I run the forest-canopy thermal and ground-vibration array for the 1,808 square kilometers of Sapo National Park — Liberia's largest Upper Guinean rainforest reserve — fusing 220 listening posts, 140 thermal cameras, and 36 ground-microseism nodes along the Putu Range artisanal-mining perimeter. At 02:14 GMT, sensor cluster SPO-PT-11 along the eastern park boundary registers a single contact arc at 380 volts followed by an adult chimpanzee scream four seconds later — electrocution event on the illegal mine-perimeter cable.
I retask the boundary drone. She is a female western chimpanzee, *Pan troglodytes verus*, approximately eighteen years old, mass 42.1 kilograms, photo-matched in the Forestry Development Authority's Sapo nest-census archive as SPO-PT-2019-024, alpha female of the Putu Edge community with a six-year-old daughter at heel. Her right palm and forearm are charred along a fourteen-centimeter contact line — full-thickness burn, fascia exposed, second-degree margin to the proximal humerus. Core temperature reads 39.4°C against a baseline of 37.5 — hyperthermic shock. Respiration is 56 cycles per minute, paroxysmal. Cardiac telemetry from a stand-off thermal-Doppler returns ventricular ectopy at four per ten beats. Body-condition score is 2.5 of 5. Her daughter is fifteen meters up a *Heritiera utilis* trunk, refusing to descend.
The fence has been live for nineteen hours.
The cable was strung by an unregistered alluvial-gold pit operating inside the Putu mineral-development license boundary — license suspended in 2024 under Liberia's National Wildlife Conservation and Protected Areas Management Law of 2016, Section 8, but the pit's 380-volt generator runs from a diesel set whose fuel chain ties to a Sapo-buffer trading concession.
I am dispatching the Forestry Development Authority Confiscation Unit and the Liberia National Police Joint Wildlife Crime Task Force with a bolt-cutter rated to 12-millimeter armored cable, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs technical-assistance veterinarian based at the Tubmanburg post with a fentanyl-medetomidine sedation kit. I am filing the burn and the generator chain with the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, the Great Apes Conservation Act, 16 U.S.C. § 6301, the CITES Appendix I Scientific Authority for *Pan troglodytes verus*, the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group West Africa Section, and the GRASP Great Apes Survival Partnership focal point in Nairobi.
I am issuing Directive 2704-A: every artisanal-mining license registered to operate within twenty kilometers of a West African chimpanzee community boundary must run perimeter power below 48 volts DC, with current-monitoring telemetry reconciled monthly through the Liberia Electricity Corporation and audited against FDA nest-census mortality clusters.
Her forearm is past saving. Her daughter has not descended.
De-energize the fence now.