About 10 years ago I was working on the management plan for
the Cotapata National Park in Bolivia. In that process it was essential to convene
and talk with as many people as possible that live inside and around the
protected area. It is fundamental that people
interacting with protected areas understand the process that was being
conducted, understand their rights and ideally come to see the protected area
and wildlife in general as assets and not an imposition from outside. The park
guards had the custom of announcing a meeting in a certain community and then
showing a movie an hour before the meeting was supposed to start to encourage
people to show up. This involved carting
in a generator and a very large, old fashioned television, but it worked. People of all ages who live in areas without
electricity and TV will generally make an effort to take in a movie even if it
means afterwards talking with bright-eyed conservationists from the city.
I asked the guards “What video do you have?”, the answer was
Matar o Morir!! (Kill or be Killed!!!).
I said, “Not another martial arts film!”
They said “Oh no, it is very appropriate, it is a wildlife program.”
Back to the present, it has been amazing to see the response
to the hunting of a picturesque lion, which most of us had never heard of,
including most of the people in Zimbabwe. A couple of years ago a Texan trophy hunter
caught widespread ire on social media for paying 350,000 dollars at an auction
to hunt and preserve the head of a rhino in Namibia. But the response did not compare to that
about Cecil. Much has been written about this posthumously famous lion, and I
don´t intend to read it all, but what I have read collectively misses enough
simple principles that it justifies a few moments to point them out.
What comes closest to
what I consider the central issue and related principles is the following:
“Cecil
will be remembered forever, but no one has names for the thousands of lions
that are killed invisibly and silently each year because of human encroachment
on wilderness.” Lawrence Frank,
Letter to the editor of the New York Times.
However, it is not that thousands of lions are being killed
invisibly each year, because all animals die eventually, and the more lions there
were around the world the more that would die of whatever cause each year. A true tragedy would be that only a few lions
were dying, because that would mean that there were only a few lions left in
the world. In fact, Cecil, left to his
own devices in a large National Park, presumably was not stranger himself to
wounding, stalking, maiming, perhaps even decapitation in the course of the
survival of his pride. Kill or be
killed.
No, the central issue in conservation is “human encroachment
on wilderness”, or said another way, the reduction and degradation of natural
habitat around the world. A first principle
to remember is that the central objective in conservation is the preservation
of natural habitat, the bigger it is and the more natural it is, the
better. If your area is large enough, referred
to as “landscape scale”, then there is little “management” to be done by humans. Natural processes will ensure that as wide a
selection as possible of plants and animals survive, though the populations of
individual species will naturally fluctuate.
To be clear fluctuation means that at times more individuals of a
species will be dying than are being born, and usually this is related to
resource availability. Put simply if the
population of a species is increasing it will usually reach a point where there
is not enough food, and it will depress the food availability and the species
will die off, either of starvation, disease or natural enemies that are momentarily
happy to have an abundance of weakened prey, until the population of the prey
gets so low that the predator starts to die off. Kill or be killed.
A second principle is that outside of natural habitat we
need to have as much additional habitat as close to natural as possible. To a large extent we are running out of
additional, large, biologically intact regions of the word, while at the same
time the human population and its demands on natural resources have been
increasing drastically[1]. It is in this area of near-natural or
potentially natural habitat that the biggest challenges for biological
conservation occur. All kinds of management tools are needed. Though all humans
benefit from conservation and habitat preservation directly, or indirectly,
local resource users (LRU) pay a disproportionate amount of the direct cost.
Though Cecil was apparently lured out of a National Park to
his death, Zimbabwe has been overall a pioneer at innovative management of
wildlife outside of parks, in the African context, with CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Program
for Indigenous Resources[2]). The concept is that wildlife be viewed as a
renewable natural resource that can be owned and managed by local communities to
improve their livelihood, while helping to extend and manage near-natural habitat.
In practice the program has had many challenges but I
believe the concept to be fundamental.
During colonial times tribal people were pushed onto marginal land,
sometimes even to create national parks. The
point is that, as an agroecologist, I can tell you that the best use of
marginal land is for it to be under natural vegetation. At the same time the local resource users have to live from something.
According to the same source on CAMPFIRE, at one time 89% of the income
from wildlife use on communal lands in Zimbabwe came from sports hunting, with
trophy hunting the most extreme case.
In the absence of this income there would almost certainly
be a major move back to livestock rearing, (the leading alternative to wildlife
management) leading to overgrazing, leading to degradation of habitat, leading
to fewer numbers of wildlife, including or perhaps especially lions. In the absence of trophy hunting the lions
have no value to the communities; to the contrary they kill livestock and would
be considered only as a pest, not a resource.
Whereas in the presence of trophy hunting a lion can be worth 50,000
dollars, and would therefore be considered a valuable potential resource.
Namibia adopted the CAMPFIRE concepts later, but is
considered, for whatever reasons, to have been more successful. Perhaps this is in part because Namibia has a
very low population density for Africa.
This in turn is largely because Namibia is so dry that it essentially
has no free flowing rivers and is in a perpetual state of drought. What Namibia does have is thriving
populations of virtually all native wildlife, including black and white rhinos
that are disappearing or have disappeared from most of Africa. Outside of the Namibian national parks the
communities have the right to use the wildlife resources with careful control
of the national government. This
includes trophy hunting of certain individuals for officially approved reasons.
For example, that rhino that a Texan paid 350,000 dollars
for was a non-breeding male (too old) that was deemed to be dangerous to
younger, breeding animals. What was not
mentioned at the time is that in the drought he would also have been consuming
forage and even helping to degrade the habitat.
His removal is called culling, and is essential to most management of
many large species both wild and domestic in the absence of natural predators. And in the case of Zimbabwe and Namibia the
wildlife has to be managed many times alongside livestock to maintain the
quality of the habitat. Even elephants
and rhinos, globally under threat, can contribute locally to serious overgrazing and habitat degradation, if there are
too many for the forage at hand. Management sometimes means culling, killing,
individuals even if in other parts of Africa they are scarce. And a Texan paying 350,000 dollars to kill an animal that needs to be culled, is a lot of money to local
communities.
 |
| Discussing the challenges of sustainable wildlife management with the Torra Conservancy representatives, Namibia. Photograph Daniel M. Robison |
To my knowledge Namibia is one of the few, perhaps only, countries
where the rhino populations are on the increase in their natural habitat. The country is also considered to have negligible rhino
poaching. This is even though it has a
relatively lenient penalty for poachers.
Other countries have “shoot to kill” policies with poachers but their
rhino numbers continue to decrease. How
can this be? In areas where rhino
poaching is epidemic, it can be expected at the local hunters might get a few
thousand dollars for the kill, even though the rhino horns eventually get to be
worth 50,000 in the Asian aphrodisiac market.
The local communities, at least in Namibia, have the following choice:
do we let local hunters kill a rhino illegally and get a couple of thousand dollars, or do we look after it
on the hope that some Texan is going to pay the community conservation system
350,000 dollars for it, with most of that going to the community?
That was pre-Cecil, now airlines have started to refuse to
carry trophies and politicians have started talking about forbidding the importation
of trophies. They have just made it
harder for those local communities and LRU to gain significant material benefit
from conserving and properly managing the habitat under their control. It these measures stick, I would not be at
all surprised to see conservation on communal lands collapse financially. We should not forget that lions used to range
all over Europe and Asia in addition to Africa.
However for whatever reasons lions have only survived in Africa which is
to say that it is the continent where humans have best lived alongside lions and other
large game species. We should not
question too much the measures they have that, for the time being, help to
compensate for the cost to local humans of having the predator species in their
greater landscape.
This is where Tuichi the horse comes in. I live in the Bolivian Amazon on the edge of
major protected areas. I have a farm and
am involved in an ecosport venture that are both experiments in maintaining
near-natural habitat extensions to buffer said protected areas. In neither case has the income come close to
the cost of maintaining near-natural habitat.
At the farm we experiment with cattle, and of course every
dry season when I know that the forage is going to be limiting I cull the
cattle. Either they are young and sold
to somebody else to raise up, or they are older and sold to a butcher. Either way I get some income to help pay for
the habitat that is being protected.
With the horses it is different as an old horse has no value here. We are in the middle of the dry season so forage
is already relatively scarce.
 |
| Tuichi, front left and her great-granddaughter Tarumá (front right) |
Tuichi, who was once my favorite ride, is 24 years old (beyond
ancient for horses in the tropics) has had a good life as the queen of a free-ranging
herd, but she is nearing the end. She is getting very thin and has more trouble fending off parasites. Not
only does she suffer because it is harder for her to eat, but she is also using
up forage resources that another animal might need. Even though she is still dominant and will
wade into a fight biting and kicking, she stumbles and sometimes looks
confused. My fear is that sometime when I
am traveling she will be foraging in the forest, get tangled, fall over and not
be able to get up. Horses can last a
long time flailing without being able to get up, even with help, and it is not
a pretty sight. It is time for her to be
culled as humanely as possible.
Now I do not like guns, but I like to see animals suffering even
less. Our local vet does not like to
euthanize so I am generally the person who ends the life of dogs and horses
that are suffering beyond the point of return.
I would absolutely love to have some dentist from Dubuque offer to pay
me 50,000 dollars to end her life, even if he did take her head to hang up in his living room. She would
not care anymore. Culling individuals
is an unpleasant but essential part of maintaining habitat quality in the
absence of a natural enemy. I would,
however make sure that he nabbed Tuichi, and not her shiny young great-granddaughter,
Tarumá (the equivalent of killing a famous, picturesque lion in a busy national
park instead of some goat-killing lion outside the park.)
Finally, with respect to trophy hunting I am reminded of a
story about a president of Duke University a few decades back. The university has ties to the Methodist
Church, and a church member was questioning having accepted tobacco money for
the endowment. The president is alleged
to have said “Well the Devil has had that money long enough, now let’s put it
to a good use.”
[1] Speaking
of lion country, Uganda, that had a human population under 7 million at
independence 50+ years ago, is currently at around 35 million and is projected
to reach 100- 130 million by 2050[1][1].
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