Jul 29, 2020 | News
July independence …or not?
In line with USA’s month of Independence, it seems just about everything has lost its independence. From education, social and main stream media, our civil liberties, through to just about anything else. The only thing we truly have left that’s independent are our minds.
And even they’re attacked from every angle, every day. Retaining independence and clarity of thought is a feat all on its own. As an aside, if you have not read the book by Christopher Wiley (the brains behind Cambridge Analytica) this is an incredible and terrifying read.
Jul 7, 2020 | News
In May this year, elephants started dying in the Okavango Delta region of Botswana, a country known for its large and burgeoning elephant numbers. With a population estimated at some 135,000 individuals, Botswana has the largest concentration of these pachyderms in Africa. But there are no fences between neighbouring countries, so Botswana’s elephants are able to move between that country, Angola, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. To date, an estimated 400 elephants have apparently died, without any cause having been pinpointed to date. A mystery indeed.
The Botswana government has come under fire for not finding out what is killing their elephants, but reports say that samples are now being examined by several different laboratories. It should be remembered that the movement of humans and goods in southern Africa have been negatively affected by the COVID-19 ‘lockdowns’. The following reasons for the elephant mortality have been considered:
Poaching? No – dead animals have not had their tusks removed, so poaching seems unlikely.
Persecution? Many rural folks in Botswana are very disgruntled with elephants which destroy their crops, houses and often people at times. Some may be tempted to take revenge on elephants for this reason, but no evidence of gunshots is visible on any of the carcasses examined.
Poison? A number of elephants were killed in neighbouring Zimbabwe when a waterhole was poisoned with cyanide. But such poisoning incidents usually affect other species drinking water from the same waterhole, or scavengers like vultures that feed on poisoned carcasses. No such evidence is forthcoming from Botswana.
Toxic algae? Some blue-green algae are known to be toxic to mammals, but again, if this was the cause we would expect other species drinking from the same waterholes to be affected. They are not – this thing is apparently elephant-specific.
Anthrax? This disease is known to kill elephants, but during an outbreak, many different species are usually affected. There is no evidence that anthrax is the culprit.
Starvation? No – Botswana has had reasonable rains, and the elephant carcasses do not appear to be emaciated. Starvation normally affects the very young and the very old, but the carcasses examined so far seem to be subadults and adults in good condition.
A new, previously unknown virus affecting the nervous system? In the outbreak area, elephants have been seen to be walking in circles. A number of the elephants have apparently collapsed face-down and died like that, indicating a very sudden onset of a fatal neurological event.
This last one got me thinking about events many years ago when my friend and colleague Dr Peter Mundy was studying vultures in then Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) for his Doctoral degree. He kept a number of different species in captivity for his research, and had the sad experience of quite a few of these birds dying of what he described as ‘epileptic fits’. Affected birds would stagger about in circles, falling on their backs with convulsions and quickly die. The mysterious agent responsible was spread from affected birds to healthy individuals.
Brain tissue from the dead birds was sent to Dr Bob Swanepoel, a very good veterinary researcher in the country. However, due to various circumstances beyond his control, Dr Swanepoel could only get around to examining these specimens several years later, when he was working at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Research Institute in South Africa.
He found evidence of a virus in brain tissue that probably caused this deadly neurological syndrome in the affected vultures. Unfortunately, nothing further has ever been done to conduct more research on this particular avian disease.
Living in the age of COVID-19, it seems clear that a virus from bats managed to transfer to humans in Wuhan, China, possibly via pangolins. Given this potential for interspecies transmission of viruses, is it possible that Peter Mundy’s vultures picked up their deadly virus from eating dead elephants that had succumbed to the same agent? And that the same or a similar virus has now resurfaced in the elephants in the Okavango Delta? What happens to disease transmission when animal (or human?) populations grow too large? Again, I am reminded of an epidemic of rabies that decimated the very large population of Kudu in Namibia many years ago.…
Hopefully the mystery of Botswana’s elephant mortality will be solved, sooner or later. But these things do take time, as critics of the Botswana government should be reminded. It took many years, and the near-extinction of the vultures in India and Pakistan, before it was finally discovered that the birds were being killed in their thousands by Diclofenac (‘Voltaren’), a drug commonly used to treat sick cattle in both countries. When some of these medicated livestock died, they were consumed by vultures, with devastating results. What a terrible outcome for these magnificent birds, which “Even when bloody, have done no creature harm”.
Dr John Ledger is a past Director of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, a consultant and academic on energy and the environment, and a columnist for the African Hunting Gazette. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.
John.Ledger@wol.co.za
Jun 8, 2020 | News, Newsletter, RSS Feed
The theme for this year’s global environment day is biodiversity, meaning the components of the natural world that work together to constitute the living planet. The number and variety of species in the world is astonishingly huge, with only a fraction of the species known and described. The rate of extinction of species is a cause for concern, particularly as the major reason for extinctions is the superabundance of human beings.
Now, at this time of the pandemic of COVID-19, it may not be very fashionable to campaign for the conservation of a virus that is causing so much misery and disruption to the human population. But biodiversity in its broadest sense includes viruses, bacteria, fungi, arthropods and other forms of life that can cause harm to other living organisms. The very core of biodiversity is that every conceivable lifestyle will be exploited by organisms of different kinds in order to survive and replicate themselves. So, we have parasites, predators and prey making up the web of life that we call biodiversity.
Humans have learnt to cultivate and farm a variety of plants and animals to provide a reliable source of food. But many humans still depend on foraging for wild plants and hunting of animals for their daily sustenance, and many such people live in Africa. As more and more humans migrate to the cities of the continent, seeking better lives and the benefits of modern civilisation, they also retain their taste for bushmeat, and commercial trade in wild plants and animals thrives in the urban centres of the world. Here the concentration of humans makes the rapid spread of harmful organisms such as viruses that much easier. There is strong evidence that the COVID-19 virus originated from bats in China.
Various epidemics or pandemics have afflicted humans for a long time. More than 100 years ago the Spanish Flu spread around the world after World War I ended in 1918. My own grandfather was one of its victims. And who can forget the poliomyelitis epidemics of the 1940s, that killed many and left many others crippled for life? The South African Poliomyelitis Research Foundation was established in Johannesburg with funds raised largely from the public. In parallel with efforts in the United States of America, a vaccine was achieved simultaneously in both countries in 1955, and a mass global immunisation campaign has seen the disease disappear from most of the world.
Hopefully the COVID-19 virus will likewise be conquered in time by the development of a vaccine. It is rather ironic that modern medicine has been able to extend and prolong life for many people suffering from various ailments, but this older group of humans seems particularly susceptible to the ‘new’ Coronavirus.
With travel, tourism and hunting at a complete standstill, we can but fervently hope that the success story around the polio vaccine some 70 years ago will soon be repeated. And perhaps on World Environment Day, we also need to recognise that not all the wondrous expressions of biodiversity out there are good for us!
Dr John Ledger is a past Director of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, a consultant and academic on energy and the environment, and a columnist for the African Hunting Gazette. John.Ledger@wol.co.za
May 8, 2020 | News, Newsletter, RSS Feed
Garth Owen-Smith lost his battle with cancer on 21 April 2020, and so ended the life of an extraordinary man who has left an indelible mark on the practice of wildlife conservation in Africa. For 53 years, from his first visit to Namibia in 1967, Garth devoted his life to changing the way in which wildlife policies and attitudes to rural communities were implemented.
Colonial attitudes and philosophies brought to Africa saw rural Africans as ‘poachers’, to be pursued and punished by the equivalent of the European ‘gamekeepers’, whose job was to protect the ‘Royal Game’ within the areas designated for their protection. In this way most rural Africans were alienated from wildlife and denied access to the wild resources that they had traditionally utilised for centuries.
Garth Owen-Smith’s story was published in African Hunting Gazette 23.2 in 2017. His early years in Namibia (then ‘South West Africa’, administered by South Africa since 1921 after World War I) were characterised by ongoing friction with government officials who regarded rural communities as incompatible with wildlife conservation goals. Garth’s view was that unless these same communities were treated as legal custodians of the wildlife they lived alongside, there was no hope for nature conservation in Africa. His philosophy was articulated in a seminal article entitled Wildlife conservation in Africa: There is another way!, published in Quagga # 17 (1987), the journal of the Endangered Wildlife Trust.
r the years, Garth suffered considerable deprivation and hardship, but stuck firmly to his convictions. With his anthropologist partner, Dr Margaret Jacobsohn, steady headway was made, which escalated rapidly after Namibia’s independence in 1990. The new regime was very supportive of the notion of communities having ownership and responsibility for the wildlife on their land, and the concept of ‘conservancies’ was widely implemented.
By 2017 there were 83 registered conservancies in Namibia, covering 163,000 square kilometres of land, over which wildlife was now managed as a valuable and sustainable resource through tourism, live game capture and sales, subsistence hunting and trophy hunting. Today Namibia leads the African continent in its enlightened wildlife conservation policies, which have ensured the increase in numbers of rhinos, elephants and a myriad other species that have benefitted from the conservancy concept.
It is not often that individuals can play a major role in shaping far-reaching national policies, but Garth-Owen Smith was one of them, and we salute his legacy and his memory with gratitude and appreciation for a life truly well-lived.
Dr John Ledger is a past Director of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, a consultant and academic on energy and the environment, and a columnist for the African Hunting Gazette. John.Ledger@wol.co.za
Apr 9, 2020 | News
Apr 3, 2020 | News, Newsletter, RSS Feed
While the world goes into “lockdown” in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus, international travel, tourism and hunting activities have ground to a halt. The flow of money that used to reach rural African communities in the form of hunting income has dried up. What are these custodians of African wildlife resources going to do?
The tourism and hunting industries are generally not sufficiently organised to have reserve funds to pay workers in their industries at such unexpected times of stress. Large numbers of employees in safari and bush camps all across Africa have lost their jobs.
It is to be hoped that those operators that have made good profits during the good years will support their loyal employees during this stressful time. The NGOs that work with rural communities also have a vital supporting role to play. Nobody knows how long it will take for international travel to resume, and for visitors to return to Africa. But it will happen, sooner or later, and the challenge is to weather the storm until it is spent.
Until then, it is important that the valuable wildlife resources of Africa be protected against exploitation by the criminals who are already advantaged by the CITES bans on trade in ivory and rhino horn. Because no legal trade is allowed, only the illegal trade is allowed to flourish, thanks to the lunacy of CITES and the animal rights activists that seem to determine policy there.
Government conservation agencies are under extreme pressure to maintain their presence and uphold law enforcement among rural communities that have lost their incomes from tourism and hunting. What they can do is ensure that such communities have access to protein from controlled and sustainable subsistence hunting of non-threatened species. In this way the wildlife of Africa can at least support the lives of their custodians until such time as the currency-based economy returns to rural regions.
Those rural communities that have nurtured their wildlife populations over the years for the benefits of ecotourism and hunting, can now turn to their valuable assets as a sustainable source of food in times of need. They deserve nothing less.
Dr John Ledger is a past Director of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, a consultant and academic on energy and the environment, and a columnist for the African Hunting Gazette. John.Ledger@wol.co.za
