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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: March 2006
Drought tests Kenyan and Zimbabwean hunting policies
Leopard
NAIROBI, HARARE––The vultures inspecting drought-parched Kenya and Zimbabwe have counterparts in the corridors of national capitols, watching to see whose wildlife management mode will fail first.
Kenya, since banning sport hunting in 1977, has made non-consumptive wildlife watching the nation’s second largest and best known industry.
Much of the faltering Zimbabwean economy is based on trophy hunting.
The Kenyan model requires attracting large numbers of tourists, who in good times employ thousands of hotel staff, drivers, guides, and souvenir vendors.
The Zimbabwean model draws far fewer people, who seek much less by way of accommodation, minimizing the need for up-front investment in infrastructure. Yet trophy hunters spend considerably more per person than wildlife-watchers.
The prospect of high return from low investment has tended to encourage other African nations to emulate Zimbabwe rather than Kenya.
“Theoretically, hunting is a fantastic way to preserve very large eco-systems,” Laikipia Predator Project director Lawrence Frank told a conference of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and World Conservation Union in Johannesburg in January 2006, “but the practicalities of getting that money to the little guys who are paying the costs is a huge issue.”
The conference was called to address the loss of African lions from more than 80% of their former range. Attendees were critical of Kenya––whose lion population has been poached to the verse of extirpation from many regions––for prohibiting lion hunting.
The conference closed by issuing a joint statement favoring trophy hunting “as a way to help alleviate human-lion conflict and generate economic benefits for poor people to build their support for lion conservation.”
This was an endorsement of the Zimbabwean economic model. But economic good times ended in Zimbabwe more than five years ago.
The Kenyan economy, despite a crippling drought in 2000, as well as the current drought, continued to improve. Relative prosperity helped opponents of trophy hunting to persuade Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki to veto a hunting authorization bill that cleared the national legislature in December 2004, pushed by wealthy landowners seeking to capitalize on Zimbabwean instability.
But hard times in much of Kenya, despite 5% economic growth in 2005, may have increased the inclination of politicians to try to cash in on wildlife before losing it, after already losing visitors who prefer not to see animals dying from thirst and starvation.
The political tendency to think short-term is why Youth for Conservation founder Josphat Ngonyo sees as a priority an ongoing campaign against exporting 175 Kenyan animals to the newly opened Chiang Mai Night Safari Zoo in Thailand––a deal concluded by President Kibaki himself.
The animals are to include endangered and threatened species including servals, crowned cranes, lesser flamingoes, and hippopotamuses. While the Kenyan animals sold to Thailand are not to be hunted, Ngonyo sees the transaction as a precedent for consumptive use of wildlife, rather than hands-off observation. Many Kenyans are also concerned that if foreigners can see Kenyan species in their own nations, fewer will come to visit.
The Kenya Ministry of Tourism & Wildlife reportedly ordered the Kenya Wildlife Service to begin capturing the 175 animals for export on February 16, 2006, after a 60-day injunction against the deal expired.
The Kenya SPCA and Community Based Organizations network applied to extend the injunction, but were given a March 8 court date, leaving a three-week window of opportunity for the animals to be caught and flown out.
Ngonyo hoped that protests scheduled for February 25 in Nairobi would deter the exports, but ongoing regional demonstrations have so far attracted more media attention than tangible results.
Firefight
As many as 3.5 million Kenyans, 1.8 million Ethiopians, 1.4 million Somalis, and 60,000 Djiboutians are at risk of famine due to drought––and many are already desperate. On January 13, 2006, Dongiro warriors from the Naita region of Ethiopia crossed into Kenya to try to steal about 300 cattle and goats from members of the Turkana tribe. Thirty Dongiro and eight Turkana women and children were killed in the ensuing firefight at Lokamarinyang village, Obare Osinde of Associated Press reported.
Thirteen salty wells are responsible for the existence of Goraye, a watering hole community at the edge of an extinct volcano in southern Ethiopia.
“The picturesque scene is littered with the corpses of thousands of goats and cattle,” reported Meskel Square web log writer Andrew Heavens in mid-February 2006.
“Pastoralists from as far as Kenya have come here in search of water,” described Heavens. “A constant stream of goats, camels, and cattle slowly make their way down to the bottom of the crater for their small allotment of water. For many of the weaker animals, the walk back up is too much.”
Herder Yatari Ali, 42, told Heavens that 200 to 300 animals per day die along the crater rim. Yatari said he had lost 100 goats, five cows and four camels, and had begun to worry about the survival of his two children, ages four years and three months.
“Development experts say the sheep and goats generally go first in a major drought,” said Heavens. “Then the cattle, the camels, and the people. Estimates of the number of human deaths during the region’s last major drought in 2000 range from 56,000 to more than 90,000.”
Oxfam spokesperson Brendan Cox warned on February 8 that 70% of the cattle in the Wajir district of northern Kenya had already died. Rain last fell there in December 2004. Oxfam and the United Nations World Food Program called the crisis the worst to hit Kenya since the nation won independence from Britain in 1963.
Hippos & elephants
Though the dry northeast is most imperiled, drought most threatens wildlife in the south, where the major national parks are.
An estimated 60 to 80 starving hippos died in waterways and ponds in the Maasai Mara reserve during December 2005 and January 2006. As their habitat shrank, the hippos fought for what remained. Dead hippos reportedly contaminated many of the waterholes that had not already evaporated.
The Kenya Wildlife Service in January warned residents of communities surrounding wildlife areas to be especially careful of animals leaving the parks in search of better habitat, after buffalo killed one person and injured four near Maasai Mara, and elephants killed two near Tsavo National Park.
While wildlife ventured outside the reserves in search of food and water, herders engaged in the same quest took their animals into the reserves, resulting in further conflict.
Reported Rodrigue Ngowi of Associ-ated Press on February 12 from Amboseli National Park, close to Tanzania, “Elephants, buffaloes, and other wild animals drink water on one side of a swamp. On the other, Maasai warriors watch hundreds of cattle graze. Kenyan officials recently bent stringent conservation regulations to allow cattle into Amboseli––the only permanent source of water in the region.
“Conservation workers warn that Amboseli’s delicate swamps and streams are threatened by a government plan to hand over management of the park to the local county council,” Ngowi continued. “Conservation groups have sued the government seeking to stop Amboseli’s handover to Olkejuado County Council, whose predecessor ran the sanctuary from 1961 until environmental degradation prompted the central government to take over in 1974.”
Meanwhile, Ngowi noted, “Drought has begun to kill animals in Amboseli, and has started to drive elephants to leave national parks and game reserves––triggering conflicts between pachyderms and people.”
Kenya Wildlife Services elephant project manager Patrick Omondi told Gakuu Mathenege of the Nairobi East African in January that since Kenya currently has only 30,000 wild elephants, with an estimated carrying capacity of 50,000, it will not consider culling any.
Instead, Kenya tries to relocate elephants from areas where they may be overpopulating to areas where they have yet to recover from intensive poaching during the 1980s.
That, however, tends to relieve one problem at cost of creating another.
Mwaluganje Elephant Sanctuary director Mohamed Mwarachuma and project manager Paul Musila told Mazera Ndurya of the Nairobi Nation in December 2005 that helicopter flights associated with relocating about 150 elephants from the Shimba Hills National Reserve, near the Indian Ocean, to Tsavo East National Park, well inland, had driven the entire local elephant population into hiding. In consequence, they claimed, tourist revenue at the sanctuary had dropped by 60%.
Ultimately, 400 elephants are to be moved from the Shimba Hills, but the relocation was suspended in January 2006, said Kenya Wildlife Service spokesperson Connie Maina, because “There is more vegetation in Shimba Hills than there is in Tsavo. We shall resume,” said Maina, “only after the rains resume and enough vegetation grows.”
The African Wildlife Foundation, Safari Club International, and other international pro-hunting organizations have meanwhile helped aspiring hunting concessionaires to rally support from farmers who are frustrated by elephants’ crop raids, creating a potent political force in some districts––including around Tsavo.
Elephants are not helping their own cause by becoming increasingly aggressive.
“Across Africa, elephants seem to be turning on their human neighbors in ever increasing numbers,” wrote Caroline Williams in the February 18, 2006 edition of New Scientist. “Although such attacks are nothing new,” Williams continued, summarizing research by Gay Bradshaw of Oregon State University, “they have always been seen as a side effect of elephants competing for food and land. But that may not be the whole story. It may sound far-fetched,” Williams admitted, “but a growing number of scientists are lending their support to the theory that elephants are taking revenge on humans.”
Agreed Joyce Poole, research director at the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya, “They are certainly intelligent enough and have good enough memories.”
Observed elephant attack researcher Eve Abe, “Elephant numbers have never been lower in Uganda. Food has never been so abundant. There is no reason for this to happen. In the 1960s elephant densities were very high and there were few reports of aggression. Now the elephants are just so wild.”
Poaching has reduced the elephant population in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda, to barely 10% of the size it was 30 years ago. But about a third of the survivors are orphans.
“Across the continent,” Williams continued, “many herds have lost their matriarch and have had to make do with a succession of inexperienced ‘teen mothers’ who have raised a generation of juvenile delinquents. Meanwhile a lack of older bulls has led to gangs of hyper-aggressive young males with a penchant for violence. In Pilanesburg National Park, South Africa, for example, young bulls have been attacking rhinos since 1992,” a behavior previously seldom seen, “and in Addo National Park, also in South Africa, 90% of male elephants are killed by another male––15 times the ‘normal’ figure.”
Cape Buffalo (Kim Bartlett)
The South African National Park Service has proposed culling half the elephant population of Kruger National Park, claiming that post-traumatic stress disorder among the survivors will be minimized if whole families are culled together.
Bradshaw is skeptical. “That would be like taking out a district of London and thinking the rest of the city will be fine,” she told Williams. “Do you think they’re not going to know and be affected by what has happened to the herd next door?”
KwaZulu-Natal reintroduced elephants to the Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park in 2001. Already elephants have twice killed people there. The most recent incident, on November 3, 2005, looked suspiciously like an ambush, as a breeding herd of elephants blocked a truck whose occupants had been burning firebreaks. A cow elephant then pushed the truck off the road, smashed the windshield, tore off the roof, and fatally gored park worker Zelani Ntuli, 50.
African lion behavior is also believed to have become more aggressive in recent years, as lions have come under increasing pressure from hunting, anti-predation activity, and habitat loss.
Zimbabwean excuse
Drought provided the failing Robert Mugabe regime with an excuse for economic collapse––along with a pretext for more aggressive exploitation of wildlife.
Hwange National Park public relations manager Edward Mbewe on November 15, 2005 told the Harare Herald that more than 40 elephants, 53 buffalo, a giraffe, three zebras and two impalas had died from thirst and black leg, described as “a disease that affects animals when the ground is too dry.”
Mbewe disclosed the situation while seeking permission to cull elephants, and did not explain why the elephant toll had allegedly increased by 22 in three days since the Zimbabwe National Park & Wildlife Authority gave the Herald otherwise identical statistics.
“Zimbabwe’s tourism industry faces collapse after reports of extensive wildlife deaths due to poaching and lack of water in national parks, with Gonarezhou and Hwange particularly badly hit,” assessed Itai Mushekwe of the Zimbabwe Independent, often closed by the Mugabwe regime for contradicting official statements.
In this instance, however, the Independent echoed the party line that the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species should allow Zimbabwe to cull elephants and sell their ivory.
“Hwange National Park has a population of 50,000 elephants, 36,000 more than the carrying capacity,” Mushekwe claimed.
SW Radio Africa reporter Warren Moroka reported on November 18, 2005 that Zimbabwean deputy environment minister Andrew Langa had asked Namibia to take some of the starving Hwange elephants.
Namibian parks and wildlife department director Ben Beytell responded that the 16,000 Namibian elephants are also at risk from drought, and that the northern Caprivi region is already overrun with elephants escaping from Chobe National Park in Botswana.
“What has not been reported,” added Tererai Karimakwenda of SW Radio Africa, “is that outbreaks of foot and mouth and anthrax have been common in Zimbabwe, and Namibia did not want to take any chances. Zimbabwe’s neighbors are also experiencing water shortages,” Karimakwenda continued, “but they are better prepared and well staffed. They have spare parts for pumps and other irrigation equipment. In comparison, the Zimbabwe government is literally broke, and animals are the least of its concerns.”
But drought was an issue in Namibia too. “Since October, more than 20 elephants have died in the Caprivi as the region’s main rivers dry up,” Absalom Shigwedha of The Namibian reported from Windhoek on November 23, 2005.
The Hwange crisis was eventually relieved somewhat when Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force chair Johnny Rodrigues raised funds from private donors, with the help of the SAVE Foundation of Australia, to buy two new pump engines with which to resurrect the Hwange wells, “plus enough spare parts,” Rodrigues e-mailed, “to repair another 20 engines.”
“Our industry depends on wildlife and the parks. The state of their health is what drives the tourism industry,” Zimbabwe Council of Tourism chair Tom Chuma told Mushekwe of the Independent. “We expect all responsible authorities to do what they’re supposed to do, and that is ensuring the wildlife and parks are in a functional state.”
What the so-called responsible authorities were actually doing was finalizing a “Wildlife Based Land Reform Policy” that amounts to legalizing the takeover of the Zimbabwean trophy hunting industry by Mugabe government insiders.
“Animals belong to the state. The policy has been approved and we are now waiting to identify people with the ability to run conservancies,” environment and tourism minister Francis Nhema told the Zimbabwe Standard on January 6.
Nhema claimed that white game ranchers would be compensated for 25-year leases to be issued by his ministry.
The U.S. Treasury Department is among the skeptics.
Summarized Joshua Hammer in the January 13, 2006 edition of Newsweek, “Jocelyn Chiwenga, wife of General Constantine Chiwenga, commander-in-chief of Zimbabwe’s army, has earned a reputation in her own right as a vicious enforcer for President Robert Mugabe. About three years ago, Chiwenga won an auction for a coveted lease on a 220-square-mile tract of bush, owned by Zimbabwe’s Parks and Wildlife Authority, located just outside Hwange National Park. Chiwenga’s property has since become a choice destination for professional hunters, particularly well-heeled Americans.”
However, in November 2005, the U.S. Treasury Department “added Chiwenga, 50, to a list of 128 Mugabe relatives and cronies who are ‘undermining democratic processes or institutions in Zimbabwe,’” Hammer wrote. “The Treasury Department has blocked the assets of those on the list and established penalties of up to $250,000 and 10 years’ imprisonment for anyone who does business with them. That executive order has put Americans who hunt on her land in legal jeopardy.”
The episode, wrote Hammer, “has drawn new attention to the unsavory links between American sportsmen and the Mugabe dictatorship,” repeatedly exposed by ANIMAL PEOPLE since 1994.
“One of Chiwenga’s neighbors in the Victoria Falls area is Webster Shamu, Mugabe’s minister of policy implementation, and a key architect of the brutal slum clearance program that has left some 700,000 poor black Zimbabweans homeless,” Hammer noted. “Another is Jacob Mudenda, the former governor of Matabele-land North. All of them do a brisk business catering to professional American hunters.”
Njabulo Ncube, chief political reporter for the Harare Financial Gazette, estimated that U.S. citizens “comprise 80-90% percent of the people who visit Zimbabwe for trophy hunting.”
Mudenda is among the owners of Inyathi Hunting Ltd., which markets hunting expeditions on Woodland Estates, near Victoria Falls.
Hammer also named as key marketers for the Mugabe in-crowd, “Out of Africa Adventurous Safaris, founded by four former South African policemen and based in both South Africa and Overland Park, Kansas,” which was eventually banished from Zimbabwe for alleged violations of hunting laws, and “Rob and Barry Style, owners of Buffalo Range Safaris, based in Harare.
“Rob Style denied in an e-mail to Newsweek that he had a business relationship with Chiwenga,” Hammer said, but “several professional hunters in Zimbabwe insist that the brothers have frequently taken clients to shoot animals on her property. The Hunting Guide, an industry newsletter published in the United States, also names Buffalo Range Safaris as a hunting-safari operator on Chiwenga-owned land.”
Hammer confirmed––as ANIMAL PEOPLE reported earlier––that “American hunters are also flocking to private game reserves that were seized without compensation, and sometimes with violence, from white farmers and ranchers as part of Mugabe’s radical land-reform program. That property is now mostly in the hands of Mugabe’s most diehard supporters.
“Many of the land owners who took this property by force,” Hammer alleged, “have no experience in wildlife conservation. They reportedly ignore strict hunting quotas on prized species such as lion and leopard. They also allegedly kill animals, including rhino, inside protected wildlife areas.”
Newsweek missed...
Hammer did not mention a September 2005 transaction in which 35 rhinos were transferred from the government-owned Gourlays Ranch to the Bubi River Conserv-ancy, owned by HHK Safari Operators. HHK Safari Operators once listed Webster Shamu as a partner, but another partner told The Hunting Report recently that Shamu is no longer involved.
The rhinos were moved, secretary for environment and tourism Margaret Sangarwe told the Harare Herald, to protect them from poaching. The move was financed, said the Herald, by the World Wildlife Fund.
Edward Mbewe, who wanted to shoot elephants in Hwange National Park, said that the rhinos would eventually be released into Gonarezhou National Park.
“We are encouraging farmers to take some of the animals, especially rhinos, so that poaching levels are contained,” said environment and tourism minister Francis Nhema “We have problems at this time of the year when animals move out of the parks in search of water and food and are killed by poachers.”
As Hammer’s Newsweek expose went to press, Nhema was also trying to explain the Mugabe government’s role in the collapse of a crocodile farm.
“At least 12 crocodiles have died of starvation on the farm, in Serui, near Chegutu, while another 258 are close to death after going without food since November 2005,” wrote Tsitsi Matope of Harare Herald on January 25.
“Malham Farm was allocated to Zimbabwe Tourism Authority chief executive officer Mr Karikoga Kaseke on November 3, 2005,” Matope continued––but Kaseke disavowed responsibility, saying he had never actually taken possession of the farm.
“Officials from the Parks and Wildlife Management Authority and Zimbabwe National SPCA yesterday rescued the surviving crocodiles,” Matope added.
Nhema told Matope that “cruelty to animals is a serious offence that warrants a custodial sentence,” but issued an immediate disclaimer. “We know that wildlife farming is a new venture for many people,” Nhema said. “We always encourage those with no know-ledge to nurture the animals to seek help.”
Hammer of Newsweek further did not mention the longtime role of the U.S. Agency for International Development in building the Zimbabwean trophy hunting industry. From 1989 through 2004, USAid pumped more than $40 million into the Communal Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources.
Passed by Congress as an incentive for Zimbabwe to comply with the 1989 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species moratoriums on elephant ivory and rhino horn trafficking, CAMPFIRE raised about $2.5 million per year in revenue, mostly from trophy hunts––and rewarded Mugabe regime insiders for neglecting the leftist goals that brought Mugabe to power.
Hammer cited the Safari Club Inter-national convention held in Reno, Nevada, in January as the most important marketing opportunity of the year for Zimbabwean hunting promoters.
Mudenda was barred from the U.S., but others claimed success.
“Despite negative Western media publicity, Zimbabwe safari operators have raked in billions of dollars in hunting deals clinched,” the Harare Herald declared.
The billions were in Zimbabwean dollars, however, at an exchange rate of 165,000 to the U.S. dollar.
“There were media reports that discouraged American hunters from having anything to do with Zimbabwe, as this would mean promoting the so-called human rights abuses said to be happening here,” complained Zimbabwean Parks & Wildlife Management Authority director general Morris Mutsambiwa.
“After discussing the matter with a few other members of our team, we decided to meet with the United States of America’s Fish & Wildlife Services, a scientific authority responsible for the importation of trophies,” Mtsambiwa continued.
In disregarding human rights concerns and in viewing the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service as an agency that exists to serve hunters, Mtsambiwa demonstrated an ideological affinity with U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Both are Safari Club lifetime members.
Cheney, on that day, was at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, shooting cage-reared quail and attorney Harry Whittington, 78, of Austin, Texas.
Hit by birdshot in the cheek, chest, and shoulder, while shooting with Cheney, Whittington later suffered a “silent heart attack” after a pellet migrated into his heart, but survived.
Cheney was not charged with any offense. ––Merritt Clifton