Oct 14, 2014 | News
For those who watch Come Dine With Me, you’d know that serving pangolin foetus soup as your starter probably wouldn’t score many points. However, this dish is considered a delicacy throughout south-east Asia and China, and has partially led to the decline of all four Asian pangolin species.
Apparently not sated, evidence is amassing that industrial-scale shipments of African pangolins are being ferried across the Indian Ocean to continue feeding those with extravagant tastes. Although China has recently outlawed the eating of 420 threatened species, which includes all eight pangolin species worldwide, the rise of the middle-class predilection for status symbols and prestige will probably ensure a flourishing black market trade in pangolins, much like wealthy consumers in Vietnam are now thought to be driving the rhino poaching epidemic.
Unlike rhinos, however, pangolins are estimated to be the most trafficked mammal in the world, with between 10 000 and 100 000 sold in black markets every year. Unfortunately for Temminck’s Ground Pangolin Smutsia temminckii – the only pangolin species found in South Africa – this is a war being fought on two fronts. While not quite the same twee presentation of a soup starter, pangolin blood, intestines, feet, and scales are consumed in South Africa for their assumed medical properties.
Pangolins, known locally as inkhakha (isiNdebele), kgaga (Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana), haka (Shona) or khwara (Tshivenda), are caught, bought and traded by traditional healers and punted as curing anything from nosebleeds to cancer. Ongoing research from Tshwane Technical University and the African Pangolin Working Group suggests that all indigenous South African cultures use the pangolin in some form of traditional medicine. The parts are most often burnt and ground to a fine powder; the patients then cut themselves and apply the powder over the cuts for magical protection.
Always on offer at the Mai Mai bushmeat market, which is tucked inside Johannesburg’s inner city, vendors (who grind up the intestines and hang them in the shop to lure customers) sell individual scales for R80-100 each, and advertise that they will confer invincibility, strength and treat low blood pressure. So powerful is this belief in the pangolin’s magical properties, that sangomas will drive any distance back home if they’ve forgotten their pangolin scale, and thieves think they are bulletproof if they have a scale in their breast-pocket.
Bemused, a judge asked an arrested poacher why he thought the pangolin’s scales made him invincible if the poacher had so easily killed the pangolin for its scales. Nonplussed, the poacher replied, “The pangolin did not believe its scales would protect him.”
Therein lies the heart of the problem. Although there is no scientific evidence to support the 
healing properties of pangolins, and their scales are certainly made of the same non-magical keratin as rhino horn or finger nails, traditions are stubborn and have inertia that can take generations to dispel. Pangolins are now so rare in KwaZulu-Natal that vendors must import them from Mozambique.
Throughout the bushveld regions, where game fence electrification is rapidly increasing as farmers convert from livestock to game ranching, over 1 000 pangolins might be electrocuted annually, as pangolins roll around the strand when convulsed by electrical shocks, and die of exposure or are collected by locals looking to sell them to healers. These threats, coupled with an intensifying illegal international trade, do not paint a pretty picture for our pangolins.
There is a legend that pangolins create thunder by racing across the heavens rattling their scales. Unless future generations can be convinced that these scales do not cure cancer or deflect bullets, and that vegetable soup is preferable to pangolin foetus soup, Africa is set to become a far drier and less interesting place to live.
Highlights
- Up to 100 000 pangolins may be sold in black markets worldwide every year.
- Only one species is found in South Africa – Temminck’s Ground Pangolin Smutsia temmincki.
- Apparently all indigenous South African cultures use the pangolin in some form of traditional medicine.
- Individual pangolin scales may sell for R80-100 each, and are believed to confer invincibility, strength and treat low blood pressure.
- Thieves and rioters think they are bulletproof if they have a pangolin scale in their breast-pocket.
- More than 1 000 pangolins might be electrocuted annually on electrified game fences in South Africa.
- These harmless, insect-feeding mammals face a dire future at the hand of man.
Oct 14, 2014 | News
Management techniques vary widely, with one end of the spectrum being intensive single species production systems, and the other end being extensive, free-roaming systems. Intensive systems fall under the game farming category, and generally involve high-value species such as Sable, held in small fenced camps, where they are protected from predators and provided with all their food, water and veterinary requirements.
The purpose of these systems is to produce superior animals for live game sales or trophy hunting, and breeding may be manipulated to select animals for desirable traits, such as long horns.
Extensive systems fall under the wildlife ranching category, where wildlife is given very little assistance from the landowner other than protection against poachers.
Between these management extremes are a number of intermediate management practices that fall along a continuum, including semi-intensive systems where animals are supported by regular management interventions to maintain habitat integrity and supplement the food and water supply, and lightly managed systems where properties are large enough to accommodate most ecological requirements of the wildlife, but populations may need occasional help in years of bad drought. In some instances, different landowners may join forces to form a conservancy, whereby adjacent properties remove the fences that separate them, allow wildlife to roam freely and adopt a common management plan.
In South Africa, landowners have been allowed to commercially exploit their wildlife since the 1970s, a fact that is widely credited with the huge growth of wildlife ranching in the country over the last 40 years. Starting from a handful of game farmers in those early years, wildlife ranching has grown exponentially and now incorporates>200 000 km2 of private land representing as much as 17% of South Africa’s surface area. The precise number of wildlife ranches is not known, but is thought to be between 10 000 and 15 000, while the number of wild animals living on these properties may be as high as 20 million.
There are, however, potential downsides to wildlife ranching, and there are questions about whether the industry has a positive effect on the conservation goals of South Africa and whether the land could be put to better use for the long-term benefit of the country.
The private ownership of White Rhinoceros in South Africa illustrates many of the pros and cons of wildlife ranching described above. In the late 1960s, the then Natal Parks Board started selling rhinos to private landowners, and this process has been continued by SANParks selling rhinos from Kruger National Park and other state land.
These sales have helped keep state-owned rhino populations at sustainable levels, which helps prevent over-utilisation of food resources and maintains high birth rates. The number of rhinos on private land has subsequently reached about 5 000 individuals, or one-quarter of the national herd, while the range of the species outside formally protected areas has expanded considerably.
Given the current high rate of rhino poaching in South Africa, the contribution of wildlife ranching to rhino protection may turn out to be important to the future survival of the species. On the down-side, many private populations of White Rhinos are small and isolated because they occur on small fenced properties and therefore are making negligible contributions to the conservation of wild rhinos. Others are held in intensive breeding conditions where their breeding may be manipulated, and this might disqualify them from possible future reintroduction into the wild.
Although wildlife ranching is a large and growing industry in South Africa, there is still much that we do not know about it, and this lack of knowledge puts it at a disadvantage when it comes to government support. We do not know how many wildlife ranchers there are, how much area they use, how many animals they have, how much money they contribute to the national economy, how many people they employ, and how much they could potentially contribute towards food security.
Questions about the true impacts of fencing, the potential implications of intensive breeding and the overall contribution to biodiversity conservation also need to be answered. In an attempt to deal with some of these issues, the Endangered Wildlife Trust is conducting a study investigating the contribution that wildlife ranching makes to the green economy of South Africa. To achieve this, we are trying to interview 1 000 private wildlife ranchers using a structured survey questionnaire. Wildlife ranchers of any type could make a valuable contribution to the study and to the future success of their industry, and are encouraged to participate. Please contact the author for further details.
The positive contributions made by wildlife ranching include the following:
- Large areas of land that were once used for livestock or crops now form natural or semi-natural habitat that is generally better suited to the conservation of biodiversity. This land also conserves indigenous vegetation, protects watersheds and allows degraded land to recover;
- There are now many more wild animals in South Africa than there were 40 years ago. This is in contrast to the situation in Kenya, which banned the consumptive use of wildlife on private land in the 1970s, and has subsequently experienced a 60% decline in wildlife numbers outside state protected areas;
- These animals are distributed over a much wider area than would be the case if only state-protected areas were allowed to benefit from wildlife, and this spreads the risk from ecological catastrophes and increases the chances of long-term survival of species. Wildlife ranching also provides a buffer against possible future losses of species from state-protected areas if national land policies become less favourable to conservation;
- Numbers of some threatened species have increased as a result of their inclusion on private land, including the White Rhinoceros, Black Wildebeest, Cape Mountain Zebra and Bontebok;
- There are substantial financial benefits to be gained by wildlife ranchers, with knock-on effects to other industries and the national economy;
- The large and growing industry creates > 65 000 jobs.
The potential negative aspects of wildlife ranching include the following:
- Most private wildlife ranches have game fences that prevent the free movement of animals across their natural ranges, which is problematic for the dispersal of many species, for migratory species and for species with large natural ranges, including many large predators;
- Electric fences with trip wires present lethal barriers to some species, such as pangolins and tortoises, and result in the deaths of many animals;
- Many wildlife ranchers are intolerant of predators and use lethal control measures to keep numbers down, and this has detrimental impacts on the natural functioning of ecosystems;
- Intensive breeding systems that select for traits favoured by humans, such as large horns or unusual colour morphs, may promote the breeding success of weaker individuals and thus reduce the fitness of the overall population;
- Even though wildlife numbers are high on many private wildlife ranches, the intensive breeding practices and impenetrable fencing used on some properties mean that they cannot be considered ‘wild’. This is important because it can affect the conservation status of a species (i.e. whether it is threatened with extinction), and this in turn impacts on the level of protection that the species receives from the government;
- There is a perception that wildlife ranching is a playground for the rich and does not provide many social, economic or food security benefits to South Africa. This is not conducive to a positive attitude from government.
Mar 27, 2014 | News
Canned hunting is illegal in South Africa and people should immediately report suspected incidences to the police or wildlife authorities, the Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa (PHASA) said today.
“Canned hunting should, however, not be confused with legal, responsible and sustainable forms of hunting, which have had a demonstrably positive impact on conservation in South Africa as well as other countries where it is practiced,” said chief executive Adri Kitshoff.
Kitshoff said that PHASA had noted a deliberate attempt to confuse the difference between canned hunting and legitimate forms of hunting and that this was part of a larger campaign to undermine hunting as an effective conservation tool.
PHASA said that the animal rights and animal welfare organisations behind the campaign were not recognised authorities in the field of conservation. “The real authorities are the Convention for the International Trade in Endangered Species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the World Wildlife Fund and in South Africa the Department of Environmental Affairs, all of which recognise sustainable hunting as a valuable contributor to conservation practices as well as to rural community development and anti-poaching initiatives,” she said.
For further information contact Adri Kitshoff, PHASA chief executive, on 083 650 0442.
Mar 27, 2014 | News
The inaugural World Wildlife Day (3rd of March) is an ideal opportunity for international conservation organisations and authorities to publicly acknowledge the role that big game hunting plays in the conservation of species and their natural habitat, the Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa (PHASA) said today.
Adri Kitshoff, PHASA chief executive, said that while trophy hunting is a highly emotional and often misunderstood industry, despite its value as a conservation mechanism having been quantifiably and historically demonstrated.
“We wouldn’t have white rhino today if it wasn’t for trophy hunting,” she said, adding that South Africa is home to almost 90% of all rhino. “Additionally, thanks to hunting our sable, bontebok, wild ostrich, Cape mountain zebra, black wildebeest and many other species have been brought back from the brink of extinction and have successfully been reintroduced into areas where they had become locally extinct.”
Kitshoff said that South Africa is a prime example of how wildlife can flourish provided there are laws that allow for both the private ownership of game and sustainable trophy hunting. “Fifty years ago there were four private game reserves in the country and a headcount of all our game would’ve numbered some 500 000. Today there are about 10 000 private game ranches, covering some 20.5 million hectares and home to an estimated 16 million head of game. By comparison, all South Africa’s national parks only cover 7.5 million hectares, which is home to an estimated 4 million head of game,” she said.
“Game has overtaken cattle, which now number only 14 million, and vast tracks of land, commercially unviable for photographic safaris, have been reclaimed from livestock-rearing and agricultural use for wildlife conservation. The health of our wildlife today is about the same as it was 100 years ago and this development, unmatched anywhere in the world, is almost exclusively due to the impact of trophy hunting.”
According to Kitshoff, most global conservation bodies support trophy hunting but are reluctant to do so publically out of fear of a backlash from animal rights activists and a misinformed public. She said that the recent public outburst over the Dallas Safari Club’s black rhino hunting permit auction, endorsed by the Convention of International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) and the International Union of the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), was a great opportunity for many of these organisations to help educate the public about the virtues of hunting. Instead it was left to the hunters to defend.
“Our plea to sensible conservation authorities is to stand up and publicly defend activities that have a substantial and measurable positive impact on our environment no matter how unpopular these may be with animal rights activists and the uninformed,” she said.
For further information contact Adri Kitshoff, PHASA chief executive, on +27 83 650 0442.
Mar 27, 2014 | News
Africa’s wildlife is being loved to death. Kenya’s much-praised ban on hunting, in fact, has had an impact opposite to its intent: wild animals are disappearing at an accelerating rate. “Charismatic megafauna” — elephants, lions, rhinos, the larger antelopes — are in a true death spiral.
When Kenya’s hunting ban was passed in 1977 in response to the “Ivory Wars” that were ravaging the nation’s elephants, it was hailed as a new and progressive paradigm for wildlife management. With the hunting pressure off, animal lovers opined, the game would bounce back. And it’s true that elephants did recover modestly over the ensuring two decades.
But now the slaughter has begun anew, driven by an unrelenting demand from a prosperous Asia for ivory objets d’art. Meanwhile, everything else is going down the tubes, including carnivores and antelopes. By best estimates, Kenya’s wildlife has declined by more than 70 percent over the past 20 years.
What happened? While the ban played well in the developed world, it was catastrophic for the people who lived in the rural hinterlands of Kenya — the places where wildlife actually exists. Basically, folks out in the bush had the responsibility for maintaining wildlife on their lands, but they were deprived of any benefit from the animals. Such a situation is intolerable for subsistence pastoralists and farmers.
Subsequent to the ban, they could not respond — legally — when an elephant raided their maize and stomped their goats, or when a lion killed a cow. But laws made in Nairobi are seldom if ever applied with rigor in the Kenyan bush. Even as animal rights groups lionized Kenya’s no-kill policy and urged its adoption across Africa, the killing has continued unabated. Carnivores are poisoned, antelope snared, elephants speared and shot: Crops can thus be raised and the livestock grazed in peace.
Michael Norton-Griffiths, who has served as the senior ecologist for Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park and the manager of the Eastern Sahel Program for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, likened the situation to owning a goat.
Assume, says Norton-Griffiths, that you’re a poor pastoralist in rural Kenya, and your assets consist of a goat. You can eat this goat, or milk it. You can sell it, gaining hard currency that you can use to buy necessities. Or you can breed it, increasing your asset base in the form of another goat.
But now imagine that a law is passed that forbids you to eat, sell, or breed that goat. In fact, the only thing you can do with it is allow tourists to take pictures of it. Even then, you obtain no benefit; the money derived from the tourists photographing the goat goes to the owner of the “eco-lodge” they are patronizing.
By substituting wildlife for the goat, says Norton-Griffiths, you have the situation that exists in Kenya today.
If African wildlife is to survive — let alone thrive — local people must value it. In other words, they must be allowed to gain both income and meat from it in a sustainable fashion. And repugnant as it may seem to most urbanized westerners, lion, buffalo and elephant hunting can be sustainable enterprises — like most large African mammals, these species are fecund. Wealthy hunters will pay between $50,000 to $100,000 to take a trophy male lion or elephant bull, and up to $20,000 for a buffalo with big horns. If that money is returned to local communities — along with the meat — then tolerance for wildlife reflexively improves.
Similarly, the commercial cropping of certain species of plains game for hides and meat (Burchell’s zebra most specifically) can build support for conservation among Africa’s pastoral and agricultural communities.
This isn’t to say hunting is a panacea for Africa’s wildlife crisis. Kenya’s wildlife stocks currently are too depleted to allow any kind of “consumptive” game policy. Tanzania has larger populations of wildlife than Kenya, and both trophy and subsistence hunting are allowed — but the game is dwindling. Over-hunting due to poor enforcement of the quotas and general government corruption is widely acknowledged as a contributing factor.
But a template for a rational wildlife policy exists: in Namibia. By the late 1980s, wildlife was almost wholly extirpated from this vast southwestern African territory following decades of conflict between South Africa and the Southwest Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO). Following Namibia’s independence from South Africa in 1990, the leaders of the new nation established wildlife policies that invested tribal communities with control over the game, while simultaneously establishing firm quotas for individual species. Income from both hunting and cropping is rigorously tracked, and diligently returned to the communities.
Namibian wildlife, in short, was changed from a liability to an asset. Today, Namibia is burgeoning with wildlife, game and non-game species alike. The country has the world’s largest population of cheetahs. Elephants are abundant — in some places too abundant — and lions are returning. Rare antelopes such as kudu and sable are anything but rare in Namibia; their meat, the yield of certified cropping programs, is easily found in supermarkets.
Obviously, this would not be possible without relatively good governance. In the 2011 corruption index for 182 countries released by Transparency International, Namibia ranked 57th and Kenya was close to the bottom at 154. If Kenya is to duplicate Namibia’s success, it must address its rampant corruption as well as revamp its game laws.
Still, Namibia points to a better way than the blanket no-hunt policy that has become holy writ among some animal rights groups. And it’s better because it’s pragmatic: It addresses the needs of people as well as the rights of animals. Unlike Kenya’s current wildlife policy, it actually works.
Jan 27, 2014 | News
The WWF issued the following statement regarding China’s destruction of ivory: The world’s biggest consumer of trafficked ivory – most of which comes from elephants illegally killed in Africa – destroyed more than 6 metric tons of seized elephant ivory today.
This move is a hopeful signal that China is firmly behind international action to stop rampant elephant poaching and illegal ivory trade. China has previously indicated it is prepared to clamp down hard on the illegal ivory trade.
The ivory destruction takes place just weeks after eight Chinese citizens were convicted given sentences of 3 to 15 years imprisonment for smuggling a total of 3.2 tons of ivory.
Attending the ivory crushing ceremony were Chinese government officials, as well as a variety of international observers including from the United States government, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the United Nations Environment Programme, and international non-governmental organizations including WWF and TRAFFIC.
‘China’s gesture is a solemn commitment by the government to cleanse the Chinese ivory market and to guarantee the survival of Africa’s elephants,’ said Fan Zhiyong, head of WWF-China’s Species Programme. ‘WWF believes that destroying seized ivory is a signal of the government’s commitment to enhance law enforcement against illegal ivory trade.’
China has a legal ivory market of items that pre-date the 1989 international ivory trade ban and a CITES sanctioned ‘one-off’ ivory sale with four African countries in 2008. But under rules of the CITES, seized ivory cannot be used for commercial purposes.
In the past, Kenya, Gabon, the Philippines and the United States all destroyed large amounts of illegal ivory. WWF and TRAFFIC believe that the destruction of illegal ivory should be backed by rigorous documentation, including an independent audit of the ivory slated for destruction, to reduce the potential risk that some of it could leak back into the black market.
