From Africa to Mexico to the Middle East, British-born trapper John Brooker spent 50 years traveling the globe, hunting for creatures to capture — not for sport or trophies, but to ensure their survival.

Elephants, hippos, rhinos, lions, cheetahs, zebras, chamois, oryx. The 69-year-old South African has lassoed them all.

“This is what I specialize in,” he told The Post. “In Africa I’ve caught every single species of animal.”

But one mission went terribly wrong — a fact Brooker did not fully discover until decades later, and for which he now seeks justice in a Manhattan courtroom.

In 1985, Brian Hunt, who runs the International Animal Exchange, agreed to foot the bill for what turned out to be one of Brooker’s toughest tests: the capture of 16 elusive giant eland in the Central African Republic.

The expedition spent three months in the bush chasing the 2,200-pound antelope across the savannah in helicopters, spying on the radio transmissions of hunters and poachers, hunters, in a desperate effort to zero in on the endangered, spiral-horned beasts that can run 40 mph. They nabbed 16.

“It was one of the hardest operations I’ve ever done in my life, working in an area 8,000 square miles,” Brooker told The Post. “When I tell you there’s nothing there — there’s nothing. No people. Zero.”

They managed to catch just three giant eland in three weeks before their luck finally turned.

“I sat behind the pilot. The animals are running flat out,” he recalled. “I’d shoot a net over it and jump out and use a syringe” to tranquilize the eland.

The animals eland were secured for transport, and then “we’d sort of hang on the skids of the helicopter — sometimes an hour, and hour and a half, to get back to camp,” he said.

The animals were quickly tamed. “Within a week, they were just eating out of your hand,” Brooker said.

They built a quarantine station in the capital of Bangui, and transferred the healthy herd of 16 giant eland there from the bush in two trips in a DC-3 plane.

That’s when Brooker handed off control of the animals to Hunt, who, Brooker now alleges, lied about quarantine requirements and had unqualified people handling them.

Brooker learned just last year that five of the giant eland he had captured died in an African quarantine the Bangui facility and one died on the way to New York, where Hunt kept them quarantined.

“I read they were doing blood tests on the one animal and they starved them for 24 or 36 hours,” Brooker fumed. “It’s crazy. I never lost one.”

It’s clear the people Hunt hired “had no clue what they were doing,” he said.

Brooker, Hunt and a third partner in the expedition, Ralph Rowher, had sold a 50 percent ownership interest in the giant eland to the Los Angeles Zoo for $1 million per head. The trio were supposed to split the other 50 percent stake and any profits from thebreeding the animals, according to court papers.

Brooker now estimates he should have been paid $8 million in breeding and other fees over the years but that he never got a dime. The Michigan-based Hunt, 75, who still heads the International Animal Exchange, did not return messages.

But Hunt allegedly told Brooker that selling the animals didn’t cover the $150,000 Brooker laid out to capture them, and never gave Brooker a dime, according to the lawsuit.

Brooker, who didn’t make any money at all off the giant eland, wanted the trio to sell their interest over the years, but Hunt refused.

Hunt later claimed Brooker had sold his interest in the giant eland years before, for a paltry $230,000, producing an agreement Brooker said he’d never seen, according to the May 1 Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit, which accuses Hunt of forging Brooker’s signature on the sale document.

“It’s certainly not his handwriting,” Brooker’s lawyer, Roger Blank, told The Post.

The alleged fraud and breach of contract surfaced last year in a separate court case between Brooker and the estate of Rowher, who died in 2008. Brooker had sued the ­estate over a piece of property he jointly owned with Rowher.

Brooker, who still does missions to rescue and preserve threatened species, lives and works at his 2,000-acre South African game reserve, called Glen Afric, where movie stars like Jackie Chan and Angelina Jolie have filmed.

In the face of what the Council of Foreign Relations has called “unprecedented” rhino poaching this year, Brooker is pushing for the legalization of the sale of rhino horns as a way to preserve the species and protect it from unscrupulous hunters.

Rhinos can regrow their horns just like humans can regrow their fingernails, Brooker said. The horns are highly valued in Chinese medicine and more recently, as a party drug cocktail in Vietnam.

“With the rhinos horns they have in storage there is enough rhino horn to comfortably keep the [Asian] market going for 20 years,” he said.

Brooker is also working to bring his Breeding Endangered Species Trust, or BEST, to the United States, which he says provide “transparency” for those who want to financially support wildlife conservation.

He hopes to revisit the giant eland, of which there are only about 200 thought to be left in the wild, in order to help protect the species.

“I’m just so worried about the wildlife situation,” he said, adding that poachers “will kill anything that moves.

“I’m going to carry on as long as I can,” he said.