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MERU––The latest Kenyan venture in wildlife tracking could
either help to stop elephant and rhino poaching or accelerate it, depending
on the monitoring and interdiction capabilities of the Kenya Wildlife
Service.
“Elephants in some national parks are being fitted with SIM card
collars that send a text message telling wardens exactly where the elephants
are every hour. That information will soon be available over the Internet,
and accessible to people who choose to sponsor an animal or make a donation
to charity,” London Independent correspondent Meera Selva reported
on June 5, 2005.
Confirmed Meru National Park senior warden Mark Jenkins, who is introducing
the tracking technology, “People can go online and see where ‘their’
elephant is at any time of day or night. It should be a very useful tool
for fundraising.”
“A similar technology is also being used to track rhinos,”
Selva added.
But poachers can access the same web sites––and battery-operated
laptops make access from remote locations relatively easy.
Under Jenkins, Meru has been safe from poachers. But Meru was the hardest
hit of the major Kenyan wildlife viewing venues during the poaching wars
of the 1980s.
Meru at peak was visited by 47,000 tourists per year, but after conservationist
George Adamson was killed there in 1989, following several murders and
disappearances of visitors, the visitor traffic fell to only 1,500 by
1997, before Jenkins was appointed to restore wildlife to the depleted
park.
