ADDIS ABABA, NAIROBI, FREETOWN, CAPE TOWN, KAMPALA--Less than six months ago there was no humane society in Ethiopia. Foreign conservation groups sent veterinarians from time to time to vaccinate and sterilize the owned dogs around Bale Mountains National Park, to keep them from hybridizing with and transmitting diseases to the highly endangered Ethiopian wolf, and the Ethiopia Wildlife Conservation and Parks Department tried to discourage poaching, but no one did anything in an organized way for street dogs, or cats, or to prevent cruelty to either pets, livestock, or work animals.

On August 30, however, Bale Mountains National Park staff member Efrem Legesse announced the formation of the Homeless Animals Protection Society, incorporated with the help of Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Program education officer Zegeye Kibret and Bale Mountains National Park warden Hana Kifle.

They have no facilities of their own, and no budget, but were already pursuing their program. They have added messages about the plight of homeless animals to their talks to school children about the importance of conserving wildlife. They have visited gatherings of truck drivers to urge them to avoid hitting dogs--and have been encouraged, too, that roadkills of dogs seemed to diminish during the next few weeks. They pay a visit to anyone who is suspected of cruelty. They speak out against the formerly routine poisoning of dogs, jackals, and hyenas, who are considered a threat to sheep and goats even if they do no harm. They hope to find a way soon to start sterilizing and vaccinating street dogs. Since the first weeks of 2001, Legesse has sent ANIMAL PEOPLE dozens of typed or handwritten reports, documenting poaching and cruelty cases as thoroughly as if he had studied evidentiary reporting at the National Animal Control Training Academy. Each report includes a photograph of the subject, whether an abandoned puppy, an overloaded donkey, or a poached hyena, with transcripts of interviews with all witnesses.

When and if Ethiopia gains a law prohibiting animal abuse, Legesse will be ready to secure convictions. "I have worked in various Ethiopian national parks," Legesse wrote in a May 2001 ANIMAL PEOPLE guest column about the dogs of Bale. "At first I was interested only in conservation as the source of my own living. I believed that Ethiopians should protect our natural resources, and hoped that wildlife could attract tourists, but I never paid attention to animals other than wildlife.

"After I began reading ANIMAL PEOPLE, my attitude changed. I realized that every animal has a right to live, and that if an animal must be killed, the killing must be done humanely." Interviewing people in and around the park about their view of the dogs, Legesse discovered that he was not alone. Kibret and Kifle felt much the same as he did, and many others agreed that shooting and poisoning dogs is cruel, even though something must be done to limit their numbers.

The idea of forming the Homeless Animals Protection Society evolved rapidly from there--even though Ethiopia not only lacks existing humane infrastructure, but also lacks a strong tradition of petkeeping.

Nearly half the human population are Muslims, and in most Muslim households, Legesse explains, "It is taboo to approach or even touch a dog. They just keep dogs to guard their livestock. Children approach dogs more often than their parents, but sometimes children stone the homeless dogs."

Legesse, Kibret, and Kifle will need outside help to sterilize and vaccinate the homeless dogs of Bale. After that, they would like to sterilize and vaccinate the homeless dogs of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. They hope that eventually the Homeless Animals Protection Society will have active chapters throughout nation. For now, though, they work with just their voices.

The role of class

Colonial attitudes toward animal protection are ending throughout Africa, more than a generation after colonial rule did. The remnants of colonial-era animal protection infrastructure typically leave successors little more than the chance to start with a name and sometimes a building.

The Zambia Society of Vegetarians, for instance, is trying to revive the Mufulira SPCA "after more than 10 years of inactivity," president and SPCA director Ernest M. Chakanga wrote to ANIMAL PEOPLE in August 2000. Chakanga described the 42-kennel SPCA shelter as "dilapidated and vandalized," in urgent need of extensive renovation, for which he was raising seed money by selling donated used clothing.

Many others start with less, like Sylvain Souop, of Yaounde, Cameroun, who wrote to ANIMAL PEOPLE in May 2000 seeking "help to raise funds for a permanent sensibilization campaign for the protection of domestic animals in Cameroun and central Africa. Since four years," Souop explained, "I am trying to sensibilize my counterparts and mates about the protection and well-being of domestic animals like dogs, cats, and birds," without institutional support of any kind.

"My task is not easy, as you can imagine," Souop continued, "as Africans are preoccupied by the battle to survive." The colonial perspective, imported chiefly from Britain, divided the animal world into a privileged elite including dogs, cats, and horses; a middle class of "game," with some rights to habitat and fecundity, but no right to life or kind treatment; a slave class of domestic animals, living and dying entirely as human property; and a criminal underclass of baboons, jackals, and other "nuisance" species, to whom anyone might do anything.

Recognizing such class distinctions kept the workload down, appealed to colonial donors whose status often derived from class distinction, and whose occupations were often based on exploitation of non-privileged animals, and rendered the humane ideal unintelligible to many Africans. If a horse should be protected from rough handling and neglect, why not a donkey or a camel? If a pig could be eaten, why not a dog? Why were domestic dogs and cats defended while the heads of wild dogs and wild cats were mounted on the wall?

If there is one commonality among the new African groups, even those of highly specialized purpose, it seems to be rejection of any class-based animal hierarchy. A distinction is made between wildlife and domestic animals, but as a matter of practicality, since African nations already have government agencies regulating the use and abuse of wildlife, while little has been done at official levels for animals kept and raised by humans. Otherwise, running an SPCA tends to be seen as a logical extension of the work of a vegetarian society or conservation officer. Vegetarianism, however, may be as hard a sell to Africa as to much of the rest of the world.

Another prototypical indigenous African animal protection group is Youth for Conservation, begun three years ago in Nairobi, Kenya, by former David Sheldrick Trust staffer Josphat Ngonyo and friends. They had in common good educations, as attorneys, accountants, and teachers, and a lack of opportunity in the depressed Kenyan economic climate, which has yet to recover from a catastrophic decline in tourism in 1991-1995. The YfC cofounders also had in common a clear sense of what had to be done. The twin scourges of poaching and corruption had all but destroyed wildlife-based tourism, the most important sector of the Kenyan economy. Poaching fed the corruption.

There was not much that YfC could do against heavily armed ivory poachers, raiding from Somalia, but unarmed YFC volunteers with military escorts could dismantle snares set for bushmeat. That, therefore, is the activity they have emphasized, removing 3,000 snares so far in 14 two-week sweeps of four major Kenyan national parks.

"From one YfC project, 779 snares were found and removed within an area of 24 square kilometres in Tsavo National Park," Ngonyo recounts. "The project participants found that 3% to 5% of the snares they found each day had caught an animal," including "porcupines, dik-diks, duikers, bushbuck," and even some larger animals such as zebras, elands, cape buffalo, elephants, and rhinos.

Ngonyo estimated the snaring toll at "168 animals killed per week, 720 per month, and 8,640 annually," just within that sector. Bushmeat snaring has markedly declined in some locations, but in others the poachers have become more aggressive. "Sponsored by the A.K. Taylor Foundation, the latest YfC two-week desnaring project in the Masai Mara National Reserve of Kenya yielded 29 snares, 14 of which were spring-loaded spikes, YfC spokesperson James Kiplimo told ANIMAL PEOPLE in June. "These are buried in the ground," he explained, "connected to strong tree branches," which bounce up when tripped "to spike the animals to death. This is a new snaring technology," Kiplimo said, "different from the common traditional wire snares." "We also found 10 poachers' camps," Kiplimo added, "in one of which was dried meat."

YfC responded with intensified patroling. An August mission to Mara, also partially sponsored by the A.K. Taylor Foundation, "collected 216 snares in twelve days," according to YfC cofounder Ngonyo. "This is the largest number of snares collected in a single sweep since the beginning of the six Mara desnaring projects" that YfC has conducted so far.

"Our team found established poachers' camps," Ngonyo continued, "and helped to get 12 poachers arrested. With the help of a Kenya Wildlife Service vet flown from Nairobi, they also removed a wire snare from a lion's neck."

The snare would have strangled most animals as they pulled to get away, but the lion was strong enough to wrench the snare from whatever anchored it before she choked to death.

YfC was initially backed by the David Sheldrick Trust, which provided office space at the elephant and rhino orphanage managed at Nairobi National Park by founder Daphne Sheldrick, widow of Tsavo National Park founder David Sheldrick. The British organization Care For The Wild has also assisted YfC, and most of the budget for the 2000 fiscal year came from the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which opened a Nairobi office in 1999.

Wildlife photographer Karl Amman of Kenya argues that African wildlife cannot wait to be saved by grassroots efforts--or even by the level of investment made so far by major foreign donors. Amman was among the first to draw global attention to the explosion of bushmeat hunting that hit interior Africa in the early 1990s along with roadbuilding and logging. Amman recently posted to <www.africa-geographic.com> an essay entitled "For peanuts, we will get a lot more dead monkeys!" Amman points out that although the destruction of African forests has not visibly slowed, and the bushmeat trade may be bigger than ever, foreign investment in African environmental projects has sharply declined during the past several years.

At that, Amman contends, it was never enough--and the use of the money was inadequately monitored. He points toward a two-year, $640,000 effort "to get wildlife management under control in a small corner of one single 1.2-million-hectare logging concession" in the Congo between June 1998 and June 2000. U.S. government agencies kicked in $260,000, the World Bank contributed $225,000, the Wildlife Conservation Society gave $180,000, and CIB, the German-owned firm that holds the logging concession, donated $75,000 in services.

"Ignoring that no independent audit was ever done of any of the claimed achievements, and that hunting pressure might have just been shifted from controlled areas to others, the CIB contribution was no more than 0.18% of its turnover," Amman charges. "This is proportionally less than the $50 donation of a widow living on a pension of $1,000 a month.

"While talking about money and putting it where one's mouth is," Amman continues, "last year the conservation establishment celebrated the passing of the Great Ape Conservation Act by the U.S. Congress. Supposedly up to $5 million was to be made available annually for great ape conservation projects. In the end, $600,000 was allocated for 2001. Applicants were encouraged to submit proposals which did not exceed $30,000 U.S. and were combined with matching funds. Can we hope to be taken seriously by the governments concerned, when loggers are bragging about their economic clout of $800 million, while we are running around selling $30,000 pilot projects?"

On the other hand, few efforts to save nonhuman primates from bushmeat hunting and other threats enjoy stronger community support than the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, 10 miles from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to which $30,000 would be an immense sum. The sanctuary houses 43 chimps, 25 of them roaming a 10-acre fenced natural habitat.

Sierra Leone had 20,000 wild chimps circa 1970, but the population has been cut to 2,000 by decades of capture for export, meat hunting, disease, habitat destruction, and deaths caused by warfare.

In 1988, founders Bala and Sharmila Amarasekaran, immigrants from Sri Lanka, paid $30 for a caged baby chimp who seemed to be on the verge of death. They nursed that chimp back to health, acquired another in 1990, and by 1993 had seven. Seeking help from Jane Goodall, they were able to place those seven at a sanctuary in Zambia.

But the chimps of Sierra Leone were still in trouble. Bala Amarasekaran "asked the government for land for a preserve and was given the current site in 1994," Douglas Farah of the Washington Post Foreign Service recently reported.

"In 1995 Bala Amarasekaran went to work fulltime at the sanctuary, while his wife ran a computer business in Freetown. When funding wanes, some of her profits are channeled into food for the chimps or salaries for the staff. In May 1997," Farah continued, "rebels and renegade army units marched on Freetown. Bala Amarasekaran, along with foreign aid and embassy workers, was evacuated. Rebels marched through the sanctuary, looting the chimps' food and smashing computers, but sparing the chimps. The reserve's local staff, aided by people in surrounding communities, risked their lives for months to scrounge in the forest for food for the chimps and deliver it as the war raged."

Bala Amarasekaran returned in November 1997, but better times were still far away. "The rebels attacked Freetown again in 1999," Farah wrote, "killing and maiming thousands of people. Workers at the chimp reserve and civil defense forces from nearby villages took up arms to defend themselves and the 22 chimps there at the time. Despite heavy fighting, the chimps again escaped slaughter. Bala Amarasekaran stayed, fearing his staff would be killed if no foreigner remained to offer protection."

Wartime shortages of food and medicine eventually caused the deaths of at least five chimps, Bala Amarasekan believes. But now, as peace returns to Sierra Leone, the sanctuary is receiving an unprecedented number of visitors, bringing donations--and more chimps, 11 in 2000 and 12 during the first half of 2001, including the former pet of the son of Sierra Leone president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.

The Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanc-tuary has become a trusted and beloved community institution. Residents of Sierra Leone are becoming persuaded, by example, that chimps are to be treated kindly. As chimps have commonly been kept much as guard dogs are kept in the U.S., Bala and Sharmila Amarasekaran have much work ahead of them to complete the transformation of attitudes that they have started--but despite the human poverty and misery surrounding them, most of the people who see what they are doing agree that saving chimps is worthwhile.

The London Observer, meanwhile, disclosed on August 26 that, "One of the world's last great rainforests is to be laid waste by loggers working for Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe. and his ruling clique. Associates of the increasingly despotic 77-year-old are planning the biggest ever logging operation in the tropical rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. "The 85 million acres, almost 1.5 times the area of Britain, that Mugabe hopes to exploit are the heart of an area recently designated one of the most important forests on the planet by the United Nations," the Observer continued. "The rights have been conceded by the DRC government to representatives of the Zimbabwean president in return for military aid against rebels in the east of the country. The war in the DRC has killed an estimated 2.5 million people in the last three years. The logging is to be run by the Zimbabwean army and forestry commission, and is expected to reap profits of $320 million over the two to three years it will take to clear the concessions of the most valuable timber." The Observer noted that the Mugabe regime has already spent more than that to keep troops in the DRC, where they have allegedly facilitated other logging projects and a considerable smuggling traffic.

While inflation is at 70% in Zimbabwe and unemployment is at 60%, the Observer said, "the logging revenues are likely to be shared by a small clique of senior generals and politicians. The funds will also swell the war chest of the Zanu PF party, Mugabe's primary political vehicle," which "needs funds to expand its brutal campaign against the challengers to Mugabe's power in the run-up to next year's presidential elections."

The rainforest logging deal was overshadowed in other media when Mugabe agreed to evict squatters from about 1,500 farms owned by Zimbabweans of European descent in exchange for Britain and other Commonwealth nations bearing the cost of resettling the squatters on land bought from willing sellers--which after a year under frequently violent occupation might include most Zimbabweans of non-African descent.

Among the occupied properties were the Save Valley Conservancy, which formerly boasted 600 resident elephants and 200 black rhinos, and the Chiredzi River Conservancy, whose 50 wild dogs were the third largest population in Africa. The squatters poached more than 3,000 animals during their first six months at the Save Valley Conservancy, according to Kenyan wildlife film producer Jenny Sharman--and subdivided much of the Chiredzi River Conservancy after burning about 40% of it.

The Zimbabwe National SPCA, often called upon to rescue animals who have been injured by farm invaders, is another colonial-era African humane society now addressing the spectrum of animal issues. Yet while the ZN/SPCA mission has grown and the need for a strong SPCA network in Zimbabwe has increased with the human population, the financial base for humane work is dwindling as Zimbabweans of European descent leave, if they can, or simply die out.

Like other disfunctional African nations, Zimbabwe has not developed an economically secure middle class with the education and wherewithal to take up the cause. The best future that most Zimbabwean animal defenders imagine is that their institutions might survive until better times.

Pro-animal activism in neighboring South Africa has by contrast never been more vibrant--albeit in transition from sheltering and conservation activity, the focus of most of the older South African groups, to all-species advocacy often facilitated by the Internet.

As well as participating in the information networks maintained by global organizations, South Africans have established several indigenous networks, serving an animal protection community which has grown to nearly 200 groups--about half the total on the whole continent.

The first South African electronic animal news medium may have been Wildnet Africa, set up at <http:Wild-NetAfrica.com> by Elfriede Ainslie, Andrew McKenzie, and Adrienne Harris to promote ecotourism. The Wildnet Africa news links soon proved invaluable in informing animal defenders throughout the world about African animal issues.

Wildnet Africa keeps a reportorial distance from most forms of activism, but after four Kruger National Park wardens and 15 village women who were hired to cut grass died in a September 5 brushfire, the network raised $1,750 for their families. Africa Adieu, an electronic wildlife protection newspaper later renamed Southern Sentinel, debuted in 2000 with an unabashedly activist outlook. The syndicated news content was much the same as that of Wildnet Africa, but was illuminated with informed editorial commentary by publisher Roger Gould-King, of Brackendowns. Gould-King issued 99 editions before bidding adieu on September 7 to focus on other writing projects.

George Mandel and Irene Webb started the Animal Intelligence News Media Centre only days before at <http://animalintelligence.freeservers.com/>, e-mail address <count.g@freemail.absa.co.za>, to promote attention to "issues of cruelty in South Africa." Mandel and Webb mentioned a particular interest in animal experimentation, and in early editions were critical of old-guard organizations which hoard instead of using resources, while encouraging no-kill sheltering and efforts to assist Zimbabweans who have fled the Mugabe regime with their pets. South African animal defenders are doing less sheltering these days and more electronic work largely as a reflection of economics. During apartheid, when activism and outreach were officially discouraged, sheltering was all that most activists felt able to do--but sheltering requires extensive infrastructure, helps relatively few animals at a time, and is costly per animal assisted. Advocacy, outreach, and humane education are meanwhile essential to building multi-ethnic support in the new South Africa, and are logical priorities even if parts of the traditional shelter network seem near collapse.

As in Zimbabwe, South African humane societies are suffering the effects of a shrinking economy and donor base. The Cape Town Star reported in December 2000 that, "At least two SPCAs--Kempton Park in Gauteng and Virginia in the Free State--are on the brink of closure, and most are battling to survive. SPCAs in Soweto, Lydenburg in Mpumalanga, and Kuruman in the Northern Cape have already closed. The Randburg SPCA has remained open only by retrenching staff, while the Ellisras SPCA in Northern Province is surviving because its manager is not paid. The Wet Nose Animal Rescue Centre in Pretoria is also battling financially, and the Craighall Park-based Friends of the Cat said they too were in financial trouble."

"The traditional approach to dealing with unwanted, abused and abandoned pet animals isn't working," says Mike Wood, cofounder of the Animal Rehabilitation Initiative in Cape Town and the Community Veterinary Initiative in Port Elizabeth. "In fact, the problem appears to be worsening year after year, while resources diminish. Shelters continue to fill," Wood continues, "and the sad truth is that the vast majority of the animals are eventually euthanized due to lack of capacity, resources, and potential adoptors. There are no systematic sterilization campaigns in Port Elizabeth, or indeed anywhere in South Africa."

Inspired by the success of non-shelter-based pet sterilization and adoption projects in the U.S., the ARI and CVI promote sterilization, health care, and retraining of dogs to increase the likelihood that they can be rehomed or keep the homes they already have.

The ARI recently built a six-dog kennel on the grounds of the Domestic Animal Rescue Group in Hout Bay to serve as a retraining center. The idea is not that either ARI or CVI wants to get into sheltering; it is simply that ARI needed space to do what it can to reduce the shelter population.

Working from a pickup truck instead of any fixed site, Community Led Animal Welfare project founder Cora Bailey, 49, and assistant DeVilliers Katywa, 46, treat up to 700 animals per week in the Johannesburg slums. Largely self-taught, Bailey and Katywa have no formal veterinary training, according to a recent profile by Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Block, but scarcely compete with private practice veterinarians, as none enter those neighborhoods. CLAW, founded in 1991, is financially assisted by IFAW--but not all of the CLAW patients are within the IFAW mission statement. Visiting dumps to tend abandoned dogs and cats, Bailey and Katywa also discover and help abandoned humans, including AIDS patients whom no one else will touch.

IFAW has had a South African office since 1985, and in 1999 opened a second African office in Nairobi, Kenya. Both offices, however, have mostly worked on wildlife issues. Other international humane organizations have dabbled in South Africa, but the 34-year-old British group Compassion In World Farming in early 2001 became the second to make a longterm commitment. Louise van der Merwe, editor of the South African animal rights magazine Animal Voice [not related to the U.S., Canadian, and British magazines of similar title] was appointed a CIWF representative, mandated "to develop farm animal welfare work from South Africa as the gateway to the huge and important African continent."

The CIWF goal is to keep intensive confinement animal husbandry from becoming as established in Africa as it already is in Europe and North America. The CIWF platform calls for "the inclusion of humane education throughout South African schools; the establishment of an animal welfare council, including animal protection representatives, to conduct independent enquiries and provide advice to the government on all animal protection matters; a dedicated animal welfare department to be established, with its own budget; the establishment of effective official enforcement for animal welfare; support for animal protection societies carrying out this work; codes of practice to be made into regulations and enforced; and animal welfare standards in transport, slaughter, markets, and saleyards to be improved, with absolutely no weakening of any existing provisions."

A longterm ambition is "the inclusion of animal protection in the constitution, including recognition of animals as sentient beings and making the prevention of suffering a moral responsibility." Louise van der Merwe also heads the Humane Education Trust, whose humane educator, Taliep Lewis, is a convicted murderer and former leader of a street gang. Somewhat like Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, played by Burt Lancaster in the 1962 film of that title, Lewis rehabilitated himself by raising lovebirds, cockatiels, ringnecked parakeets, and African grey parrots in his cell as part of The Bird Project.

While wildlife, livestock, and birds are all very much part of the African humane agenda, the first priority for most of the new groups is to allay public fear of street dogs. Across Africa, as on other continents, dogs are the most ubiquitous of animals, in the closest proximity to people, and the most vulnerable to abuse. Dogs are eaten and used in animist rituals in parts of Ghana, Nigeria, and several other nations, but most often are just poisoned, stoned or beaten from fear of rabies, a constant threat in hot climates where vaccines are scarce, costly, and often unreliable due to lack of refrigeration.

Uganda affords a typical example of the ups and downs that African humane workers face in defending dogs. Rallying against strychnine poisoning of dogs in Kampala during February 2000, the Uganda SPCA convinced Ministry of Health chief veterinarian Chris Retebarika that birth control should be used to lower the dog population instead. Pointing out that 73% of the dogs in Uganda have no home with humans, Retebarika urged petkeepers to avoid contributing to the surplus by putting their dogs on the contraceptive drug Depo Provera.

The Uganda SPCA meanwhile began building an animal hospital, shelter, and humane education center in Kamwokya, a Kampala suburb, which was to open and begin doing sterilizatons in August 2001. In May 2001, however, the Kampala City Council met complaints about dogs from Makerere University students and faculty by ordering the massacre of all dogs kept by local street children. About 50 dogs were killed during the next week--just as Uganda SPCA volunteer Karen Menczer appealed through ANIMAL PEOPLE and other media for humane education materials, to be used in part to teach street children.

In July 2001, two street children died from rabies after more than 50 were bitten by dogs in the Busia district of Kampala. District veterinarian Obale Riochard and Busia health center physician Bunoti James, MD, were unable to obtain post-exposure anti-rabies vaccines, so washed the children's wounds, gave them antibiotics, and hoped for the best. Several adult "drunkards" reportedly received no treatment.

Fear surged again on September 6, when four dogs described as "violent" invaded the offices of Radio Uganda, halting broadcasts until they were poisoned.

The Uganda SPCA is actually a bit ahead of most of the new or newly revived African humane societies in getting a sterilization program started. Even Egypt, with the longest recorded history of pet-keeping in the world, and some of the oldest humane societies, has only just begun an official effort to sterilize street dogs and cats. In May 2001, Arab Republic of Egypt deputy prime minister and minister of agriculture Dr. Youssuf Wally announced an "action plan aiming to surgically sterilize 70% of both adult and early-aged animals, while leaving 30% to maintain the natural ecological equilibrium" by hunting rats and mice.