NAIROBI, HARARE, JOHANNESBURG--The humane movement in Africa may presently be going to the dogs, because the street dogs are the most ubiquitous and vulnerable animals, but the battles of the future are forming over sport hunting and vivisection. With the use of animals in European and American laboratories increasingly under activist scrutiny and restricted by law, vivisectors are looking toward Africa as a potentially congenial new home.

Hunters, an aging and declining coterie in the U.S. and Canada, are also trying to expand their welcome in Africa--and hunt promoters in Kenya and KwaZulu-Natal are eager to grab their business, over the objections of many Masai and Zulu tribe members, who consider sport hunting profane.

Both tribes are traditionally herders, whose economy centers on cattle. Their warriors have always hunted animals who prey on lifestock or threaten humans, but have looked down on tribes who routinely eat wild animals.

The Masai, the dominant tribe in Kenya, made abolishing sport hunting a priority after Kenya won independence from Britain in 1963. A hunting ban took effect in 1967 and was reaffirmed in 1976 under the Hunting and Wildlife Management Act. Masai have subsequently ascended to most of the higher positions within the Kenya Wildlife Service. Many have been killed in defending animals against poachers, especially heavily armed elephant ivory poachers associated with Somalian militias.

The Zulu, dominant in much of South Africa, are at last in a position to manage wildlife their own way, for the first time in more than a century, and mean to do it rather differently from South African convention, Fiona MacLeod of the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian reported in late June.

"At the heart of the former Zulu empire between Empangeni and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve complex," MacLeod wrote, the future Royal Zulu Reserve and Biosphere "will form part of the largest conservation area in Kwa-Zulu-Natal--second in size [in southern Africa] only to Kruger National Park. King Dingiswayo's descendants, the Mtethwas, and their neighbors, the Biyela clan, want their animals back--and they are clear that commercial hunting should not be a part of their future."

Said Ms. Nokwethemba Biyela, a former member of Parlia-ment who helped start the project, "Animals like leopards and lions are signs from God. When the animals were gone, there were no more signs. Hunting the animals was a mistake. Traditionally, hunting took place only for rare ceremonies, and it was done properly. A lion is like a godfather: you cannot let just anybody kill him." The Royal Zulu Reserve occupies land obtained from the South African government in settlement of claims filed for land that was stolen from the Zulu early in the 20th century. More is to be purchased with $1 million in grants from the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs. While prime agricultural land will be kept in crops, and residential and commercial property will remain in residential and commercial use, the Royal Zulu Reserve will form the center and chief economic engine of the new Zulu homeland. "Six tribal authorities have already undertaken to add their own land to the reserve," MacLeod reported. "This land is crucial because it abuts the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve, which has agreed to drop its boundary fence with the Royal Zulu Reserve 'when the time is appropriate.'"

Explained Lawrence Anthony, founder of the effort, "If we are to avoid Zimbabwe-style invasions of conservation land in the future, we need major projects that get black communities involved as owners of conservation."

Across the country, the Makuleke tribe in 1997 settled their land claims by taking one of the northern sections of Kruger National Park, from which they had been forcibly evicted in 1969. They then scandalized their international sympathizers by opening it to trophy hunting. Raising about $60,000 by selling the lives of two elephants and two Cape buffalo in 2000, they hope to top $100,000 in 2001 from the deaths of two elephants, four buffalo, four nyalas, four impalas, three zebras, an eland, and a kuku.

The Royal Zulu Reserve has gone the opposite direction, providing sanctuary to eight elephants who were to have been shot for trophies, plus Sahib, 20, who spent 18 years in a German circus after he was orphaned by a Zimbabwean cull hunt. Northern Province wildlife officials refused to let Sahib go to a refuge there, claiming this "would not contribute significantly to elephant conservation," the purpose of the reserve. But they could not interfere in KwaZulu-Natal.

KwaZulu-Natal authorities allowed Sahib to come, but appear worried that the popularity of the Royal Zulu Reserve could undermine support for hunting-centered conservation strategy. Less than two weeks after MacLeod's article went to press, the KwaZulu-Natal Nature Conservation Service and Hartog Zuma, chair of the Impendle Traditional Hunters' Association, summoned media to witness a "traditional" reedbuck deer hunt with dogs. Twenty-five hunters of African descent used 50 greyhounds, not a breed native to South Africa, to flush 15 deer.

"Dogs were set on three prime males only," Darran Morgan of the Mail & Guardian reported, "and the reedbuck rams showed a clean pair of heels each time." Ostensibly the "experimental" hunt was held on the Robert Smith sheep-and-cattle ranch near Dargle to see whether "traditional" hunting with dogs could be done without conflict with farmers. Farmers in the vicinity have indeed shot dogs used by hunters of African descent in recent years, and there has been trouble over it. The hunting tradition of most concern, however, may have been British-style fox hunting, done from horseback, and "lurching," done afoot. Many British hunts accommodate both riders and lurchers. Efforts to ban hunting with dogs remain stalled in the British and Scots Parliaments, but have had consistent majority support in public opinion polls for more than a decade--which suggests to South African entrepreneurs that there may be money to be made by hosting hunts with dogs, when and if the long anticipated bans take effect, for Britons and Scots who are unwilling to kick the blood sports habit.

While concerned about the possible effect on "conservation" of rescuing Sahib, Northern Province officials seem to have ignored the whole concept at the Manyeleti Game Reserve, environment reporter Russel Molefe wrote in the July 13 edition of The Sowetan. "The Mnisi community in the Bushbuckridge area is shocked by the appalling state of Manyeleti," Molefe said, "where the few animals left are a sad reminder of what once was. Authorities could not account for the large number of animals who have "disappeared" from the reserve, which is already being 'commercialized'--a term used for the privatisation of tourism facilities and services. All in all, 41 game reserves are to be commercialised in the provice because they have been neglected to the extent that they are now in a most appalling state."

Zimbabwe was until recently the foreign trophy hunters' African destination of choice, not least because the U.S. hunting establishment all but owned Zimbabwean wildlife policymaking and law enforcement.

No nation in Africa has received more outside funding for wildlife conservation during the past decade than Zimbabwe, repeatedly appropriated through the influence of members of Congress with close ties to Safari Club International-- like Don Young, chair of the House Resources Committee 1993-2000. Since 1989, when the contributions were first authorized by President George Bush, who like his son President George W. Bush is a Safari Club life member, USAid has given more than $30 million to the Communal Areas Management Program For Indigenous Resources, CAMPFIRE for short. The CAMPFIRE "sustainable use" strategy revolves around the notion of auctioning the right to shoot elephants and rhinos to rich trophy hunters.

It has worked well for Safari Clubbers, but not for either the animals or most Zimbabweans. Even at peak, CAMPFIRE raised only about $2.5 million a year in program revenue, functioning mainly as a conduit for payoffs to Robert Mugabe regime insiders. Allegedly among them was Mugabe's sister Sabina, Godfrey Marawanyika of the Zimbabwe Independent dared to hint in November 2000. When 114 villagers in Gokwe North in late 1999 resisted the seizure of their crop patches to create "a buffer zone for safari activities," the Zimbabwe Standard reported, CAMPFIRE backers torched their homes, possessions, and food stores, and kidnapped four of their children, ages 4-13, who were dumped at a distant mine site.

After the farm invasions of the past two years disrupted or halted operations at many well-known Zimbabwean hunting ranches, however, most hunters quit coming. In early 2001, after courting wealthy U.S. trophy hunters during a visit to Las Vegas, Zimbab-wean environment and tourism minister Francisco Nhema tried to lure some of them back by hosting "trial hunts" of hooved species using crossbows and handguns, and of leopards using dogs.

The CAMPFIRE strategy is based on the "sustainable use" doctrine advanced since 1961 by the World Wildlife Fund, formed by wildlife artist and trophy hunter Peter Scott with hunting pals Prince Philip of England, Prince Rainier of Monaco, Prince Bernhardt of The Netherlands, and whaling baron Aristotle Onasis. Their motivation, frankly expressed at the time, was that the newly independent African nations would follow the example of India, and Kenya after 1966, and halt recreational hunting. They sought to prevent that by funding the wildlife management departments of the new nations, more-or-less as the National Wildlife Federation arranged for U.S. wildlife management to be funded by taxes on hunting licenses and equipment.

Instead of taxing hunters, however, WWF raised money directly from the public, to "save animals," seldom if ever mentioning the pro-hunting agenda in appeals. WWF and other pro-hunting organizations often cite South Africa as an example of successful sustainable consumptive use. The Uganda Wildlife Authority, headed since 1998 by former South African National Parks chief G.A. "Robbie" Robinson, on September 18 introduced sport hunting to Lake Mburo National Park, hoping to emulate the South African model.

Both wildlife viewing and trophy hunting have boomed in South Africa since apartheid ended. But the ongoing transfer of governmental authority over wildlife management to majority rule has had rough spots. A series of scandals involving the Mpumalanga Parks Board has encouraged traditionalists to assert, much as the WWF founders did in 1961, that people of African ancestry are incapable of management without corruption-- although many of the alleged perpetrators have been flushed out by internal audits and sent to trial.

Kruger National Park, the jewel of the South African National Parks, has meanwhile claimed significant profits in each of the three years it has been managed by current director David Mabunda. Mabunda, however, was accused of mismanagement by opposition political parties and disgruntled ex-staff in early 2001, after he laid off 513 employees to cope with a cash flow crunch. Critics claimed the cash flow problem resulted from embezzling, discovered by an internal audit at the Satara camp, one of the most popular overnight accommodations at Kruger. Similar activities were alleged to be going on at other facilities within Kruger.

Mabunda responded that the biggest part of the cash flow problem may simply have been overstaffing due to cronyism among the old guard.

As in Zimbabwe, many observers of South African wildlife management suspect some of the top authorities are more interested in finding ways to sell elephant ivory and rhino horn than in making nonconsumptive use work. Before majority rule, the South African military funded covert operations in nearby nations through ivory poaching and smuggling. Some people nominally involved in anti-poaching activity actually worked for both sides. Whether or not they are still in positions of influence, the South African stockpiles of elephant ivory and rhino horn are an evident temptation to others whose incomes and authority are shrinking with the economy of the struggling nation.

Related to goats and antelope, Himalayan tahrs are endangered in their native India. Under 2000 are believed to remain in the wild, but translocated feral populations thrived until recently at Table Mountain and in New Zealand. The Table Mountain colony started in 1935, after a newly arrived pair escaped from the Groote Schnur Zoo. Despite the limitations of the habitat, which is surrounded entirely by human development, the tahrs persisted, while native hooved stock died out or were poached to extermination.

Seeking World Heritage Site status for Table Mountain and Cape Peninsula National Park, SANParks deemed the tahrs an invasive alien menace and set about killing them all. Park officials killed 57 tahrs with lethal drug darts during 2000, over intense protest from the South African humane community, led by an ad hoc group called Friends of the Tahr. SANParks proposed shooting the estimated 31 remaining tahrs by helicopter gunnery in early 2001, but India asked that they be repatriated instead to help rebuild the wild herds. SANParks on March 23 suspended the killing for six months to give Indian cabinet minister Maneka Gandhi, the Wildlife Trust of India, and Friends of the Tahr time to arrange for the tahrs to be net-gunned from helicopters by a New Zealand team and flown to India--and to seek funding for it.

The World Conservation Union then objected that the Table Mountain tahrs are "invasive" despite their low numbers, should be removed immediately, and should not be allowed to mix with the remaining wild tahrs lest they carry negative inbred genetic traits. As time ran out, Friends of the Tahr raised enough money in Britain, with the help of former model and longtime cat rescuer Celia Hammond, to bring New Zea-land helicopter net-capture expert James Innes to Table Mountain. Innes' company Helicopter Wildlife Management has reputedly caught more than 17,000 wild animals for wildlife agencies around the world. Vishwas Sawarkar, dean of the Wildlife Institute of India, joined Innes as an official emissary of the Indian government.

They discovered just seven surviving tahrs during a 90-minute helicopter inspection of Table Mountain. SANParks, however, refused to meet with them--reportedly because they were not invited guests of South Africa. As ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, SANParks still planned to shoot the last tahrs when the moratorium expires on October 1.

While the tahrs are endangered but non-native, the caracals rescued by the Kalahari Raptor Centre are protected in international commerce but remain classified as vermin under the Problem Animal Control Ordinance of 1957, an apartheid-era law which authorized people of European descent to hunt Cape foxes, jackals, caracals, and other small predators from horseback, with dogs, anywhere and at any time they pleased, without having to pay farmers for any damage they caused. Indeed, farmers could be prosecuted for noncooperation.

As KRC cofounders Chris Mercer and Beverly Pervan wrote in their December 2000 ANIMAL PEOPLE guest column "Apartheid and three caracal kittens," the Northern Cape Nature Conservation Department has tried to use the 1957 law to seize the caracals since October 2000, when Mercer and Pervan applied for a permit either to release them or "to use them to educate schoolchildren who visit our center, and for tourists to photograph. We will not allow the public to handle them," Mercer and Pervan stipulated. "We propose to build for them a large camp with high electrified fencing, where they may live out as happy a life as possible."

Two of the caracals appear to be fit for release to the wild, while captivity in a natural setting might be the best alternative for one who suffered a severe leg injury prior to capture. In early September 2001 the Kuruman Magistrates Court convicted Mercer and Pervan of illegally keeping the caracals, and Mercer of also illegally transporting them. They received fines and suspended jail sentences, and were ordered to surrender the caracals. "Wessel Jacobs of the Northern Cape Nature Department stated in his testimony that one was to die and two would be sent to zoos," Pervan said.

Mercer and Pervan bought time for the caracals by appealing, holding that the racist language of the Problem Animal Control Ordinance of 1957 makes it unconstitutional. The Northern Cape Nature Department meanwhile refused to renew their permits to keep birds.

Territoriality also seems to be at least part of the issue in a dispute between self-proclaimed "seal whisperer" Francois Hugo of the upstart organization Seal Alert South Africa on the one hand, and on the other, a variety of South African government agencies plus the South African National SPCA.

Although handling seals without a permit is illegal in South Africa, as in the U.S. and Canada, Hugo admits to responding to as many as 100 seal-in-distress calls per year from his home near Hout Bay. Since 1999 Hugo has sought permission to start a "natural care seal rehabilitation sanctuary" near Cape Town, but has been thwarted by the combined opposition of the Department of Marine and Coastal Management and the South African National SPCA. They contend that the existing three seal rehabilitation centers along the South African coast are enough, together with a temporary facility near Cape Town, which is soon to be expanded.

Hugo argued in a recent series of World Wide Web and e-mail postings that the government and SN/SPCA are in effect colluding to reduce the seal population.

"At the time of European settlement of southern Africa, some 400 years ago, Cape fur seals probably numbered in the millions," Hugo wrote, "and did not breed on the mainland. They chose instead to breed on 38 small, barren, rocky islands along 2000 kilometres of coast. In the past 60 years, 54% of the offshore colonies have become extinct, 75% of all pups are now born on the mainland, and up to 80% now reside outside South African waters, in Namibia. Of the rest, 95% live near the Namibian border."

When Namibia gained independence from South Africa in 1990, the new regime expanded fishing and sealing. As the Namibian fish stocks collapsed, Hugo continued, "the President of Namibia declared his intention to half the seal population, and urged Namibians to eat seals."

More than 250,000 seals died along the Namibiian coast, Hugo says, in three of the past seven years. Malnutrition was the major cause. Namibia responded by raising its sealing quota from 30,000 pups, plus 5,000 bulls, to 60,000 pups plus 7,000 bulls, and extended the sealing season to six months.

Hugo argues that the seal population did not just migrate from the old rookeries off South Africa to the current sites along the Namibian mainland. Instead, he says, "Evidence can be shown that persons were sent to the offshore islands for up to two years," toward the end of the apartheid era, "for the sole purpose of beating every seal off the islands."

This, Hugo contends, forced the relocation, which served the dual aim of reducing competition for South African fish stocks and transferring the perceived "seal problem" to a black-ruled neighbor that the apartheid regime wanted to keep as weak and isolated as possible.

Far-fetched? Not necessarily, in view of the simultaneous South African involvement in the ivory trade and other bizarre South African machinations involving animals. For example, as Hugo posted his allegations to the World Wide Web, cardiologist and former South African military officer Wouter Basson, M.D., went to trial in Pretoria on 16 counts of murder and 24 counts of fraud, among 67 total charges resulting from his work as head of the apartheid government's biological and chemical warfare unit from 1982 until 1992.

Basson testified in pre-trial documents that he bought a zoo near Cape Town, with South African Defence Force funding, to research the use of pheremones secreted by animals for crowd control. The court heard testimony from former Roodeplaat Research Laboratory head of research Dr. Andre Immelman that Basson used animals to test toxins added to lipbalms, deodorants, shampoos, drinks, and tobacco.

Under cross-examination, Basson claimed that he possessed toxins such as cyanide because he routinely poisoned animals to demonstrate the effects of exposure to chemical weapons while instructing special forces and military intelligence agents at the Onderstepoort Veterinary School.

Basson was originally questioned in secret, according to The Snout #8, the winter 2001 newsletter of South Africans for the Abolition of Vivisection.

"The day after the local press appealed against the secret hearing," The Snout claimed, "ten armed white men removed the computer main frame from Onderstepoort in a military-style break-in. Enquiries by a newspaper reporter elicited a denial from Onderstepoort that such a theft took place. But truth has a way of prevailing. In a recent legal action against Onderstepoort, the latter claimed to be unable to produce certain evidence. The reason? The theft of the main frame."

The Basson case affords a reminder that no African nation effectively regulates or supervises animal use in biomedical research, teaching, and testing--and only South Africa as yet has much visible antivivisection activism. Relatively little biomedical research, testing, and teaching was done in Africa until recently, but ANIMAL PEOPLE has picked up hints from business news media during the past several months that laboratories in South Africa, Ghana, and Pakistan are bidding successfully on some of the animal testing projects that companies are no longer jobbing out to Huntingdon Laboratories, of Britain.

If and when companies making extensive lab use of animals become entrenched in Africa, which may have already happened, opening them to scrutiny and regulation may prove exceedingly difficult.

As sources of well-paid jobs and conduits for technology to underdeveloped nations, biomedical research and testing companies will enjoy proportionally much greater prestige in Africa than in the developed world. Few ordinary Africans know much about laboratory procedures. The photos that have for decades horrified American and European activists may have less impact in nations where animals are routinely slaughtered and dismembered for meat in public places, and animal sacrifice including burning problematic baboons as "witches" is still common enough that most people may have encountered it.

Though vivisection has not previously been big business in most of Africa, there is relevant history. The high point of African medical prestige came during the 1960s and 1970s when the late Christian Barnard, M.D., did heart transplant experiments on various primates, including humans. He eventually concluded that chimpanzees were too much like humans for him to feel morally comfortable about using as involuntary "heart donors."

Africa was the major source of nonhuman primates used in biomedical research and testing until the 1970s, when the Endangered Species Act, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and recognition of the risks associated with simian viruses such as hepatitis-B and Ebola combined to cause a gradual shift from use of wild-caught animals to captive breeding.

But the traffic in wild-caught African primates to labs in the U.S. and elsewhere has never stopped. Baboons were reportedly routinely sent to the U.S. from Tanzania, via Kenya, until early 2000, according to the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. Kenya banned baboon exports after authorities in Nairobi found a warehouse of baboons in miserable condition, but as recently as August 2000 the U.S. lab supply firm Charles River ordered 300 baboons from Tanzania, according to African sources. Charles River was said to have cancelled the deal when U.S. activists found out about it.

In April 2001, the Lufthansa Cargo Corporation, part of the national airline of Germany, announced that it would cease transporting wildlife, effective May 1, except for rescue and conservation purposes. El Al, the national airline of Israel, reportedly adopted a similar policy in July. These had been the two biggest international carriers of primates for lab use. Their decision to stop has inhibited the primate traffic, but investigators believe it will continue via smaller carriers. Regardless of the ethics of primate use in laboratories, and whether or not it has helped to find cures for human diseases, the use of wild-caught African primates has also introduced diseases to humans, sometimes at epidemic levels.

For example, more than 60 recent studies have discovered the presence of the simian virus SV40 in rare human brain, bone, and lung cancers, including mesothelioma, previously linked to asbestos exposure. SV40 is believed to have contaminated some batches of polio vaccine cultivated in wild-caught African monkeys, especially between 1955 and March 1961, after which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required that traces of SV40 be removed from vaccines. Several investigators have suggested since 1992 that a mutated form of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus that became AIDS first infected humans via tests of an oral polio vaccine cultivated in the kidneys of macaques, tested in the Congo during the late 1950s by researchers Hilary Kopowski and Stanley Plotkin. This theory was refuted in papers published by the journals Science and Nature in their April 2001 editions, but remains alive in the rumor mills of Africa, where AIDS has afflicted 24.5 million people, or 71% of all known victims.

Various African primate sanctuaries have made attempts to rehabilitate ex-lab primates in semi-natural conditions, but none have been returned to the wild--at least not legally and deliberately--because of concern that they might take exotic diseases to which they were exposed in labs back to the wild population. Twice Friends of Animals has set up sanctuary facilities in Africa for ex-lab primates from the U.S. The first was destroyed in 1991 by the outbreak of civil war in Liberia. FoA was never able to get permission to send primates to the second, in Ghana, again because of concern that they might introduce disease.