| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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feature Forensics of the Furred and Feathered Don Jacobs was suspicious the minute he laid eyes on the big trophy buck hanging in the garage in Burney, California. The animal was in full rigor mortis, which usually takes about ten hours to set in, but the hunter claimed he had killed the deer just four hours earlier on nearby Burney Mountain where he had a permit to hunt. It was around noon on Sunday, October 4, 1992, the opening weekend of deer season--a hectic time for Jacobs, who is the only game warden with the California Department of Fish and Game to monitor the heavily forested region between Mount Shasta and Lassen Peak. "This was a mule deer, and we don't have any mule deer up on Burney Mountain," Jacobs recalled. "I also found alfalfa on the hooves and in the stomach, but there's no alfalfa in that area. I confronted the suspect, but he stood by his story, and his father and friend corroborated what he said." Jacobs seized the deer and began checking around. A rancher near Cassel, eight miles east of Burney, reported hearing several high-powered rifle shots around 12:30 a.m. that same day. Jacobs drove out to the ranch, and eventually located a fresh gut pile. Footprints and other evidence indicated that the animal had been dragged across a fence bordering the adjoined property--a posted wildlife preserve which covers several thousand acres and is owned by actor Clint Eastwood. The Eastwood connection suddenly turned a routine poaching investigation into a high-profile case. Jacobs and Shasta County prosecutor Larry Allen knew that the evidence they had collected was merely circumstantial, unless they could prove that the gut pile came from the buck found in the suspect's garage. A DNA comparison could positively link the two, and fortunately, a laboratory with unique expertise in using this modern forensic technique on animal remains was across the state line in southern Oregon. Jacobs gathered the necessary blood and tissue samples and sent them to the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon--the world's only state-of-the-art laboratory dedicated to the investigation of crimes against wildlife. A few days before Christmas, Jacobs received a call from Jerry Ruth, the forensic scientist who worked the case. A DNA match had been made, Ruth said, providing conclusive evidence that the deer came from the Eastwood property. "Great!" Jacobs exclaimed. "What are the chances of it being wrong?" "One in 18 million," Ruth responded. Confronted with the evidence, the suspect confessed. He was convicted of taking a deer without a proper permit and fined $2,500, placed on three-years probation, and banned from deer hunting until March 1996. Ruth's Ashland office now features a life-size, cardboard cut-out of Eastwood sneering, "Go ahead, make my DNA." "As a crime lab, we've got two jobs," Goddard explained, "to identify the evidence and link the suspect and the crime scene together in a triangular fashion. It's impossible for the victim, the crime scene, and the suspect to interact without the transfer of trace evidence. DNA in blood and tissue can be one of those trace elements. It's an extremely powerful, uniquely identifying tool for that purpose--as good as fingerprints if not better." This affable, chatty 48-year-old exudes youthful enthusiasm for his work and high esteem for his skilled staff. Goddard is so fascinated by the drama and intrigue of criminology that when he leaves the lab each evening, he returns home to transform his knowledge of real-life crimes into gut- wrenching fiction. He is the bestselling author of five crime novels. With his fourth book, Prey (Tor Books, 1992) Goddard turned his attention from crimes against humans to crimes against wildlife. His first eco-thriller is the story of an undercover wildlife agent trapped in a government plot to destroy the environmental movement. Wildfire, the sequel to Prey, plots the revenge of the over-zealous environmentalists. "It has an underlying sense of reality to it," Goddard said of Wildfire. "I've long since abandoned the idea that there are people wearing white hats and black hats out there. I'm exploring how the emotions and personalities involved in wildlife issues often distort reality." After a decade of police work in southern California, Goddard joined the USFWS in 1979 as its first chief of forensics, only to find that the service had no laboratory to analyze evidence. He spent the next eight years in Washington, D.C., trying to establish such a lab. Yet he credits an Ashland-area chiropractor and raptor rehabilitator, Ralph Wehinger, for transforming a grassy slope in the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains into a world-class research facility. "As a private citizen, he felt that this was an environmental issue, that Oregon was an environmental state, and the lab ought to be here," said Goddard. Wehinger took a personal interest in the project and quickly garnered the support of local, state, and federal officials. Southern Oregon State College donated a four-acre site for the project; $79,000 in state lottery funds covered the costs of building access roads and bringing utilities; and, under heavy lobbying from Wehinger, Oregon's congressional delegation secured the federal funding. When the laboratory opened its doors in June, 1989, it sent a message to those who violate laws protecting threatened or endangered species: if you are caught, the prosecution will pursue you with the full force of modern forensic science. In Huntington Beach, Goddard had only the human species to worry about. Now, he oversees forensic investigations that potentially involve more than one million animal species and their subspecies. Goddard explained that in these investigations, it's more typical to be dealing with animal parts--teeth, horns, tissue, blood, feathers, or hides--than whole carcasses. "If we seized whole elephants, we wouldn't need a 4.5-million-dollar crime lab," he said. "But we don't seize whole elephants, we seize pieces and parts. The species-defining characteristics typically aren't present so we have to come up with new species-defining characteristics, based on what's left, that let us say that this strip of hide, or fur, or blood, or tissue comes from this animal, and no other animal in the world." "Individualization is the most mind-boggling tool that we have here," he continued, "matching a kill site to a head on a wall, to meat in a freezer, blood on a car, blood on an airplane, or clothing or weapons. We can identify that animal, the only animal in the world, with absolute certainty." The ability to differentiate one identical-looking animal from another has resulted from the combined expertise of the laboratory's three analytical sections. DNA fingerprinting occurs in the serology section, where protein analysis is also used to determine the source of blood and tissue samples. In the morphology section, physical comparisons are made between the unknown animal part confiscated as evidence in a case and a standard collection of "known" species, similar to a museum collection. In the criminalistics section, chemical analysis is used to detect the presence of pesticides and other poisons in blood and tissue. Here, Asian medicines are analyzed to see if they contain the powdered remains of protected animals, and microscopic ballistics investigations are conducted. The staff is developing a technique to record and store on computer the minute striations left on a bullet's surface after being fired. Soon law enforcement officers hope to run national ballistics computer searches which will identify the unique pattern of these striations, just as fingerprint comparisons are now made. The laboratory is also home to the National Eagle Repository, a program established 20 years ago to discourage the black market trade in eagles and eagle parts. Hundreds of carcasses and body parts, including other birds of prey, are collected, bagged and frozen, and distributed intact to Native Americans for religious and ceremonial use. The birds have died due to various causes--electrocution, poisoning, gunshot wounds, or disease. They come from zoos, park and forest rangers, law enforcement officers, wildlife agents, and private citizens throughout the country. So far this year, the repository staff has shipped out more than 750 whole eagles.
Jammed onto floor-to-ceiling shelves are python-skin handbags, scrimshawed sperm-whale teeth, bear-claw ashtrays, puffer-fish lamps, walrus snouts, and penis bones. There are thousands of pairs of reptile-skin boots and shoes, scores of elephant tusks, zebra pelts, tiger-skin rugs, and packages of powdered oriental medicines purporting to contain ground rhinoceros horn, bear gall bladders, or tiger bones. The stockpile ranges from the beautiful to the grotesque and serves as a sad tribute to mankind's compulsion to dominate, possess, and profit from the creatures that share this planet. The laboratory's work is driven by an ever-growing national and international trade in endangered wildlife. According to TRAFFIC USA, the trade-monitoring unit of the World Wildlife Fund, the international trade in wildlife and wildlife products is worth about $10 billion annually, and 30 percent of this trade is illegal. This black market is the third most lucrative illegal trade in the world, surpassed only by drug and weapons trafficking. Fueled by poverty, tradition, adventure, and huge profits, the illegal trade prospers despite efforts by state and federal game wardens, wildlife inspectors, and customs agents to enforce state, federal, and international laws. Poaching runs rampant in the United States--in state and national parks, on public and private wildlife refuges, and in violation of established hunting seasons and regulations. Profit is the primary motive, but as author Marc Reisner points out in his book Game Wars, some poachers have "an unmitigated sense of violence, a contempt for all laws, and an almost suicidal defiance of authority." Don Jacobs offered this explanation. "It's a macho-type thing. When they see these great big monster deer, these trophy bucks, they just kill them for the head. They cut it off and leave the rest. These guys are not sportsmen." Dave McMullen, assistant regional director of the USFWS Region I office in Portland, Oregon, agrees that the problem is widespread. "Most experienced wildlife officers believe that at least one animal is poached for every one that is taken legally," he says. With only 230 wildlife law enforcement agents working for the USFWS nationwide (the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, in comparison, has 3,500 agents), only a fraction of the perpetrators are caught. Still, the USFWS boasts a high conviction rate--as high as 94 percent, said McMullen. The Ashland laboratory frequently provides the irrefutable evidence that cracks a case. Now a senior resident agent for the USFWS in Golden, Colorado, Dan Marshall recalls his first major case involving the laboratory. It was the summer of 1990, and he was the only federal wildlife law enforcement agent for the entire state of New Mexico. Responding to a reported sighting of dead eagles near Raton, in the northeastern corner of the state, Marshall went to inspect the dry bed of the Cimarron River. There, in the riparian grass and cottonwoods, Marshall stumbled upon an eerie scene. "I found a dead eagle perched on the body of a dead coyote; it hadn't even pulled its head out of the carcass," Marshall recalled. Assisted by state game wardens, Marshall searched the surrounding ranch and discovered a total of seven dead eagles--six golden and one bald. "When you see dead eagles with their tails, necks, and heads thrust up over their backs, it's a classic pose. You know it's a poisoning," he said. Within 60 yards of the coyote, the agents also found dead magpies and mice, evidence of multiple poisonings as the toxins moved up the food chain. "We call it a 'circle of death,'" said Marshall. The source of all this carnage was a partially eaten calf carcass that had been injected with poison to kill coyotes. Other bait sites nearby included one carcass that still had a hypodermic needle sticking out of it. Marshall sent the needle to the Ashland lab for analysis where it was found to contain carbofuran, a highly toxic and strictly regulated organic pesticide that the Germans developed during World War II as a nerve gas. Its only legal use is to control agricultural pests in field crops. Although New Mexico residents can legally kill coyotes, using a restricted chemical to do so is illegal, and killing more than one endangered eagle is a felony. The rancher admitted to injecting a still-born calf with carbofuran to control the coyotes that threatened his herd. Although Marshall found evidence of over a dozen bait sites on his property, the rancher only confessed to one poisoning. And to Marshall's amazement, the federal judge who decided the case sympathized with the rancher. As a first-offender, he was convicted of just one misdemeanor count of killing an eagle and fined $3,000, with no restitution. "This is a very common and pervasive problem nationwide," Marshall said. "Unfortunately, the sentence was too weak to deter others." The laboratory's analytical chemistry and DNA capabilities will prove invaluable in fulfilling the final stage of its mission: to aid all 122 member nations of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in wildlife crime enforcement. Several foreign countries, including Canada, India, and Taiwan, have already taken advantage of the laboratory's expertise. International investigations comprise just five percent of the laboratory's present casework. But looking to the future, Goddard hopes to use the facility as a neutral site to train wildlife forensic scientists from throughout the world, and exchange information and technology. This is welcome news for the country of Tanzania, which has seen a 70 percent decline in its elephant population since the mid-1980s, primarily due to poaching. Tanzania's chief wildlife law enforcement officer, Musa Mohammed Lyimo, was one of the first international wildlife officials to visit the laboratory and tap its resources. Until his recent visit, he relied on the general chemistry laboratory of the Tanzanian Minister of Health to process animal remains as evidence. To Lyimo, the technology available at the USFWS laboratory will mean the difference between putting poachers behind bars or setting them free to kill again. Tanzania's elephant population plummeted from 300,000 elephants in 1985 to 87,000 in 1988, even though the country had banned all elephant hunting and ivory trading within its borders in December 1986. The CITES international ban was imposed in January 1990. "We often have people poisoning our animals at the drinking places," said Lyimo. "They will inject poison into pumpkins, which are preferred by wild animals, and scatter them in the bush. At first we suspect it is a new disease, but then we hear that it is hunters who don't want to alert us by shooting. Elephants will come along and feed on the pumpkins and die, and the poachers then collect the ivory." While DNA remains the laboratory's most powerful tool, several of its most significant discoveries arose from other technologies. Using a scanning electron microscope to examine objects in minute detail, wildlife scientists found a way to visually differentiate ancient ivory (recovered from the remains of long-buried mammoths or mastodons), which is legal to trade, from modern ivory, which is illegal to trade. The powerful microscope revealed that the fine, crosshatched lines that form a pattern on an elephant tusk meet at different angles depending on the species. In ancient ivory, the lines meet at an angle that is less than 90 degrees; in modern ivory, the angle is greater than 110 degrees. Another important finding emerged from an undercover investigation in Nevada in which federal wildlife agents purchased 180 bear gall bladders from an unsuspecting smuggler. Ounce-for-ounce, the bile from a bear's gall bladder is the highest value commodity on the black market today. Bear bile sells for over $1,000 dollars a gram in Korea and is valued as a medicine and aphrodisiac throughout Asia. The trafficking in bear parts (primarily gall bladders, meat, and paws) has endangered the survival of many Asian bears and is impacting North American populations as well (see Pacific Discovery, Winter 1994). Although black bears are relatively plentiful in North America and hunting is permitted, the American black bear became a CITES-listed species in 1992 to help control the worldwide bear trade. As bear parts have become more difficult to obtain, smugglers substitute pig gall bladders for bear galls because they appear so similar. "Under the new federal sentencing guidelines, the value of the product influences the sentence," explained Edgard Espinoza, chief of the criminalistics section. "Since this was such a large number of gall bladders, we wanted to find out how many were bear and how many were pig." After identifying three major bile salts found only in bear galls, Espinoza looked for their presence in the samples. "The suspect was in prison and had even confessed," Espinoza says. "As it turned out, not one of them was a bear gall. They were all pig!" The suspect was eventually freed because, as Espinoza's analysis revealed, no law had been broken. The laboratory's ivory and gall bladder discoveries are critical to wildlife crime enforcement because a conviction can't be obtained unless authorities can clearly prove that a law has been broken. The ability to physically differentiate between illegal and legal goods has also aided agents in tracking the origins of illegal trade. Through the laboratory's discoveries, wildlife agents have pinpointed Canada as the primary source of bear gall bladders poached in North America and smuggled overseas. "The Oriental medicinal trade is the most explosive area of international trade right now," said Ginette Hemley, director of TRAFFIC USA. "Testing the contents of these products is critical to preserving these species. If we don't get on this right away, the black bear will go the way of the rhino and the elephant." Hemley added that her visits to Ashland have left her inspired that the battle to save the world's endangered wildlife can be won. The laboratory has also inspired a handful of western states to add their own DNA fingerprinting programs to their wildlife forensic capabilities. In California, the Department of Fish and Game, in cooperation with microbiologists from the University of California at Davis, School of Medicine, has just embarked on a three-year project to profile the state's deer and elk populations by sex and herd. Once the baseline DNA data for these species is gathered, researchers hope to profile the state's bear, mountain lion, antelope, and raptor populations. Fish and Game agents credit the publicity surrounding the Clint Eastwood case for attracting much of this funding. All the $180,000 in start-up funds came through private grants and donations, most of it from Shasta County where Eastwood's ranch is located. That careless killing of one mule deer in the mountains of northern California--one of countless poaching incidents in the West every year--has triggered a statewide effort that could eventually save the lives of thousands of deer and other wildlife.
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Fall 1994
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