Can Tech Stop Animal Poachers in Their Tracks?

This story was originally published by Slate's Future Tense partnership and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In August 2021, forest range officer Remya Raghavan caught three people carrying wild boar meat in the Wayanad forest of Kerala, a state in southern India. Possessing wild animal meat is a crime under the country's 1972 Wildlife Protection Act, so Raghavan entered all the details of the crime--location, witnesses, names of the accused, items seized, and section of the forest--in a mobile application. Just like that, the case was officially registered in the app-based system, which signaled that it needed to be taken to court. The app Raghavan used is called HAWK, or Hostile Activity Watch Kernel, and it appears to be the first such digital intelligence gathering system for wildlife crime in India.