African wildlife-rescue hero now writes for Digital Journal

Digital Journal has gained a real-life African wildlife rescue-hero. Alex Volker of Hoedspruit in South Africa works at the Protrack Anti-Poaching Unit - and now writes here about his unique life. He spends days on end in the bush, chasing armed poachers

Alex seen on this picture rescuing a tiny bush-baby monkey from a crowd who were pelting it with catapults in Hoedspruit, started writing about these experiences on Digital Journal just recently. See here and here. Also here His stories are raw, written by a man who is compassionate about his unique job. His style is powerful, and straight-forward, similar to the telegram-style prose used by the famous American journalist Ernest Hemingway's moving autobiographic story about his experiences in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, now in Kenya. But Alex, while writing in that same terse style, does not ever shoot Africa's beautiful animals for fun, as did the macho Hemingway. Instead, Volker wants to protect them, all creatures large and small - the unit saves rhinos from heavily-armed, aggressive poachers, but also recently rushed to the rescue of a tiny bush-baby monkey, greatly endangered because the pretty, big-eyed frail little animal is being hunted down due to tribal superstitions. see The unit started its dangerous job in 1987 and now is the largest and most experienced anti-poaching unit in Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces in South Africa, where poaching in the country's magnificent wildlife reserves is becoming a major problem -- with especially elephant ivory and rhino horns smuggled by international crime-syndicates to the far East and Japan -- and often sold for huge amounts of money. The unit however also does other and equally important work: educating the next generation of young South Africans about the magical, beautiful country they have been blessed with - so that they will start protecting it better. The unit holds regular presentations with slideshows and live animals in many area schools.