Author: PicloBot

Watching The Ivory Game While Rhino Man Was Taking Shape

By John Jurko II, director of the documentary Rhino Man.

I watched The Ivory Game not long after it landed on Netflix, sometime around 2018, right in the middle of the years I was spending getting into this world and eventually making Rhino Man. What I remember most is how well it moved. It’s a tense film. Real, sustained tension, the kind that comes from good editing and a story that earns it, not from manufactured drama.

A lot of people who know I made a film about rangers assume I’ve seen every conservation documentary out there. I haven’t seen all of them, but The Ivory Game is one I have, and it’s stayed with me.

This is my honest take on it: what it does really well, and where I think Rhino Man picks up a different thread of the same fight.

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What The Ivory Game Does Well

The Ivory Game is built around the trafficking network itself, not just the poaching that feeds it. Richard Ladkani and Kief Davidson spent well over a year embedded with undercover investigators, following the ivory from the animal all the way to the buyer. That’s a hard, dangerous thing to film, and it shows in how carefully constructed the movie is. You get a real sense of who the players are in this trade: the poachers, the middlemen, the corrupt officials, the dealers, and the customers on the other end creating the demand in the first place.

The film also does something a lot of conservation documentaries don’t do well. It makes you understand the stakes of losing elephants at a species level, not just an animal-by-animal level. There’s real attention paid to the big tuskers, the older bulls carrying the largest ivory, and what it means when those specific animals get targeted. Losing one of them isn’t like losing any other elephant. It’s losing genetics and history that took decades to grow, gone in an afternoon.

Some of the film’s footage was shot at and around the Big Life Foundation’s operations in Amboseli, Kenya, which is one of the areas where you feel the scale of the landscape these teams are trying to protect. Open country, long sightlines, and still not nearly enough people or resources to cover it. That tension between how much ground there is and how few people are actually out there defending it comes through clearly, and it’s a feeling I recognized from my own years in the field, even though the terrain we worked in was different.

A Kenya Wildlife Service ranger watches confiscated ivory burn, a real scene from The Ivory Game (2016), Terra Mater Factual Studios / Tobias Corps.

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Where Rhino Man Picks Up a Different Thread

The Ivory Game is about elephants in Kenya, told through the eyes of investigators and the criminal network they’re trying to infiltrate. Rhino Man is about rhinos in South Africa, told through the eyes of the rangers standing on the ground of the private reserves where a lot of that ground-level fight actually happens. Different animal, different country, and honestly, different terrain. The open landscapes around Amboseli aren’t much like the dense, fenced bush of a place like Timbavati, and the anti-poaching challenge looks different in each setting because of it.

Where the two films genuinely connect is on the organized crime thread. The Ivory Game makes it very clear that this isn’t opportunistic poaching. It’s a transnational, demand-driven business with real money and real networks behind it, and that’s just as true for rhino horn as it is for ivory. If you came away from The Ivory Game understanding that wildlife trafficking is a global, organized problem, you already understand something essential about what’s happening to rhinos too.

But that’s about where the overlap ends, and I think that’s a good thing. The Ivory Game goes deep on the crime and the investigation. It stays with the people working to expose the network from the inside, at real risk to themselves. Rhino Man goes deep somewhere else entirely: the rangers themselves. Not the syndicate, not the courtroom, not the undercover operation. The people whose job is to walk into that danger every single day, and what it costs them, their families, and their communities to keep doing it.

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The Human Side of That Front Line

If The Ivory Game opened your eyes to the scale and danger of wildlife trafficking, that’s exactly why I think Rhino Man is worth your time next. It takes you to the other side of that same fight: inside the daily life, the risk, and the humanity of the rangers who actually stand between poachers and the animals.

Rhino Man follows Anton Mzimba, who was Head of Ranger Services at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve, and Ruben de Kock, who leads a group of ranger candidates through a selection course at the Southern African Wildlife College. Anton spent 25 years training and leading the rangers who stood between rhinos and the syndicates trying to kill them. In July 2022, while our film was still being finished, he was murdered at his home. That case remains unsolved. There’s an active campaign, Justice for Anton, working to keep pressure on the investigation and support the ranger team and family he left behind.

That’s the part of this story that’s hard for any film built around investigators and crime networks to hold, and it’s not a knock on those films. It just needs a different kind of film, one built on years of trust with the people living it, to show what the front line actually costs.

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Where to Watch The Ivory Game

The Ivory Game is streaming on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it and you care about wildlife trafficking, elephants, or the conservation space in general, it’s worth the watch. It’s a genuinely well-made, tense piece of filmmaking, and it gives you a clear-eyed look at how organized the trade actually is.

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The Other Side of the Same Fight

The Ivory Game and Rhino Man aren’t trying to tell the same story. Richard and Kief gave you the network. We tried to give you a few of the people standing in front of it.

If you want more of the wider trafficking picture alongside the ranger’s-eye view, I’d also point you to my review of Stroop: Journey into the Rhino Horn War, which covers a lot of the same ground The Ivory Game does, on the rhino horn side specifically.

But if you’re ready to spend time with the people on the ground, you can watch Rhino Man from home, or if you’re part of a campus, company, or community group, you can host a screening and bring the conversation to your own room.

Both films serve the same fight. Watch The Ivory Game for the network. Watch Rhino Man for the people standing in front of it.

Rhino Man is now available for rental and purchase on Apple, Amazon, Google Play, and Vimeo.

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