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.
Jan 27, 2014 | News
On 20 December 2013 the Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa (PHASA) announced that it has appointed Hermann Meyeridricks as its new president.
Meyeridricks holds degrees in Commerce and Law at Stellenbosch University and a higher diploma in Tax Law from the University of Cape Town. Mr. Meyeridricks takes over from Hans Vermaak who had served his two-year term as president.
Jan 27, 2014 | News
PHASA has been criticized by prominent hunters such as Gerhard Damm and Peter Flack for its stance on the hunting of captive bred lions.
PHASA recently issued a statement indicating that it felt that Messrs Damm and Flack did not distinguish between canned lion hunting and captive bred lion hunting. PHASA said that canned hunting, which is illegal in South Africa, is when the animal is hunted while it is drugged or in an enclosed hunting area too small for the lion to evade the hunter; in captive-bred hunting, the animal is released into an extensive wildlife system to be hunted in accordance with South Africa’s strict and explicit regulations.
It proceeded to state that PHASA has always been strongly opposed to canned hunting and that it would continue to work with the government and the law enforcement agencies to eradicate the practice. From 2006 until its 2013 AGM PHASA’s position on captive bred hunting was that it supported the responsible hunting of all species in a sustainable wildlife system, in which animals can fend for themselves, provided that they are hunted in accordance with the laws of the land and PHASA’s own code of conduct.
According to PHASA a number of developments necessitated a review of its 2006 position. First, the South African Predator Breeders’ Association (SAPA) won its appeal against the Minister of Environmental Affairs in 2010, effectively ending any attempts to stop the practice in South Africa; second, the Department of Environmental Affairs has itself significantly softened its stance on the activity, calling it sustainable; and third, demand for lion hunting continues to grow.
Given this growth in demand, the fact that captive-bred lion hunting was deemed legal and sustainable by our courts and government, and the potential risks that continued unethical hunting practices in the captive-bred hunting industry posed to traditional trophy hunting, PHASA felt that it would be a dereliction of its duties to simply distance ourselves from the practice while ignoring continued unethical hunting and the damage this could cause to the reputation of all trophy hunting activities.
As such, PHASA entered into a dialogue with SAPA to improve the conditions in which lions are reared and hunted, and over the two year period it assisted SAPA to develop a set of norms which PHASA believes is a good starting point to ensure that captive-bred lion hunting is carried out responsibly.
