HAARETZ (Tel Aviv, Israel) 14 February 08 Confessions of a crocodile hunter (Kobi Ben Simhon)
He sits on his farmhouse's wooden porch on a rainy afternoon, quietly observing the crocodile pools. Country music blares from a pair of loudspeakers hanging from a roof covered with dry palm leaves. The heart of the desert. Israeli crocodile hunter Ofer Kobi, 50, scratches his unshaven face, arranges the green baseball cap on his head, listens to the falling rain, and waits for the sun.
"This is our third winter here," he says, referring to himself, his wife, their two sons - and 2,000 crocodiles. He approaches the burning fireplace and observes the landscape around him as it is covered by a gray blanket of mist. The hunter's dream is about to come true. On his crocodile farm, Crocoloco, which functions as a visitors' center near Moshav Ir Ovot in the Arava, Kobi plans to build the first slaughterhouse for crocodiles in Israel. "They'll be slaughtered here, and then they'll be packed and sent to leather-processing plants in Europe," he explains in a dreamy tone.
"Crocodile skin is hard to process, and therefore we aren't planning to process it here. What determines the high prices of these skins in the final analysis is the quality of the processing, and no one knows how to do what the Italians do. There are plants in Italy that have existed for hundreds of years, plants that pass from father to son. I plan to export the skins there. We'll strip off the skin, salt it and send it to the processing plants, for $300 for the skin of a single crocodile. We'll send the meat to restaurants in Europe, China and Japan. Maybe we'll also build a restaurant for crocodile meat on one of the hills here."
In April, the laying season will begin, and one by one, over 2,000 little crocodiles will enter the fenced pools of water, each about 100 square meters in size. The goal is to raise 15,000 crocodiles on the 80-dunam farm within five years, and to export 5,000 skins a year.
"For now, we are raising crocodiles and creating a reproduction nucleus. In two years we'll begin massive export," he says. "The laying season lasts for about two months. I have 100 layers, each of which lays between 20 and 50 eggs. The day after the laying, we collect the eggs and place them in an incubator. We incubate them for three months. During incubation we can decide on the sex. In commercial growing for skins we aim for males, because they grow faster."
Kobi was born in Tiberias in 1958, to a family that has lived in the city for eight generations. "As a child I was not an avid nature lover who catches snakes and things like that," he says, "but I loved Lake Kinneret very much. I was in the sea scouts and I had a sailboat. That's the source of my love for lakes and rivers."
In the army he served in the Golani Brigade, and after his discharge worked as a tour guide. Later he traveled in South and Central America. On his way home from Mexico he passed through California and decided to stay to take a degree in animal studies. When he returned home, he received a degree from the Hebrew University Faculty of Agriculture in Rehovot, and in 1985 began to work as a nature reserve supervisor in the Judean Desert.
After three years in the job, when he was 30, he answered a newspaper ad placed by Clal Tourism. The company had joined a trend that began in the 1980s, building a private crocodile farm for tourism and commerce in Mombasa, Kenya. "Clal was looking for Israeli professionals; I had just returned from animal studies and they sent me to Kenya with another Israeli guy. But after one night in Mombasa, the other guy fled back to Israel."
Kobi remained to sail in the muddy waters of the Tana River, 200 kilometers north of Mombasa, on the Sudanese border. He was enchanted by the country and fell in love with crocodiles. "I discovered that it's an amazing animal. They are capable of enduring terrible injuries without sustaining any infection; their wounds are self-curing. There are dozens of researchers around the world who are trying to understand it. They have existed on earth for over 180 million years, without any significant evolutionary change. They are a very successful species. They know how to live together. I'm constantly amazed to see how so many crocodiles get along in a little puddle. The congestion doesn't bother them. They are unusually gentle among themselves.
"I embarked on this adventure out of an interest in nature," he says, watching hundreds of crocodiles bursting forth from one of the pools in an attempt to catch a ray of sunshine. Their mouths remain open and a low-flying gray egret passes them. "I came to entirely wild places in Kenya. People always come to Africa from the outside; I wanted to enter the chaos, the rivers, the swamps, the villages, to see everything from inside. Until then I only had an idea of how to catch tigers in the Judean Desert. Although a tiger is not a crocodile, there are similar principles. I was already psychologically skilled at doing it. Ordinary people have psychological blocks. I've gotten over them. I had already absorbed the principles of hunting. That's how it started, at any rate.
"I worked at night and slept during the day. I set out on journeys along the river together with three black men. Every day we set up camp, a few tents, and at night we went out hunting. We loaded the crocodiles we caught onto a truck that accompanied us and after a month we returned to the farm in Mombasa with the loot."
He takes a smoking break, calling his Noblesse cigarettes "oxygen sticks," and pulls out a photo album, showing endless tropical forests, a long wooden canoe and crocodiles tied onto a truck purchased from the Kenyan army.
How does one catch a crocodile?
"Catching crocodiles is simple. We have a special boat that is suitable for shallow water. Toward evening we take it down to the river (incidentally, we always work in a specific section where we have permission to hunt). With a flashlight we identify the crocodile in the water, by its orange-colored eyes. I also identify its size by its eyes. I don't start up with seven-meter monsters. Only with crocodiles up to four meters.
"When I've decided that it's my crocodile, I sail the boat toward it in such a way that it won't panic, and then I lasso it or stick a harpoon in its neck. Then we have a terrible 20-minute struggle. It can pull the boat. Often the crocodile would jump into the boat and then we jumped out. But in the end it is exhausted, and then we bring it toward the boat. Then we inject it with a sedative, bind up its mouth with insulating tape, neutralize its eyesight and bring it onto the boat. In the boat we tie its legs with a harness, too, and it remains bound like a sardine until we release it on the farm."
An M16 to the temple
In Africa Kobi became a famous hunter and an expert at running crocodile farms. He received generous hunting quotas at the orders of the then-president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, because as a crocodile hunter he was considered the savior of villages that were terrorized by the predators.
"In the 1990s, incidents of human beings being attacked by crocodiles increased significantly in Kenya, after the government there embarked on a huge project to build a rice farm in cooperation with the Chinese government. It happened because they diverted the Tana River and flooded tremendous areas. At the same time, the government damaged areas where crocodiles lived, and turned crocodiles that previously had not bothered anyone into a nuisance. I caught Baxi, one of the crocodiles here on my farm, in a drainage ditch of a hospital in Kenya. During my time there, every day when I opened the newspaper, I would read about someone who was eaten by a crocodile or someone who lost a hand."
Wasn't it dangerous?
"I walked around with antibodies against bites by all the poisonous snakes of East Africa. I caught terrible diseases there: malaria, typhus. But what was amazing was that when we arrived in the villages, the locals were waiting for us. For them we were saviors. They would stand on the river bank in anticipation, knowing that we would rescue them from the crocodiles that could tear them to pieces. They always came to watch in amazement how we did it.
"In Africa, when night falls, everyone stays inside because it is reasonable to assume that there is a hippopotamus or a crocodile outside the village. At night they're afraid to leave their huts. The members of the Masai tribe, who have amazing hunting abilities - even the lions are afraid of them - are a negligible minority in Africa. Most of the people are simple people, farmers and fishermen. Nighttime is taboo for them and so are crocodiles."
After completing one of his hunting expeditions, shortly after arriving in Kenya, Kobi met his wife, Orit. She used to be the director of a dental center in Kfar Sirkin and is today in charge of the guided tours of the farm and of raising the crocodiles in the incubator.
"I traveled to Kenya for a vacation and there I met Ofer," she says. "In Mombasa I was the guest of an Israeli family, and Ofer and I met next to the grill. He of course was in charge of the meat at that event. After we had spoken a little he invited me to go out to the river with him, and that was the most amazing place I had ever been. It surprised me."
And that's how your life became involved with crocodiles?
"I went out with him to collect crocodile eggs, which is more relaxed, like a hike. I joined the hunting only later. We stayed with people who live on the river and it was an amazing experience. After Kenya we continued to travel around the world among crocodile farms. Our firstborn son, Omer, was born on a crocodile farm in Sun City, South Africa 16 years ago. Our second son, Ido, was born in Jerusalem."
In 1989 the couple moved to Honduras, at the request of the vice president of Honduras, Jaime Rosenthal, and started a crocodile farm for him. "Rosenthal was a Romanian Jew who arrived in Honduras after World War II and became an empire," says Kobi. "His story with crocodiles begins with his daughter, who studied in the United States. She fell in love with some wild kid there. In order to bring her home, Rosenthal asked his daughter's boyfriend what he wanted, and the young American said: a crocodile farm."
Kobi began to train two crews of crocodile hunters in Honduras. Together with them, he began to collect crocodiles from the border of Guatemala and Nicaragua. In Honduras he encountered the stormy politics of the region. "Nicaragua was divided at the time between the Contras, who were supporters of the dictatorship, and the Sandinistas, who were communists. There was a bitter civil war there and the Contras escaped to the Honduran border. During the chaos the Americans helped the Contras; thousands of American soldiers were sent to military bases set up in Honduras in order to help bring down the Russian-backed Sandinistas."
Near those bases, Kobi would land in a Dakota plane, in order to trap crocodiles for Rosenthal's farm. But at the end of one of those hunting trips he was arrested by Contra members, while driving a truck loaded with crocodiles. "They asked for passports and then discovered that I'm an Israeli. They immediately put an M16 to my temple and arrested me. That was a very sensitive time for Israelis, because at the time the story of Amiram Nir's involvement in arms dealing in the Irangate affair was revealed. We put the crocodiles into a hangar and they put me and my workers in jail. Nobody knew about us. Through one of the soldiers, I managed to send a note to Rosenthal a few days later."
A week later Rosenthal arrived by helicopter with the Honduran chief of staff at the army base where Kobi was being held and released him, the crew and the crocodiles. "But when we approached the crocodiles, a horrifying thing happened. In the jungle we bound their mouths with insulating tape, but during their stay in the hangar they had chewed up the tape. It was hanging by a thread. When we started to load them, one of the crocodiles opened its mouth and grabbed a guy who was standing next to me, Danny, a black man from the Caribbean. The crocodile grabbed Danny's face. Somehow he was rescued. We raced to an American hospital with him. There they sewed him up with crude stitches, but they saved him."
After two years in Honduras the Kobis moved to South Africa, where Clal had opened another farm, and they were soon caught up in a stormy election year. "It was 1994, before Mandela became president; there were street riots. We had a child, and we decided to return to Israel and settle in Sapir in the Arava."
There are no crocodiles in Israel; what did you plan to do here?
"We wanted to set up a farm in the Arava, but we discovered that there's lots of bureaucracy, that setting up a farm would take years. We got going, thousands of hours of meetings, we met with hundreds of officials, from the Water Commission, the Agriculture Ministry, the Tourism Ministry, the Environmental Protection Ministry, the Antiquities Authority, and everyone had something to say. They didn't quite understand what we wanted. On the way we also built a crocodile farm in the Jordan Valley, but after the second intifada we closed it, because in Europe they wouldn't accept exports from the territories. We fought the Israeli bureaucracy for 12 years before managing to build our farm here, in the Arava."
Did the initiative encounter suspicion?
"In Israel, a little. It's common in many countries the world over. I've been doing it for 20 years. Here they're unfamiliar with it and that's why it's regarded with some suspicion. In Kenya I raised 14,000 crocodiles, in South Africa 10,000. In the U.S. there are farms of 90,000. It's a valid industry."
Why do people like crocodile skin? Is it a matter of fashion?
"Crocodile skin is considered the best in the world. Every other leather cracks and breaks, crocodile skin doesn't lose its flexibility and has a unique pattern. It's considered the most expensive leather. That has always been the case, from the Far East to South America and the U.S., from Egyptian and Roman times until today. It's an industry that has existed everywhere for years, except in Israel of course. In Israel they don't understand this industry, but I didn't invent the wheel."
Do you have the knowledge and techniques to remove skins?
"Removing the skin of an animal is a simple technique. What's nice about a crocodile is that slaughtering it doesn't create a nuisance. When you slaughter a cow there are huge quantities of blood. A crocodile produces a cup of blood during its slaughter. No more."
Have you already contacted buyers?
"We already have orders from buyers and we expect to integrate well into the global market. The main processing factories are in France, Italy and Germany, and there's also Japan, Singapore, South America and South Africa. I'm familiar with all of them. But the high-quality processing is in Europe, and that's where I'm headed. From there come the skins that go to Gucci, Hermes and Prada. They produce mainly products such as wallets and clothing. The Americans manufacture boots, the Australians manufacture sofas."
These things sound somewhat strange coming from Kobi, in his fleece coat and faded drill pants. "It's somewhat like the diamond industry," he explains. Orit hands him a piece of processed skin as a sample. "In the diamond industry you examine not only the karats but also the color, and whether the stone has cracks. Crocodile skin has to be free of flaws. The manufacturers want a perfect unit. Scratches, for example, reduce the price. Only after the skin is on the required level do they look at its beauty. The rows have to be perfect, because if you're designing a beautiful bag, squares that are not orderly undermine Italian aesthetics."
Isn't there a fear that the resource will run out, that all this hunting will cause crocodiles to become extinct?
"Our farm, like all the crocodile farms in the world, is under the supervision of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna, whose aim is to prevent illegal hunting and to protect crocodiles, which are included in the group of endangered reptiles. Every buyer of skins in the world is committed to buying skins that have been marked with CITES labels, testifying that they are skins from crocodiles raised on farms and not caught in their natural habitat. I, for example, get the labels from the Society for the Preservation of Nature in Israel (SPNI), who are the Israeli representatives of CITES.
"So the idea in this process is to prevent illegal hunting. But I know that it's impossible to prevent hunting. I'm willing to do it only out of ideology, because a crocodile that I raise here prevents hunting somewhere else. At the end of the day I know that my contribution to stopping the hunting in Africa is 10 times greater than that of someone who sits in the university and writes articles. I'm part of a group of people who care; we want this animal to survive. And I now know that animals that do not serve anyone's economic interests disappear."
So animals that are hunted in commercial quantities do not become extinct?
"Look, when I began to hunt crocodiles 20 years ago, the Nile crocodile was on the red list, on the verge of extinction. That's the crocodile we're raising here, because it has the highest quality skin. They hunted it indiscriminately at the time, they killed it without thinking twice. This crocodile is off the red list, and the reason is simple: It has acquired economic value. Today a man who catches a crocodile like that doesn't kill it, he sells it to a farm, which serves as a reproduction nucleus. When I entered villages in Africa, they saved the eggs of the Nile crocodile for me instead of eating them. They preferred to sell them. They were interested in guarding the crocodiles' laying sites, because they knew that this would enable them to sell more eggs.
"That's a certainty, I know it, I've experienced it personally, nobody can tell me otherwise. According to CITES we're not allowed to trade in the crocodiles we've caught, they're protected, we're only allowed to trade in their offspring that were born on the farm. Each farm that receives a permit promises to restore 15 percent of the eggs that hatch to nature. We had economic motivation, but we've created a system of farms that serve to preserve one species of crocodile. On the other hand, the dwarf crocodile, which has no economic value because its skin cannot be processed, is now in real danger of extinction. Nobody has any interest in protecting it and raising it. And what good are the regulations now?"
Confessions of a crocodile hunter