Fun fact: Kenyan rangers are legally authorized to fire upon and kill poachers. The scary thing in your universe a few of these rangers may have become dragons or work closely with them. And you thought getting shot at was bad

Yeah, the problem is the poachers are also heavily armed and being an anti-poaching ranger is one of the more dangerous jobs in the world. Now, Children of the Egg and Diggers taking over the role of enforcement has entirely shifted the balance of power against the poachers.

Bonus point: The local fauna are not quite sure what they're seeing and smelling with the presence of the dragons and so have largely opted to just ignore them, except for bull elephants in musth. The dragons are in agreement that those guys are just dicks who deserved the first-ever instance of an African Bush Elephant being placed in a headlock and wrestled to the ground by an enraged Matriarch.

Dragons and elephants wrestling. That's a funny idea maybe you should do one about that one day.

Anyways it does suck that they are so heavy armed. I wish we could send military surplus to them to help because protecting endangered species is something I think we should at least allocate some amount of supplies to.

Also because the idea of rhino and elephants being protected by tanks and drones is funny. Like you sure you wanna poach that rhino? Especially with that tank watching licking it's metaphorical lips waiting for you to make the wrong choice.

But sadly that's not going to happen but hey at least civilian drones have been a big help.

Most of the time a roar strong enough to shatter those jeep windows gets the message across...

In some cases the threat of turning them into the very animal they hunt for ... trophies ... does the trick.

Extreme cases of learning resistance may even call for force but thankfully that's very rare but some humans beg for being made an example.

With ivory going for something like 700 USD a kilo and rhino horn going for 7000+ a kilo I never discount the lengths greed will drive humans to go. Even in the presence of 9 tonne Children of the Egg or Diggers that are infamous for the severity of their violent tempers.

Pain is and always will be one of the best teachers... sadly.

Make sure your shields are up to be safe from potential bullets :)