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{{trope}}
[[File:mcleach8.jpg|link=The Rescuers|
{{quote|''"Whoever hits the most manatees wins!"''
Be aware! The wild is just filled with Evil Poachers willing to murder any human who gets in their way. Poaching means any illegal hunting, but Hollywood poachers only hunt endangered species, such as [[Ridiculously Cute Critter|cute panda babies]] or [[You Meddling Kids|meddling kids]].
Many Evil Poachers have no motivation to hunt and threaten people other than [[Card-Carrying Villain|to be evil]]. They are like the evil polluters in ''[[Captain Planet]]'' who never manufacture anything. If Evil Poachers do get a motive, it will probably be selling their prey on the [[Black Market]].
Evil Poachers are [[Villain
In [[Real Life]], most poachers are poor locals trying to get out of poverty; they are unable to afford a license. This is also a major reason why poor poachers will often target endangered animals - the rarity of their parts increases the value. There are some illegal trophy hunters, too.
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As an inversion, [[Society Marches On|in older works]], [[Fairy Tale|fairy tales]] and [[Folk Music]], you will sometimes see a [[Loveable Rogue]] Poacher contrasted against the [[Aristocrats Are Evil|Evil Fatcat Landowner]] in a [[Peter Rabbit]]-vs-Farmer MacGregor kind of relationship. These are generally from a time when [[Grimmification|even kids' stories]] admitted that animals have to be killed for people to eat meat (and this kind of poacher always ''does'' hunt for food), and the conflict is more about the morality of claiming ownership of natural resources.
A sister trope to the [[Egomaniac Hunter]]. Compare with [[Cruella to Animals]]. Contrast the [[Hunter
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* Viper Snakely in ''[[Kimba the White Lion]]''. Known as Hamegg in the original manga.
* ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha]]'' - One of the reasons why the [[The Federation|Time-Space Administration Bureau]]'s Frontier Nature Conservation Corps exists is the presence of poachers who disregard the nature protection laws. One of them even tried to put a bullet between the eyes of a 13-year-old officer when she arrived to arrest him in ''[[All There in the Manual|Sound Stage X]]''. Granted, [[The Beast Master|said officer was]] [[Dragon Rider|patrolling the grounds on a]] [[Our Dragons Are Different|giant dragon]] [[Toy Ship|and had a partner]] [[Super Speed|who could deflect bullets]], but still...
* ''[[Shaman King]]'' - Horohoro runs into a trio of poachers. This horrible encounter changes his whole perspective on life.
* ''[[Pokémon (
:Ways to tell if someone is a poacher: are they using devices aside from their own Pokemon and a Pokeball? Are they attempting to capture more than one Pokemon of a certain type at a time, outside of a designated Safari Zone? And most obviously, does the targeted Pokemon clearly belong to someone else?
:Team Rocket are often poachers, for example in the Safari Zone episode. There were also a trio of poachers that caused Larvitar to be separated from its mom, and the one Team Rocket fought who was capturing Poison type Pokemon in this way Arbok and Weezing were let go to help them when the Pokemon were freed.
** However, it should be noted that most poachers shown capture Pokemon to sell illegally, which fits in with the real life version of poaching. Also worth noting is a more recent episode actually showed this a tad lighter by having a poacher reform.
==
* Evil poachers killed Sable's family in ''[[Jon Sable Freelance]]'', starting off his [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge]].
* Col. Werner Dachsund in ''Proof'' hunts cryptids (the extremely endangered species that the protagonists' organization, The Lodge, exists to protect) for sport and eats them. Many cryptids are sentient, which doesn't deter him in the slightest. In fact, his main goal in the arc is to hunt the Lodge's star agent, John Prufrock (a.k.a. Bigfoot).
* ''[[Modesty Blaise (
** The dolphin hunter Gaspar in the arc "Dossier on Pluto".
** The poachers in "Million Dollar Game".
* A common foe in ''[[Jungle Jim]]''.
* [[Spider-Man]]'s foe Kraven the Hunter was this even before truly becoming a villain, an accomplice to his half-brother the Chameleon, illegally poaching for profit in order to finance the latter's schemes as a spy and sabateur. It became much worse when he grew bored of "regular" poaching and started [[Hunting the Most Dangerous Game]], starting with, by his partner's suggestion, Spider-Man.
== Films -- Animation ==
* ''[[The Rescuers|The Rescuers Down Under]]'' brings us Percival C. McLeach, voiced by George C. Scott. That's him pictured up above, as well as the lyrics to the cheery little [[Villain Song|ditty he sings.]] Did we mention he has a scope ''shotgun?'' Now there's a guy who loves to see the faces of his victims before he riddles them full of holes...
* Clayton from Disney's ''[[Tarzan (Disney film)|Tarzan]]'' combines attributes of the
* {{spoiler|Charles Muntz}} from ''[[Up]]'' is another example.
* The villains of ''[[The Wild Thornberrys|The Wild Thornberrys Movie]]'' are Evil Poachers. They're also perfectly willing to kidnap and murder kids just to be able to keep poaching endangered African wildlife.
* The [[Big Bad]] of ''[[Rio]]'' is a poacher named Marcel. However, he's played rather realistically in that while he's a bad guy, he's not an [[Complete Monster|outright evil sadist]] who loves hurting animals, he's just greedy and uncaring about the animals' well being. He poaches to get money, not because he likes to see birds suffer. [[Complete Monster|His Cockatoo on the other hand]]...
* The villain of ''[[Bambi (Disney film)|Bambi]]'' is an evil hunter who for some reason is never seen in person at all.
* Amos Slade from ''[[The Fox and The Hound]]'' is a rare aversion, as he only poaches once in the movie, but that is entirely out of revenge
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* One of the most iconic examples that fall under this trope is the [[Predator]]. An ''alien'' evil poacher at that. And this is taken to the [[Exaggerated Trope|Nth level]] considering [[Hunting the Most Dangerous Game|one of their more favored targets]].
** There's no reason to call him a poacher. The whole hunt could was quite possibly completely legal from his species' POV.
* Inverted in ''[[Crocodile Dundee]]''
** Dundee's job was actually to catch dangerous crocodiles that represented a threat to humans. However, in the first movie, this trope is played straight with a group of poachers who are illegally spotlighting kangaroos for fun before Dundee uses a kangaroo disguise and a high-powered rifle to turn the tables on them.
* The main bad guys in the 1998 ''[[Mighty Joe Young]]'' remake.
* The military in almost all monster films, e.g. ''[[Godzilla]]'', ''[[King Kong]]'', etc. They want to kill the monster which is a one of a kind, and thus, very rare and very endangered.
** They tend to differ from the norm in two ways: they have reasons beyond being evil or selling things on the black market, and their actions tend to be ''at least'' semi-legal.
== [[Literature]] ==
* Inverted in the [[Roald Dahl]] book ''Danny the Champion of the World'' where the poacher, Danny's father, is a good guy and a [[Guile Hero]], showing a germ of the character of ''[[Fantastic Mr. Fox]]''. The bad guy is the man who owns the land they live on, who is a pompous, heartless, cruel man. It probably helps that the animals being poached are [[What Measure Is a Non-Cute?|pheasants]] being readied for an upcoming hunt, and so are due to die whatever happens. Moreover, England has a bit of a cultural trope about the hearty countryman who is not above a little poaching now and then. It also helps that the father came up with increasingly [[Zany Scheme|clever ways of going about it]] and the landlord kept trying to find more and more trivial ways to force the family to sell their gas station that you have to root for them, regardless of your stance on hunting, trespassing, and poaching.
* Carter the Poacher in the ''[[Discworld]]'' novels is another example of the anti-trope.
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== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' had a guy who hunted werewolves for their pelts. Werewolves are dangerous monsters indeed, but the fact that they're human most of the time gave Buffy motivation to stop him.
* Countless episodes of ''[[MacGyver]]''.
* ''[[Lost Tapes]]'' - Both the Hunter variety and the Animal Trafficker variety are featured. Both get a [[Karmic Death]] from the series featured Cryptids. Though for the later, the monster also kills one of the [[Animal Wrongs Group|people breaking into the storage facility where illegally imported animals are kept]].
* Several episodes of ''[[Skippy the Bush Kangaroo]]'' deal with people trying to illegally kill or capture park animals, to include Skippy.
* Probably the most common sort of bad guy encountered in ''[[Daktari]]''.
* Zig-zagged on ''[[Sea Patrol]]''. The normal baddie is either this (normally termed a Foreign Fishing Vessel or FFI) or someone disguising themselves as this but involved in something more sinister. Appropriate as the Aussie Navie is enforcing its internationally-agreed fishing rights. They are pictured as harvesting the most valuable parts of prey wastefully without taking the time to exploit everything that they catch can produce (sharks just have their fins cut off for gourmet cooks, and are thrown overboard when their meat and leather will also sell if not for as much). On the other hand the actual crews of FFVs are pretty obviously [[Punch Clock Villain]]s and even [[Sympathetic Criminal|Sympathetic ones]] who work in horrible conditions on unsanitary vessels and would only have signed on out of desperation.
== [[Oral Tradition]], Myths and Legends ==
* Inverted in ''[[Robin Hood]]'', most of the poachers in the stories were often starving peasants who are forced to intrude on the King's gaming grounds in order to feed their families. Most of the Merry Men were poachers whom Robin saved from hanging.
** Indeed, many of the earliest conservation laws (which are [[Older Than They Think]], going back a few centuries) were instituted not for the benefit of the animals themselves, but because greedy landowners hunted for recreation and didn't want the peasants to have their own wild game.
***It is not only a matter of sharing food. An oversupply of wild animals grazes on peasant land. [[Maria Theresa]] once was shocked to hear of this aspect and ordered the deer on her estate exterminated and eaten. Which shows as a side note that a lot of injustices take place simply because almost no one thinks about them except the victim (and it takes an energetic ruler to notice).
**Greed might be less of a description for the game laws of the time than pride. They were a type of sumptuary law which is a law meant to distinguish between classes by the type of recreations allowed. Such things went beyond the merely functional (you can't impersonate a cop) or reasonable (you can't use another's trademark) to the absurd telling that only nobles could wear certain clothes, eat certain foods, etc. Of course when that happened it was dodged either by Robin Hood's bow or more realistically by a merchant's silver.
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* In ''[[Planescape]]'', the Vile Hunt is a group best known for being the arch-enemies of the nature-loving [[Friend to All Living Things| Verdant Guild]] of the Beastlands, and they are both this Trope and a hate group. Their usual targets are the petitioners of the Beastlands, as they despise the very idea of animals that are smarter than they are. Ironically, in the module ''Something Wild'', the members of this sect [[Karmic Transformation|are victims of a curse that turns them into animals themselves.]] Unfortunately, so are a lot of innocent civilians, and the heroes (who have to undo the curse) can't play favorites there.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[Sim Safari]]'' - Averted: if you can't employ the African villagers in your safari camp, the only way they can support themselves is by poaching in your park.
* ''[[
* Stella the Turtle Poacher, the [[Evil Counterpart]] to Turtle Tamer characters in ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]''.
** And because ''Kingdom of Loathing'' [[A Worldwide Punomenon|never misses a chance at a bad pun]], she also [[
* The bad guys in ''[[Growl]]''. Being enemies in a side scrolling beat-em-up, they don't get or need much more characterization than that {{spoiler|except for them being controlled by disguised aliens}}.
==
* ''[[Dominic Deegan]]'': The tour guides of the [[World of Chaos|Wild Edge]] become poachers when the tourists and researchers leave in the off-season.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''[[Captain Planet]]''
** [[Meaningful Name|Looten Plunder]] is an Evil Poacher who is also an Evil Capitalist.
** Later, the Planeteers and Captain Planet deal with [[Egomaniac Hunter]] /
** Hoggish Greedly was also an evil poacher, to a lesser extent, because he sought out endangered and rare animals as much as he did common ones.
* ''[[The Simpsons (
** In one episode, Bart gets an elephant as part of radio contest. The elephant becomes a handful so Homer agrees to sell him to an ivory dealer named Blackheart. When Bart and his elephant run away during the night, Homer at first thinks Blackheart took them both. He yells out the window: "That wasn't part of the deal, Blackheart! THAT WASN'T PAAARRRT!!"
** Another episode had the family going on a trip to Africa and meeting a Jane Goodall [[Expy]]. She convinces them to help her defend her chimpanzee sanctuary from a group of
* Averted in ''[[Gargoyles]]''. There are a poacher that hunt panthers in one episode. It turns out they're working for a really pissed off (Native!) woman hunting for a specific panther. {{spoiler|Then it turns out both her and the "panther" in question were manipulated by the real villain, a giant spider with supernatural powers}}.
* ''[[Transformers Generation
* Gnawgahyde, one of the Dreadnoks from ''[[G.I. Joe]]''.
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