Lunch with Leo, Okavango Delta, 2008. Yes, his tail is flicking. Yes, he was annoyed that we were disturbing his repast. And yes, we got out of there.
By Terry Wieland
RECOGNITION OF REALITY RETURNS TO BOTSWANA
For good, one hopes
There is one inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the announcement that Botswana is reopening big-game hunting: Wonderful. Now, perhaps, the animals have a chance.
Having said that, however, where do you go from there? None of the arguments pro or con are new. The only new thing is the fact that politicians seem to actually be behaving sensibly, responding to legitimate concerns of the people on the ground, rather than bowing to pressure from Internet vigilantes or (in some documented cases) taking outright bribes from international so-called ‘animals rights’ groups.
The problems faced by the people of Botswana, to say nothing of the lions, elephants, and Cape buffalo of Botswana, are not much different from their counterparts elsewhere on the continent: Too many people wanting too much of the land, and the animals having no way to fight back against basic economic pressure — no way, that is, except the price that can be put on their heads (literally) for hunting licences and trophy fees.
In 1990, I made my first safari in Botswana, hunting from a lovely camp on the edge of the Okavango run by Safari South. Our tents were scattered among some towering sausage trees, with an outcropping of the delta creating something resembling what I imagine the Garden of Eden might have been. A resident herd of lechwe waded in the water, against a backdrop of hundreds of birds that came and went in a moving kaleidoscope of color.
Two years later, when I returned for a second, longer, sojourn in Botswana, I got a different look. When I asked about that camp, I was told it no longer existed. It was now pasture land, and the birds and lechwe had been replaced by cattle — the slow, relentless erosion of wildlife areas that herds of cattle and goats perpetrate from the Tswana lands of Botswana to the Masai territories of the Great Rift Valley. It is what some call “the inevitability of progress.”
There was a simple economic equation at work. Cattle and goats are money on the hoof. They can be eaten, or they can be sold to be eaten by others. Lechwe cannot, nor can flocks of water birds. My little paradise was gone.
Four years later, another trip to Botswana. This time, I was ensconced in a camp called Tsum Tsum, on another side of the delta. It was one of four camps operated by Mark Kyriacou; three were hunting camps, while the fourth — as required by game department regulations — was purely photographic.
Every couple of days, the camp manager and I would take a truckload of game meat over to the photographic camp. We took guinea fowl, doves, sand grouse, kudu, tsessebe — anything the hunters in our camp had collected that was surplus to our own requirements. Refrigeration being at a premium, meat could not be kept long. We always pulled up to the back of the cook tent and kept our mission to ourselves if we ran into one of the photo clients, most of whom were virulently anti-hunting and regarded us as barbarians.
The thing was, they were all there on group tours, paid for at discounts, counting their pennies while discoursing loud and long on how much they loved animals and “if you love animals you don’t kill them.” They were told the meat they were eating was goat or some native domestic fowl. I was also told that the only thing that kept the photo camp even close to economically viable was the supply of free meat we provided, as opposed to the very expensive process of shipping in meat either by air or via the ten-hour drive around the delta from Maun.
It was a real-life incarnation of the devil’s bargain in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. We, guns in hand, were the Morlocks; they, cameras in hand, were the naive and self-righteous Eloi. Barbarians we might have been, but we made their sojourn in paradise possible.
Another economic fact that is largely ignored by the “green” forces of the world, advocating “non-consumptive” wildlife policies, is that, first, everything dies and, second, everything eats. The only questions are how things will die, and who will eat what. Big-game hunters and, to a lesser extent, wingshooters, are prepared to pay big bucks for a safari. They come in small numbers, and spend large amounts; they try to make a minimal impact on the land, for obvious reasons.
Tourists, either so-called “eco-tourists” or the more obnoxious photo-safari clients, come in large numbers and spend small amounts — as little as possible, in my experience, and becoming ever more so as the goal of any trip, anywhere in the world, becomes merely the taking of a few selfies to post on Facebook.
People in large numbers require mass accommodation. They require buses, which require roads; they need to eat in mass quantities, which requires all the infrastructure of civilization, and this infrastructure requires its own support mechanisms of food, transportation, and fuel.
Through the 1990s and up to 2008, eco- and photo-tourism steadily gained ground in Botswana, partly through government fiat and partly through the rise of low-priced group tours and economy airfares. From my first visit in 1990, to my last one in 2008, Maun grew from a dusty little hamlet with only a couple of paved roads, where the major traffic hazard was an errant goat, into a semi-metropolis of traffic roundabouts, honking horns, sprawling hotel-resorts, and hordes of clanking heavy machinery to build and maintain highways.
None of the above is what you might call “wildlife friendly,” yet much of it was intended to support “non-consumptive” wildlife tourism. Hunters, it seems, are the only people who can see the irony in this.
While all this was going on, a couple of distinct wildlife controversies played important roles in the life of the delta. These concerned the hunting of lions and the hunting of elephants. In the latter case, elephant hunting was closed in Botswana in 1984, then reopened in 1996. Elephant numbers had ballooned, and they needed to be reduced. Not enough licences were issued to make much of an impact, but the fact of hunting affected where the elephants roamed and how they behaved.
For example, in 1996, at Tsum Tsum, I had the experience of waking up around midnight to the sound of an elephant tearing apart the tree overhead to get at the edible pods. The ripping of branches and growling of elephant digestion a few inches from my head, separated only by some eight-ounce canvas, was memorable. A couple of years later, the elephants avoided Tsum Tsum, which made our lives a little less perilous.
Something similar happened with lions, but in reverse. Lion hunting was opened, closed, then opened again, largely in response to international pressure, and lion numbers leapt. By 2004, lions around Mark’s main camp, Splash, roamed among the tents at night in such numbers that none of the staff would venture out before daylight, when the lions withdrew into the undergrowth. Missing one’s pre-dawn coffee, sipping and listening to the birds, made a major impression on me (pre-dawn coffee being an important personal ritual) but I didn’t want to see any of our staff get eaten — which could and did happen.
As lion numbers burgeoned, unthreatened by rifles, they made serious inroads into populations of Cape buffalo, but instead of reopening lion hunting, the authorities suggested limiting buffalo hunting. This was more or less the situation when the incoming president, Ian Khama, announced the closure of big-game hunting on public and tribal land, including the Okavango. This big-game hunter’s Eden since the arrival of William Cotton Oswell in 1849 was turned over to the photo safaris in the zebra-striped vans, all in an attempt to make Botswana the poster boy for the idealistic (and wholly unrealistic) “green” movement.
Meanwhile, elephant numbers increased with devastating effects on habitat, lions became as numerous as goats, the Cape buffalo withdrew into the mopane to escape the lions, and the bigwigs of the international animal-rights groups flocked to Maun to drink to their success on the patios of the new photo-safari resorts.
Too extreme an image? Possibly. You might conclude from this that your correspondent is a tad cynical when it comes to the motives and motivation of politicians, greenies, and animal-rights types. In the end, history has shown, over and over again, that the only people who genuinely care about the welfare of wildlife, and are willing to spend big bucks to help, are hunters, and the only people who can protect wildlife are the inhabitants of the country where wildlife dwells.
The reopening of big-game hunting in Botswana puts those two groups back into a position to protect the animals and ensure their long-term welfare. Or at least, one would hope.
The Okavango lunch bunch. Six big male lions used our camp at Tsum Tsum as a screen to attack a herd of buffalo out behind. They brought down a bull, with great commotion at four in the morning, and were still eating five hours later when we drove out to take a look. The other three are in the grass, napping. You would not want to cross these guys.
