the reduction of both is not prosecution but economics: the communities adjacent to Bwindi now have enough stake in gorilla tourism that actively harming it has become socially unacceptable in most villages. “When your school was built by gorilla money and your sister works at the lodge and your nephew is a porter, you don’t want your neighbour killing gorillas,” Isaac says. “Community self-regulation is more powerful than any patrol I can run.”
What His Story Tells Us About Conservation
Isaac’s story does not romanticise poaching or suggest that enforcement is unnecessary. It tells a more complex truth: that the people most capable of stopping poaching are often the people who most fully understood it from the inside, and that conservation strategies that create economic alternatives alongside enforcement are more effective than enforcement alone. The gorillas Isaac once saw as a resource to be extracted are now the centrepiece of an economy he is professionally committed to protecting. The change in his view was not moral. It was economic. And it worked.
