Data collected by SNR research associate Adam Willcox almost 30 years ago is part of a new extensive study that focuses on wild animal hunting patterns in African tropical forests. Willcox recently sat down and shared his experience collecting the data in episode 34 of our Step Outside series. Along with being a research associate professor, Willcox also serves as the director of the UT Peace Corps Prep Program and works with the UT Smith Center for International Sustainable Agriculture to coordinate academic programs for UTIA.

Below is a transcript of the interview. It has been lightly edited for this post.

The main reason we’re talking today is because you recently had an article published in Nature Sustainability, and that is a huge deal. For those of us who don’t know what that means, could you elaborate on that?

This is one of the Nature journals. Nature is nature, and Science is science. Those are the two top journals in the world, and they have different journals related to them. Nature Sustainability is one of them. It has about a 30-something impact factor. We do have scientists across UT who regularly publish in Science and Nature, but this is the first time a UT professor has published in Nature Sustainability. It was from some work I did a long time ago when I was a young guy.

How did you contribute to that publication?

I’m going to give you a quick story, and I hope I won’t be too long-winded. I grew up in a little town called Scottsville, Virginia. You know we’re fewer than 500 in population or something like that. I went to UVA, did my undergrad in Environmental Sciences and English Language and Literature. From there, I wanted to adventure. I joined the U.S. Peace Corps, and they posted me in Cameroon. When I was in Cameroon in a low tropical forest, we didn’t have domestic alternatives to protein, so we had to eat wild animals. If you have a lot of people in one area and you don’t have enough animals, it’s not sustainable. I started working with hunters to come up with some research to make hunting sustainable in this area. I did my master’s in the UK where I met my wife as well, Dr. Emma Willcox, who is a professor here at UT. She got me my job. This guy at my alma mater was doing a regional database, regional comparison from maybe Senegal all the way down to the Congo, and he wanted to use my data for his publication. We started working on it that way, and my research was basically following 100 hunters around a wildlife sanctuary in Cameroon and cataloging all the harvests that they had, the sex, the age, the species of animals they harvested. We then used calculations to see what was sustainable. There were a lot of people doing this research all around the region. He wanted to conglomerate it into a regional analysis. I was not doing this to get into Nature by any means. I was just doing it because I knew that where I was living, we were all relying on bush meat as a source of protein, and it needed to be sustainable. I was working on it for that reason, and then serendipitously or whatever you want to say, Daniel Ingram contacted me to have me contribute to this paper. I thank him for that.

You said this started when you were in the Peace Corps. This started back in, I believe, 1996?

Yeah, spot on. 1996. I got those two degrees at UVA in Environmental Science and English Language and Literature because I wanted to go do environmental law. I thought that’s how change could be made, and I saw a sign up for Peace Corps at a local organization. I went in there. I was like, well I’d rather do that, just travel the world and do that kind of thing rather than going to Washington D.C. and clerk to be an environmental lawyer. I brought my LSAT book with me to Cameroon. I never opened the thing up because I found what I wanted to do, and it was literally chasing around hunters and working with farmers. It happened with the Peace Corps. That’s a two-year service you do for the U.S. government. You serve the U.S. government. I was doing agroforestry, and the Wildlife Conservation Society, WCS, was working in the same area where I was posted. It was just luck of the draw. They were sending agricultural extension stuff my way, and I would send wildlife stuff their way. I got a good rapport with hunters, farmers, everybody, and when I finished my Peace Corp service, WCS, the Wildlife Conservation Society, hired me to do community assessments. This was my first sort of research project that I fell into because we’re doing community assessments around the sanctuary. The main things that people were harvesting were wildlife for food and non-timber forest products, and I was connected with hunters. They let me do my project.

How long did you work on that project for?

I was there until 2001 maybe. I went back. I did my master’s in England in 2000. I was there six years and then brought Dr. Emma Wilcox, brought my wife. She did some work with non-timber forest products during her master’s, and I did some additional master’s research. I think we finished that in 2001. I was there for about five years and then did that and worked in Tanzania too.

You mentioned this earlier, but did you have any idea your research would go on to be published in Nature Sustainability?

No way. That was my primary protein source, and I was living in an African community so that was what we had. It’s not easy to raise cattle in a tropical rainforest. It’s chicken and goats. It’s a different situation. There’s no refrigeration, no electricity, so you can’t have a fridge and a freezer and keep meat. We ate fresh meat. In the dry season, we would eat fish because the rivers would go down and not be too dangerous and people would fish, but in the rainy season, which is most of the year, the rivers go up and then people start hunting. According to the rough estimates in the science, you can only support one person per kilometer square. That’s relying on meat from the forest. Wild meat is their primary protein source so the populations were over that amount, and we can’t do it here in the U.S. We can’t do it anywhere, so we were relying on this protein source. Hunters were seeing some species declining and some were going up and this and that. I just worked with them to develop sustainable plans about bush meat harvest. We worked with, me and my colleague David Nzouango, worked with 100 hunters around this wildlife sanctuary, and we monitored everything those hunters did for three, maybe four years. [We looked at] where it was, what was coming, where the bush meat was coming from. We did some GIS stuff, and then we took that information and presented it back to the communities so they could make their own decisions based around what the data was and where we used local people. The community started coming up with hunting management plans. There’s not a lot of government regulation or support for conservation. It’s just a cash-strapped, developing country so we used local institutions [and] local governments. We presented the information back, and they made decisions about how they’re going to manage hunting and what was allowed by law. The government of Cameroon gave the rights to the communities to be able to make those decisions, which was cool, so me and David Nzouango were able to get the information from the hunters. We visited them every month, walked through a lot of crazy places, and they made some really cool decisions about fishing and hunting. I hope it’s a little more sustainable these days than it was so that’s how I got into it. Twenty years later, some guy says, ‘Hey, you want to publish in Nature Sustainability?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure. Why not?’ I was not doing it for that in the first place, but I said, ‘Yeah I’ll help you out, Daniel Ingram and contribute my data.’ That was not what I intended it to do, but if it makes a larger awareness for hunting and sustainability and folks that are relying on natural resources as their primary source of protein or income, I’m game. It was really neat.

Since those communities started implementing those management plans, have they seen a difference?

Right now, Southwest Cameroon is not in a great place. It’s not put on the news. I cannot return there right now. Essentially, Cameron is bilingual or bi-European lingual. You got this little part of anglophone, English-speaking people, and the majority is francophone, French-speaking people. The anglophones are more associated with Nigeria, which is also anglophone. There’s been some violent conflict in South Coast Cameroon, and a lot of the villages that I worked with were dispersed by the francophone. I’m working with this guy Chika Okafor who’s from Nigeria, from a very similar region, and I want to get back to Southwest Cameroon to see what’s going on, but we’re probably going to start in Nigeria. I speak the local language. One tangible thing happened during the study. I don’t have any immediate plans to go back, but there’s one village where elephants had been a problem destroying crops. They’re very big animals. They eat lots of food, and they eat the cacao, the cocoa. They destroy and mash up crops, so they had banned WCS, the Wildlife Conservation Society, from going into their community because this big event happened where an elephant came and smashed someone’s crops, and they essentially gave him a bag of rice. That’s not equivalent, so [they say], ‘No you guys control the elephants, and you give us bags of rice.’ So, they banned us from that village. This was before I started working with WCS, and then I got that village because it was a primary hunting village in the area, and I got close with some members in the local community. They let me do my research. At some point, one of the hunters said, ‘Hey, we got these poachers,’ which are different than hunters. We got these poachers that are coming in from other places in Cameroon or other places in Nigeria, and they’re coming in and taking, shooting, killing a lot of meat including big things like elephants and taking it out of the country, and they’re want their meat to remain locally. [They] don’t want these outsiders coming in. I said, ‘Okay, that’s a great thing for you guys to tell me.’ I went to the WCS first, then local governments. Local chiefdoms are given a lot of political power in this country. It’s kind of a grassroots-type political system, and they said, ‘Hey, we really want these guys, these market hunters, who are just hunting meat and taking it out of the country, we want to be able to retain that. Can you help me with that?’ I said, ‘Okay, yeah. You guys made the decision as a local government to do this. I can facilitate a negotiation with the local gendarmes,’ who are military police. I got the gendarmes and brought them in. Everyone’s totally great, and the gendarmes went in and threw all these hunters out. So, talking to people and understanding the real situation of what was happening and why hunting was unsustainable was my 100 percent biggest success that I had in that area, just that one day when I was driving a land cruiser, grabbed up the gendarmes in this one town, went down this long dirt road to this village. They said, ‘These are outsiders that have come in and the government supports your local government, and we’re going to get these guys out.’ They kicked them all out. Those guys that lived in that village were able to now manage their meat resources because all the outsiders invading their area got kicked out. It’s probably one of the crazier stories you’ve heard, isn’t it?

It is. Yes, but very impressive and real impact that happened. Last time we spoke, you mentioned how during all of that you were honored by a chief while you were there.

That’s the only way I could do my work. I finished my two years of Peace Corps service. Chief Tataw of Edjuingang was the clan chief of the area. It’s not really secret. It’s just the traditional society called the Ekpe society, and these guys really manage what goes on the ground. There’s also an equivalent women society as well, but it is divided. The Ekpe Society is semi-secret. It’s very animist-based. It’s very religious. People believe a lot in the power of nature and the power of animals. I was not expecting this, but when I was leaving the village to move to a different place, you have this thing called a sendoff party, and a sendoff party is [saying], blessings, you go on your way and do good stuff. Chief Tataw had handmade this hat, a cap actually it’s called, and it’s really cool. It’s white with some dye on it, and you have to hand knit it, and he inducted me into being an osari into the Ekpe Society. The Ekpe Society is very important to the local community. [It’s] very important to me as well, but he crowned me as an osari in this ceremony. An osari is, as far as I understand it in local language, osari is either a bringer of knowledge or a bringer of song. I don’t sing very good. I’ve got PhDs and publications and all that stuff, but for someone to recognize my efforts to bring knowledge to a local community and be essentially a part of that local community and feel that local community and be accepted into that local community, that’s definitely the highest honor of my life, even way more so than this publication. That’s just words on paper or on the Internet or something. That is my highest achievement. I don’t do that much research so this Nature Sustainability pub is probably going to be the top one I get. That’s great, but that is my highest accomplishment as a person. Second highest accomplishment is making that crazy serendipitous decision to go to England and meet up with Emma Willcox, my wife. That’s my number one achievement, but being an osari helped me to get that respect. Hunting is illegal in some places of Cameroon so having that respect [made] all the hunters willing to talk with me cause they knew I wasn’t going to go call the cops on them. I was working with them to do sustainable hunting. Greatest life achievement being an osari. I love it. I still wear my cap every once in a while.

It’s a great accomplishment. I don’t blame you. I would too. Going back to the Nature Sustainability publication, what do you hope that publication accomplishes by just getting that information out into the world?

People are reliant on wild meat for protein, and it’s not sustainable. It’s been written since day one. We can’t do it here in the U.S. You can’t do it anywhere. Our population has grown so much that you can’t hunt that many animals and expect your population to survive because the animals don’t reproduce that fast. We have people relying on wild meat as their primary protein source and then coming up with strategies, alternatives. If we don’t get hunger under control or the humans need for protein under control, there’s no way we can ever conserve wildlife. There needs to be some sort of alternative strategy whether that’s domestic protein, plant protein. I don’t know. Those guys can figure that stuff out, but it just shows that hunting is very unsustainable around the world, especially if your primary protein source is from hunted animals. The animals can’t reproduce that much so if we want to do conservation, we need to figure out alternative ways for people to get protein whether that’s plant or animal or whatever. That’s hopefully at the end of the day what Daniel and our paper will say. This is an issue. It’s unsustainable. We can’t do conservation cause people got to eat. We all got to eat, and that’s the only thing people can eat so there needs to be some sort of change whether that’s agricultural or cultural or anything like that.

Do you have any immediate plans as far as this research or anything similar to it?

No, not this one. I’m going off on another adventure. I like adventuring. This is what I do in my life. This is the craziest thing. I got a nice invitation from the director of the Smith Center, Dr. Tom Gill, to go with him and someone from Food Science to Colombia in December to get some connections with Uniandes, this really great university in Bogota, Colombia. Colombia is called a mega, biodiverse country so it has high, high biodiversity. It’s a hotspot for the world, and those guys, Tom and Doris, were just going to go to Uniandes and go back. I was like, ‘Well if I’m going, I’m an adventurer so if I’m going to Colombia, I’m going to add on something else.’ We had a wonderful visit, and we’re making these great connections with Uniandes to try to bring Colombian students here and try to get UT students to Colombia, and I needed to add some extra time on. Tom and those guys were only spending three days, and I [looked at] what I could get myself into in Colombia. This is funny. I just started looking at natural resource issues in Colombia that I could address as a social scientist, and I love all these old cartel movies and drug running movies. I started looking around at stuff about Pablo Escobar and come across a video about these four hippos that Pablo Escobar had in his zoo when he was a drug lord, one guy and three girls. Those four hippos have turned into 400 because they got released from the zoo after he got killed. These hippos are now wreaking havoc on the ecosystem in Colombia. They poop all the time. Hippos are from Africa, not from South America, so they’re drowning out manatees and otters and destroying the ecosystem, but a lot of the people in Colombia love these things. They’re cute. They are dangerous, but they’re cute. There’s a tourism industry built around it, and the Colombian government is having trouble deciding what they’re going to do about these hippos. You could just shoot them all, and they would all be gone, but that’s not politically or not socially acceptable. I watched this video, found this guy, Davíd, and I was like, ‘Hey man I’m just going to go to Medellín after my visit to Uniandes and talk to people and see if this is a potential project.’ I said okay, and Davíd was all over it. I literally cold -called or emailed Davíd off a Vice news video or something, and he talked to me. I really enjoy the power and strength of the Colombian people. They’ve lived through a lot, and they live in arguably the most biodiverse country in the world. I just kind of got a little bit of a passion for that to go there, and Davíd was great, and I talked to him, and he has invited me back to go and actually go to Escobar’s home ranch. It’s Hacienda Napoles. I’m going to go there. He’s going to introduce me to fisher people, who are affected with the hippos, the tourism industry and all that sort of stuff. I found a collaborator in UTCVM, UT College of Vet Medicine, Andrew Cushing, who is just as adventurous as me I would say. He and I are going to go down in March to do a scoping visit to explore this next adventure to work on Escobar’s hippos. It’s going to be fun. Anyway, that’s the kind of stuff I like to do, and then just teaching. I just love teaching students. That’s kind of how I found my place here at UT in addition to impacting local communities. Students I take from UT to experience the connections I have abroad, a lot of them have never been on a plane before. Sometimes they’ve never been out of the state before, and then I just see them grow and that’s kind of where I’ve found my footing. I don’t do much research these days. I’m more focused on teaching, but that’s kind of my passion. I’m not taking students to cartel areas in Colombia. It’s probably a good thing. No, I take them to Belize and Costa Rica.

To go along with that, being involved with the students, do you have any advice for students who are thinking about joining the Peace Corps or doing any study abroad programs?

I’ll just pass down exactly what the director of WCS said to me at the time. If it sounds good to you, you should do it. Trust your intuition. Do it. You have to be aware to travel the world. You have to have self-awareness. You have to have common sense. It’s not that hard to travel the world, and the people you meet and the crazy issues that you get engaged in are completely amazing. If there’s anything you can do to help out, that’s what I do. Like I know anything about hippopotamuses, like I know anything about cocaine, like I know anything about Escobar, but you find these little niches, and if you have a good toolkit of social science or biological science, you can know how to adapt your toolkit to fit those local situations sometimes as needed. That’s the advice I would give. One hundred percent is that if it sounds good to you, go for it. Trust yourself. I came from Scottsville, Virginia, less than 500 people who still don’t have a stoplight, and I’ve been all over this world, and I’m a professor at UT. I still keep in touch with a few of my friends from Scottsville, but it can be done.

Those are all the questions I have. Is there anything else you want to add?

If this is going out to UT students, I do courses to Costa Rica twice a year, one with first gen students and one with Dr. Pulte, Andy Pulte, in Animal Science over spring break to Costa Rica to look at plants and human plant interactions and animals. Then, I also do two trips to Belize in the summer. I do one that’s I think the longest running project now, study abroad project, Tropical Ecology and Conservation Methods in Belize that I do with Mallory Tate. She’s been on your interview before. Mallory teaches more field methods for biology, and I teach more about conservation, but we just go and visit field sites all over Belize and meet some of my friends and colleagues that I’m willing to share with UT students, and I will continue to share that. Then, there’s another class that I’ve partnered with a veterinary organization in Belize, and they’re certified to teach UT students. I got that approved. It’s called the Small Animal Vet Experience, and students can come down to Belize and the organization takes care of you the whole time. It’s all hands-on, experiential. Whatever walks in the clinic that day, you work on it. We usually take 14 students to that class every year. We had 40 or 50 applicants for those 14 spots this year. [We’re] looking at adding another section because I know there’s demand from Animal Science students do pre-vet stuff.

My last words are study abroad. It’s not that hard. I did it. I just did it on my own, but I’m willing, and there’s faculty not just me. There’s plenty of faculty willing to share their global experiences with students here at UT and to get you through that first step and from there take another step and do things on your own. That’s my last word.