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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: JUNE 2006
South Africa moves on canned hunts––can rules be enforced?
PRETORIA––Six weeks of public comment on government proposals to reform the South African trophy hunting industry are expected to end in mid-June 2006 with the recommended reforms on the fast track to adoption––almost 10 years after the British TV expose series “The Cooke Report” brought to light the abuses that the proposals address.
Introducing the proposed “National Norms and Standards for the Regulation of the Hunting Industry” and accompanying “Threatened and Protected Species” on May 1 at the De Wildt Cheetah & Wildlife Centre, west of Pretoria, Environmental Affairs Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk predicted that they might be in effect before the end of the year.
Among the proposed reforms, breeding threatened or endangered large predators such as cheetahs, lions, or leopards expressly for any type of hunting would be prohibited. Captive-bred predators who are released to the wild would have to be at large for at least two years before they could be hunted. Hunting on private land that borders national or provincial wildlife reserves would require ministerial authorization. Hunters could no longer use weapons that might cause animals prolonged suffering.
“We are making sure that the hunting industry is based on integrity and the best practices that we can defend,” Van Schalkwyk said. “Canned hunting, especially of lions, have done South Africa a lot of damage. We have heard of examples,” Van Schalkwyk added, “where rhinos have been killed with crossbows or bows and arrows, which is totally inhumane.”
Van Schalkwyk spoke a week before Mike Cadman of The Sunday Independent disclosed the March 10 shooting of one of the best-known lions in South Africa by an unsportsmanlike trophy hunter. The case became a cause celebre.
“Property owners and conservation staff at the exclusive Umbabat, Timbavati, and Klaserie private nature reserves that border Kruger National Park told The Sunday Independent about their anger at the killing of the lion, considered to be a major tourist attraction, and the subsequent wounding of a one-tusked bull elephant by a Spanish hunter,” Cadman wrote. “The lion, one of a well-known pair dubbed the ‘Sohebele brothers,’ had been photographed by thousands of foreign tourists and featured regularly in e-mails sent out by several lodges to their former guests around the world.”
While the lions had wandered into an area where they could legally be shot, they spent most of their time in protected habitat, and were accustomed to human observers.
The surviving “Sohebele brother” reportedly defended his fatally injured comrade, even when the hunter “repeatedly drove a tractor at the lions in attempt to separate them,” said Cadman. “Rangers later reported that the remaining male had become so afraid that in one instance it had swum across a river to avoid game-viewing 4x4s.”
The elephant, shot three times in the head on March 24, disappeared into thick brush and was neither dispatched nor retrieved.
The furor over the lion and elephant shootings overshadowed allegations of poaching against two Kruger National Park field guides, after two carcasses of rhinos were found in early May with their horns removed. Van Schalkwyk told the South African parliament that 79 animals were poached within Kruger during fiscal year 2005-2006, up slightly from 73 poached in the preceding year.
The major question that poaching in Kruger raises is whether hunting regulations can be enforced anywhere in South Africa.
Response
Early response to the Van Schalk-wyk proposals from both animal advocates and hunting promoters appeared to be mostly guardedly positive, but the size of South Africa and size of the hunting industry make enforcing any regulations difficult without overwhelming cooperation from within the industry itself.
Approximately 9,000 hunting ranches and game farms in South Africa provide from 39,000 to 54,000 animals per year (sources differ) to be killed by an average of about 7,000 visiting hunters each year––more than half of them from the U.S.
Generating revenues of about $280 million a year, the South African hunting industry employs about 70,000 people.
Lion hunting is among the smallest parts of the industry, in numbers of animals killed. Just 190 lions were shot in 2004, and 209 in 2005, of about 2,500 to 3,000 believed to be held in captivity.
About as many lions remain in the wild in South Africa, more than 2,000 of them in Kruger National Park and adjacent nature areas. Hunting is not allowed in the South African National Parks, but hunting concessionaires often set up beside parks to take advantage of animals, like the “Sohebele brothers,” who cross the boundaries. “The Cooke Report” documented hunting concessionaires in the act of luring trophy animals past downed park fences.
As the typical cost of shooting a lion in South Africa is about $17,000, lion hunting alone is worth about $3.3 million per year.
Leopards are less commonly shot, with only 45 killed by visiting hunters in 2004, according to the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC, but the cost of killing a leopard is circa $5,500.
Other animals targeted on South African hunting ranches include captive-bred pigeons and quail, baboons, giraffes, elephants, hippopotamuses, mongooses, porcupines, warthogs and zebras.
Looming disaster
The most immediate concern of animal advocates in response to the Van Schalkwyk proposals was what would become of all the lions, leopards, cheetahs, and other captive-bred predators who are now at hunting ranches and game farms.
“That’s a looming animal welfare disaster,” SanWild director Louise Joubert told Cadman of The Sunday Independent. “If the government is really serious about shutting down the canned hunting industry, I can’t see how they can handle all these animals––there is no space for them. One breeder called and said that if the regulations forced him to close down his operation, he would dump 80 lions between the ages of a month and a year at my gate. I’m not sure if he was joking but that shows just how big the problem is.”
“The government needs to clean up the mess it has allowed to develop,” said Jason Leask-Bell, South Africa director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, “but if animals must be destroyed, it must be done humanely. The industry must be closed down,” Leask-Bell emphasized, “but it has been allowed to grow so big that we now have another animal welfare issue to deal with.”
“The first aim is to stop breeding predators for hunting,” Endangered Wildlife Trust director Nick King told Cadman. “It may be possible to place some of the animals in sanctuaries or zoos,” King suggested, at best a faint hope. “Killing them should be considered only as a last resort.”
What to do with surplus lions was already an issue.
“South Africa’s game reserves have secretly started culling lions in an attempt to tackle what they claim is a growing population crisis,” revealed Steven Bevan of the Sunday Telegraph in December 2005. “One of the largest private reserves in the country, Welge-vonden in Limpopo province, covering more than 130 square miles, has confirmed that it has destroyed a lioness and her four young.
“Two other reserves––Entabeni, also in Limpopo, and Phinda in KwaZulu-Natal––said they will be forced to cull if they cannot sell surplus animals. Madikwe in North West Province confirmed it is an option they will have to consider. The reserves say they have no choice but to kill healthy animals as numbers have grown beyond their capacity–– and they cannot sell them because there are too many on the market.”
Public relations
Harsher criticism of the Van Schalkwyk proposals came from Chris Mercer of <www.cannedlion.com>, a retired attorney and frequent ANIMAL PEOPLE book reviewer, who formerly co-directed the Kalahari Raptor Centre.
Mercer called the new hunting regulations “an elaborate public relations exercise.
“Originally the South African government tried to bypass the new laws requiring public participation, in order to protect the hunting industry,” Mercer charged. “We commenced legal proceedings. At the last minute before service of legal process, the Government announced the public participation process” now underway.
“However, regulations which entrenched and expanded canned hunting had already been drafted,” Mercer alleged. With the use of cunning legal drafting artifices which give the appearance of banning the most cruel practices, nothing will change. You can still shoot captive bred lions for pleasure and a trophy. You can still set a pack of dogs on them. You can still bait them with a carcass and hide nearby with your bow and arrow or hand gun. Restrictions which look good on paper are utterly unenforceable, and therefore meaningless––which is exactly why they have been included in the new regulations.
“It is the cruelty which offends the public,” Mercer said, calling for “a complete ban on all trophy hunting.”
“It is important to define canned hunting accurately in order to meet public concerns,” Mercer continued. “Canned hunting is hunting of an animal who is unfairly prevented from escaping the hunter, because of either physical or mental constraints,” including both fencing and habituation to humans.
“All trophy hunting is canned,” Mercer said, “because there is no true wilderness left in South Africa and all hunting takes place in fenced areas from which the animal cannot escape.”
Van Schalkwyk introduced his proposed reforms shortly after Mercer and partner Beverly Pervan “dipped into our savings to pay for me to travel around the U.K.” on a 30-stop speaking tour, Mercer recounted, “because no other wildlife organization was pro-actively campaigning against all trophy hunting, and it seemed to us that the plight of the lions was being lost among all the other animal welfare issues worldwide.
“There was a clear need to expose the doctrine of sustainable use for what it is: a policy devised for the worldwide benefit of an obscenely wealthy but harmful hunting industry,” Mercer asserted.
“We hoped that my visit might act as a catalyst for change, galvanizing the various animal rights and animal welfare organizations in Britain and Europe to take action to ban the import of all wildlife trophies from Africa.”