Why travellers should donate Asia Miles to fight wildlife crime – former Cathay Pacific captain’s campaign

Legislation is too slow, says Paul McIntosh ahead of his Royal Geographic Society presentation of conservation documentary Running Wild, at which he will ask people to donate unused air miles to save rare animals in Kenya

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Paul McIntosh with an orphaned black rhino at Lewa during filming of Running Wild – it has since returned to the wild.

Published: 7:45am, 5 Mar 2018Updated: 6:13pm, 6 Mar 2018

Former Cathay Pacific captain Paul McIntosh has been fundraising to support wildlife conservation in Africa since the 1980s. Now he is calling on travellers from Hong Kong and beyond to donate their extra miles to the protection of some of Africa’s most endangered species, at Kenya’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy.

“There are 10 million Asia Miles members,” he says. “And nobody spends all of their miles. You spend some of it on an upgrade and then you’ve got some left over, and these miles get wasted.”

When McIntosh, 59, first visited Kenya on holiday in 1984, he was shocked by what he found there.

Orphaned rhinos at Lewa. Photo: courtesy of Lewa.org

“There was a lot of poaching going on at the time,” recalls the pilot, who was born in the UK and moved to Hong Kong in 1990 with the Royal Navy at Tamar. “In 1970 there were 20,000 rhinos in Kenya, by 1980 there were just 400. We’d be out on safari, and we’d hear gunshots at night.”

Motivated to help, he began his own grass-roots fundraising efforts in the UK, and later in Hong Kong. He organised events, printed out booklets to take to local and international schools, gave presentations to educate children about wildlife.

“I was on my own,” says McIntosh. “Sometimes with my kids and my wife. Saving animals wasn’t really mainstream back then.”

He returned to Kenya after a year in the navy, where he worked as a helicopter pilot, supporting anti- poaching efforts at Lewa Conservancy before joining Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong in 1994.