Baraza

Category: China, Ivory, Trade, elephants, wildlife trade | Date: Oct 28 2008 | By: Maina

Today, 28 October 2008, Namibia opened bidding for the 9 tonnes of ivory stockpiles it wants to auction in the controversial CITES backed one-off sale. The media has been shut out of this auction. According to a report appearing in the Namibian, a national paper, The Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) never made an official announcement about the international auction. Most people would wonder if the government is ashamed or it’s trying to hide something.

Tonnes of applications and requests by international and national media houses piled into the Ministry’s in boxes but nobody was going to bother. When asked on Monday, the Deputy Environment and Tourism Minister Leon Jooste told media representatives that “It is too late to change the Ministry’s strategy with regard to the ivory auction.”

Local and regional conservation NGOs will also not be let into the auction. A request by the southern Africa office of the International Association for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to be allowed observer status was curtly rejected some two weeks ago. “The [MET] official just flatly denied us the possibility,” Christina Pretorius, Programme Manager of IFAW Southern Africa, is quoted as having told The Namibian on Monday.

Botswana will sell it’s 44 tonnes on Friday 30 October while South Africa, with the largest sale of 51 tonnes, and ZIMBABWE, 4 tonnes, will follow suit on 2 and 5 November respectively. In total, a whooping 108 tonnes of ivory will enter the market. The effect of this massive influx of ivory in the Chinese and Japanese markets, according to most conservationists, will be a corresponding increase in poaching to affect the rest of Africa. Traffic, the trade monitoring body under CITES however maintains that there is no evidence to support these allegations. Whatever happened to taking precautions?

The southern Africa states participating in this one off sale of ivory stockpiles first approved - in principle - by CITES in 2002, made $ 5-million in the last one off sale some 9 years ago in 1999. This year, according to the BBC, they expect to make $ 30-million - quite an increase occasioned just by the entry of China into the fray. They say this money will go towards elephant conservation. Traffic says that the ivory will not leave China and Japan into other markets. The two governments have promised to ensure that that does not happen but that is another story. There is evidence - overwhelming evidence - that illegal ivory trade is still alive and far outsells the legal trade.

The wisdom of this sale is quite questionable. If elephants are still endangered in most African states, then there is no logic really to let the sale of ivory - with the potential of fanning poaching - to anyone. Inasmuch as the data that Traffic presented does not show any increase in illegal trade, the fact remains that illegal trade will not go away just because the stockpiles have been sold and $30-million is injected into conservation (and this - if the money does indeed end up in conservation - will be in states where elephant populations are already growing).

Moreover, reports from Zimbabwe indicate that a large percentage of the wildlife has been eaten by desperate country folk or hunted illegally by unscrupulous safari hunting companies as the country’s governance sunk into an abyss. How can anyone justify allowing Zimbabwe to sell ivory? Besides, who knows when South Africa, Namibia and Botswana would end up with a dysfunctional government resulting in massive poaching and - perhaps - eventual extinction of elephants?

The insertion that selling these stockpiles will help conservation is myopic. This sale will only keep demand for ivory alive. And when the southern states have no more ivory to sell, who will feed China’s growing hunger for ivory? Is it not the rest of Africa where elephants are not properly protected? Is it not poaching?

One Kevin C from Taipei commenting on the BBC article puts things rather candidly:

Sounds like It is also a very good idea to sell drug stockpiles in police office. It will reduce the market value and make it less profitable to smuggle and produce it underground.

You are always welcome to have your say. This is a matter that needs all your input. Tell us what you think.

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Tags: auction, China, CITES, hunting, Ivory, ivory stockpiles, Japan, Namibia, poaching, southern Africa, wildlife trade, Zimbabwe

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Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 28 2008 | By: baraza

This is the latest news from Save the Elephants:   A new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society and Save the Elephants published in the open access Journal PloSONE has revealed massive collapse of forest elephant home range in the shrinking wildernesses of the Congo Basin forest.

The researchers fitted Global Positioning System telemetry collars onto 28 forest elephants living in six different national parks in the contiguous forests of Central Africa. Each park was found in a different road-less wilderness, free of major roads, and each wilderness varied in size, from the smallest at just 59km2 to 11,793 km2 (which at the time of the study was the largest wilderness in the Congo Basin excluding swamps).

The GPS tracking data showed that forest elephant home range size was directly related to the area of the roadless wilderness within which they lived. Average home range in the smallest wilderness was just 76 km2, whilst in the then vast Ndoki forest it was 1,284 km2. The largest home range, of a female called Spikey was some 2,226 km2.

The researchers found that forest elephants adopt a “siege” strategy in the face of road encroachment, shrinking their home ranges to avoid proximity to roads that are used by poachers. Only one elephant crossed an unprotected road, streaking across the road 14 times faster than her normal travelling speed. No other elephant was brave enough to attempt such a feat. On the other hand, the collared forest elephants routinely crossed roads that were located inside national parks and thus afforded at least some protection from poaching.

The study highlighted the dramatic decline of forest wilderness taking place in the Congo Basin, as road developments open up the interior of the Basin for logging, mining, and oil production. Since the elephant movement data were collected, the largest road-less wilderness in central Africa, home to one if the most important elephant populations on the continent, has shrunk by 89%, while others have disappeared completely. The consequences for the future of the forest elephant and its habitat are catastrophic.

This is a further challenge to the wisdom of the recent decision taken by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to downlist the conservation status of the African elephant from vulnerable to near-threatened. While African savannah elephant populations appear to be stable in some countries in Southern and Eastern African nations, both forest and savannah elephants in Central Africa are in crisis. “We question the wisdom of down listing the African elephant which appears to have been done on questionable data and assumptions” says Iain Douglas-Hamilton.

However it could all be so different. Development agencies and private enterprise spend billions of dollars in infrastructure development in Africa every year. Yet, planning of road infrastructure takes almost no account of environmental sustainability, focusing almost exclusively on maximizing the efficiency of resource extraction.

The study concludes with a call to arms, not just for forest elephants but for the future of the Congo Basin ecosystem itself. Development planners must harmonize diverse goals in order to optimize the balance between wilderness preservation and livelihood development for the poor, whilst minimizing the costs of natural resource extraction. Failure to do so will see the last great forest wildernesses of Africa, and the elephants they contain, disappear. “Unless we are very very careful, forest elephants and their wilderness home will disappear, silent and unnoticed from beneath the trees of the equatorial forests of central Africa as did the Bison form the great plains of the US. We can change the trend, it is eminently feasible. If we do not, one day we will wake up and the forest elephant will be gone” says Steve Blake. “There is a colossal threat to elephants from encroaching roads into the forest and to the entire diversity of life in that habitat” says Iain Douglas-Hamilton.

This paper by Stephen Blake, Sharon L. Deem, Samantha Strindberg, Fiona Maisels, Ludovic Momont, Inogwabini-Bila Isia, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, William B. Karesh, Michael D. Kock Roadless, Wilderness Area Determines Forest Elephant Movements in the Congo Basin, will be published in PLoS ONE on Tuesday, October 28, with the press embargo ending at 5 p.m. Pacific Time (8 p.m. Eastern) on Monday, October 27. On publication, this paper will be available online at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003546. For further information please contact corresponding author Steve Blake, sblakewcs@gmail.com, (Galapagos Islands) or Iain Douglas-Hamilton +254 7222 04868 (Kenya).

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Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 27 2008 | By: baraza

I was really pleased to see Dr Jane Goodall sticking her neck out to remind the world that we need to do more to save great apes. In an article published in the Calgary Herald Thursday, October 23, 2008, she says

“In the couple of months since the historic Spanish parliament resolution granting certain rights to great apes, the ensuing debate has taken a wrong turn. As commentators have become mired in the nuances of what rights are appropriate for apes or any other non-human animal, we have lost sight of the central concern — that we continue to use great apes in invasive research, as well as entertainment and advertising, in ways that are unnecessarily harmful and often downright cruel to these amazing creatures.

Like Spain, other countries have recognized this fact. Australia, Austria, Holland, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom have banned or severely restricted invasive research on great apes. While we may not agree on how to get there, there’s a growing consensus around the world that we need to go in this direction.

Over the past century, a wealth of information has been uncovered regarding the behaviour and biology of great apes. We now know with absolute certainty that great apes share many of the same psychological, social, and emotional characteristics as humans.

Taking these findings into account, we can no longer turn a blind eye to their inhumane treatment.

For years great apes have been used in inappropriate and irresponsible ways. Invasive research on great apes continues, despite the suffering it inflicts and the growing abundance of alternative non-animal testing methods. The use of great apes in the entertainment and advertising industry also persists, regardless of the heavy toll it exacts on both captive and wild great apes. What most people do not realize is that performing apes must be taken from their mothers as infants. The premature separation of an infant from its mother can often lead to long-term social and psychological damage. Additionally, entertainment apes have a very short shelf life in the industry. They only remain manageable until they mature, around the age of eight, yet captive great apes can live from 50 to 60 years. Once performing apes are no longer manageable on the entertainment set, they often end up in inappropriate and inhumane living conditions — a roadside zoo, a biomedical research lab, or a breeder compound where the cycle is repeated.

Researchers have found that people who are accustomed to seeing chimpanzees mimicking humans in television programs, advertising and film may be misled into believing that chimpanzees are not endangered.

The misconception that chimpanzees are not endangered negates efforts to raise public awareness and commitments toward their conservation, a consequence that we cannot afford at such a critical juncture. For chimpanzees and all the great apes, once abundant, are now on the verge of extinction. This is due in large measure to the loss of forest habitat from commercial logging, mining and biofuel operations, as well as growing numbers of people in great ape ranges who lack basic needs.

The Spanish parliament’s action serves as a reminder that we must press forward to protect the natural habitats of great apes in Africa and Asia. There is so much to be done.”

UNEP is helping by announcing that 2009 will be the Year of the Gorilla  under the Convention of Migratory species.

At WidlifeDirect we will also draw increasing attention to the conservation needs of our closest relatives - a conservation need that is badly underfunded globally, and where conservationists are working under extraordinarily difficult conditions. We hope you will support our ape projects including the Orangutan Foundation in Indonesia, Lola ya Bonobo bonobo sanctuary in Kinshasa, JACK a chimapanzee rescue center in the DR Congo, the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, the Virunga National Park, the Tacugama wildlife sanctuary in Sierra Leone, and Limbe Wildlife Center in Cameroon where rescued gorillas are being cared for.

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Tags: bonobos, chimpanzees, Gorillas, Great apes, Jane Goodall

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Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 26 2008 | By: baraza

This is from the official CITES webstie Geneva, 24 October 2008 - it makes me feel ill

The Secretary-General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), Mr Willem Wijnstekers, will visit Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe during the next two weeks to supervise closely the ivory sales that the member States of the Convention agreed to in June 2007, in The Hague.

On the margins of the four ivory auctions, Mr Wijnstekers will also hold talks with Chinese and Japanese authorities, as well as traders, about the details of further supervisory activities of the Secretariat upon arrival of the ivory in those countries and thereafter.

The proceeds of the sales must be used exclusively for elephant conservation and community development programmes within or adjacent to the elephant range. The revenues are expected to boost the countries’ capacity to conserve biodiversity, strengthen enforcement controls and contribute to the livelihoods of the rural people in southern Africa. All this without affecting negatively African and Asian elephant populations.

Background information

Under an agreement reached in The Hague in 2007, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe were authorized to make a single sale of a total of 108 tons of government-owned ivory. The following quantities of raw ivory registered by 31 January 2007 have been approved for sale: Botswana: 43,682.91 kg, Namibia: 9,209.68 kg, South Africa: 51,121.8 kg, and Zimbabwe: 3,755.55 kg.

Elephant populations of the four countries are in Appendix II of CITES, which means that, even though they are not necessarily now threatened with extinction, the trade in their products is strictly regulated. Recent studies concluded that over 312,000 elephants live in these four countries and that their number has increased in recent years.

The CITES Standing Committee, which oversees the implementation of CITES between the major conferences, gave the go-ahead to the one-off sale of ivory last July by approving China as the second importing country. Japan had been approved earlier.

Each sale is to consist of a single shipment per destination and may only go to China and Japan, whose internal controls on ivory sales comply with the required verification standards established by CITES for this one-off sale.

Between March and April 2008, the CITES Secretariat conducted missions to these four countries and verified that the declared ivory stocks had been properly registered by 31 January 2007; consisted solely of ivory of legal origin (excluding seized ivory and ivory of unknown origin); and had been marked according to CITES requirements. They also verified that their weights were in accordance with the relevant records. This involved the checking and comparison of computerized databases and thousands of paper records, as well as the physical inspection and examination of hundreds of randomly-selected tusks and ivory pieces. In each case, the findings of the audits were satisfactory.

The CITES Secretariat is monitoring the Chinese and Japanese domestic trade controls to ensure that unscrupulous traders do not take this opportunity to sell ivory of illegal origin.

The 2007 African agreement stipulates that after these shipments have been completed, no new proposals for further sales from the four countries concerned are to be considered by CITES during a resting period of nine years that will commence as soon as the new sales have been completed.

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Tags: China, CITES, elephant ivory, elephant poaching, ivory sales, Japan, South Africa, Zimbabwe

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Category: big cats | Date: Oct 24 2008 | By: baraza

The world is a buzz about Big Cat Diary and it has been a wonderful week with some extraordinary pictures on Wildlife Direct of predators. Nobody I knew could identify this unusual cat.

If you want to know what it is then go on expedition across Africa with Simon and Laela who are documenting their 2 year safari in one of the most exciting blogs to watch in coming weeks as they explore places, discover new birds of prey and meet extraordinary people. The combination of their rare writing skills and fantastic photographs generates some of the most photographically exhilarating blogs that we’ve seen for some time.

But big cats and other predators in Africa are in trouble as revealed in the Masai Mara ecosystem on Predator Aware , and on Lion Guardians where the drought is leading to human conflict with lions leading to retaliation killings of lions.

But it’s the shocking images of poaching in Zimbabwe, and as lions attack wild dogs in South Africa that really stood out for me and made me want to weep. These guys really need help.

Don’t worry, it’s not all bad… there is some good news at least for lions in the Okavango Delta,  for now lions are safe and food is plentiful, and Cheetahs are about to start breeding so watch the Limpopo Valley Carnivores blog for images of the cubs in coming weeks.

Please support our predator projects generously as they work against all odds to species at the top of the food chain. Funding will help these extraordinary projects to find ways for predators and people to co-exist.

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Tags: Africa, big cats, cheetah, leopard, Lions, okavango, poaching, predators, safari, Simon Thomsett, Zimbabwe

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Category: elephants | Date: Oct 23 2008 | By: baraza

I’ve just had a conversation with Iain Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Elephants which I would  like to share.

Like me, Iain feels that we need to do much more to raise awareness about the impact of the legal sales of ivory (which will take place later this month) on the  illegal ivory trade and the rate of elephant poaching in Africa. I have a soft spot for Iain, he introduced me to elephants years ago at the height of the poaching in Kenya, I’ve been in love with them ever since. He reminded me of our efforts to prevent CITES from re-establishing the ivory trade in the 1990’s, and he expressed great anxiety at the recent decision to allow the one off sale to China and Japan which is due to happen from the 28th of October.

Some people think we are too emotional in Kenya which has always taken a principled position on the ivory debate. We hold that the legal trade anywhere has always contributed to illegal trade, and therefore poaching. The Kenya Wildlife Service has already announced that Kenya is experiencing a surge in poaching around the places where Chinese companies are conducting roadworks. Esmond Bradley-Martin and Lucy Vigne who are the only people doing detailed field studies of ivory trade have reported in SWARA magazine of the East African Wildlife Society, that they found significant amounts of ivory in markets in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, just north of Kenya. Much of this ivory is coming from Kenya.

‘They are selling chopsticks Paula, who do you think is buying chopstics?“  he asked me. For no good reason I felt guilty! How come the culprits don’t feel guilty?

Though he had no hard figures, Iain confirmed that northern Kenya is feeling the brunt of the Ethiopia ivory trade. He told me that he is seeing an increase in the proportion of illegally killed elephants around his study area in Samburu in northern Kenya.

It’s not just Kenya and Ethiopia though. Earlier this year, the Economist reported that Elephants in the Congo are helpless. The report suggested that the price of ivory is increasing and so is the incentive to kill elephants everywhere in Africa, but especially in lawless places.

Like many scientists, we believe that forest elephant populations are declining rapidly due to rising demand from China. Dr Sam Wasser from Washington University suggests that the rate of off take may be the highest on record. He too believes that the ivory sale this month is prompting more poaching in central and eastern Africa, as criminals will mix illicit ivory with the legal ivory to avoid detection.

Shame on CITES

The scientific community should be ashamed for ignoring the warning signs and agreeing to the ivory sales under the pretext that the funds raised would help elephants.

The idea that the sale of ivory will help elephant conservation by ploughing funds back just doesn’t make sense to me. If we agree with that argument, then should we commercialize the highly lucrative child pornography industry to make money to protect children? No? I didn’t think so.

TRAFFIC, the IUCN body that monitors trade in wildlife said that the Congo is “haemorrhaging elephants”.  In Virunga National Park 24 elephants have been poached so far this year. That’s 12% of the parks entire population gone in one year! Virunga had 2,900 elephants when Congo became independent in 1960, 400 in 2006, and has fewer than 200 today. At this rate there will be none left in just a few  years time.

The politics of conservation disgust me

Why has CITES given China the green light to buy ivory despite facts about the lack of controls in China, against the backdrop of escalating poaching? How come the IUCN has just down graded elephants in the red data list suggesting that they are in fact better off than before.

Killing elephants to kill people
Who is doing the poaching? It’s no secret that  ivory is financing wars in Africa. The poachers are mostly militias who sell the ivory to middlemen and then to Chinese staff working for infrastructure projects such as road building and logging who then smuggle it to China. According to The UK Independent, elephants are being killed by the FDLR militia, comprising members of the former Rwandan Interahamwe, the Congolese military, the local Mai-Mai militia, as well as villagers. In Sudan it’s the Janjaweed.

Sudan in particular is a major transit point for shipments to China and the world’s largest center of illegal ivory trade is in Omdurman near Khartoum.

Elephant Poaching leaves long term scars on families

Some people like Sam Wasser think that elephant poaching is at an all time high and if he is right, then this could spell serious problems for elephants across Africa. Already restricted to less than 30% of their original habitat, populations of these socially complex  animals area already severely affected by poaching. Like humans, and any long lived species, elephant society is designed to learn and adapt over generations. Interrupting this knowledge and gene transfer can have serious effects. Indeed, many cases of human -elephant conflict arise because disrupted herds are not as ‘wise’ as those that have been left alone.  Leadership can be messed up leading to rogue behaviour, knowledge of resources and migration routes lost, and impacts on habitats in ’safe places’ can be devastating. Elephants are also very emotional and aware of death, they spend ages sniffing the bones of the dead. Joyce Poole who writes for elephantvoices blog is an expert on elephant behaviour and has found that the traumatic effects of losing individuals can felt for decades especially when adolescents are affected. Working in Tarangire National Park in Tanzania, Charles Foley has also documented how the loss of a matriarch has direct effects  the survival of other individuals in the family, especially during tough years.

We need new thinking to save elephants.

We can’t just let the economics of trade or the political correctness of culture understanding (eg. ivory chopsticks and Chinese traditional medicine) drive the worlds largest land mammal to extinction. We will be forced to use plastic chopsticks by then anyway, why not start now and save our elephants? We need to give elephants rights, the right to exist, the right to not be hunted, the right to keep their own tusks. We need to accept that animal species should not have to pay for their way or right to survive.  We need to accept that not everything has a cash value - after all, isn’t our love affair with money the reason why we are in so much financial trouble right now?

Ebay have made a good start, but I wish we could do more. But What? What do you think we can do to put elephant conservation back on track?

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Tags: DR Congo, elephant poaching, elephantvoices, Ivory, ivory trade, wildlifedirect

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Category: elephants | Date: Oct 21 2008 | By: baraza

I can’t shake the feeling that elephants are going to be the big news stories for coming weeks. First, we are all anxiously awaiting the 28th of this month when more than 100 tons of ivory will be auctioned in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
The sale approved by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, CITES, in July shocked many of us because China was approved as a trading partner. China! A country that has been implicated in enormous levels of illegal trade and even for organizing poaching in Kenya.  I’m talking to a number of people and I am doing some research on this issue. I’ll bring you some more posts and news about  what this means for Africa and elephants in coming days.

Today however, I’m in celebration mood. Ivory sales on Ebay are to end. This blog post is to send out a MASSIVE THANK YOU TO RICHARD BREWER-HAY of Ebay who made the decision and the announcement on an inhouse blog here.

The announcement has led to a media frenzy about this including BBC, and on Market watch - they emphasize that the announcement came just moments before a damning report by IFAW that the popular auctioning site is a place that launders vast amounts of ivory. You can download the IFAW report “Killing with Keystrokes” here.

Quick search on Ebay for “elephant ivory”  gives 6 pages with 25 items for sale on each! You can also get other elephant products like hide.

Regardless of why Ebay made the announcement, I think it’s great that conservation pressure have had an impact on Ebay. I’m a bit saddened that the ban  is not immediate but comes into effect on January 1st 2009. So, for the time being anyoen can still buy ivory trinkets - a quick search on Ebay revealed a suprising number of items on sale!

Hopefully the ivory ban is just the beginning, for sure there are many other wildlife products especially in oriental medicines, that are made up of body parts from endangered species. These should all be banned as well without delay as IFAW write another report. I’ve left a note on the Ebay blog to this effect. You can too…if you get a chance, leave a thank you  to Richard on the Ebay blog here.

On a related topic, elephants in Kenya are being saved by cell phones on a private ranch through a partnership between a conservationist Iain Douglas Hamilton, a private ranch owner and the largest Cell phone company Safaricom. The elephant with the cell phone device on a radio-collar  basically sends text messages to rangers every time he gets too close for comfort to villages. The rangers swing into action and chase him away - saving his life as well as the crops and lives of people in the village. Its an extraordinary use of cell phone technology and everyone is talking about it- check out Wildele’s here and Afrigadget blog about innovations in Africa.

Well, for your benefit, I’m going to see Ian Douglas Hamilton from Save the Elephants tomorrow to get you the inside scoop so stay tuned to Baraza blog.

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Tags: Ebay, Ian Douglas-Hamilton, IFAW, illegal wildlife trade, Ivory, ivory sales, Richard Brewer-Hays, Save the elephants, wildlifedirect

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Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 15 2008 | By: baraza

We have been coming across terrifying news about Zimbabwe for some time now.

Their economy is in melt down at an official rate of 200 million percent. The unofficial rate of inflation is apparently several billion percent! It’s completely incomprehensible what that means – basically cash is worthless.

The government has been printing money, well its not really money, it’s money that has an expiry date of 6 months - this is what is what is driving inflation.

I was shown a 100 billion dollar bill - the largest note (at least for now) and it has already had ten 0’s lopped off it! It’s worth about 30 Kenya shillings, and four of these notes will buy a loaf of bread. But there’s no bread to be found. The cash economy does not work - people are bartering or using US dollars.

I asked my colleague who lives in Zimbabwe how people are surviving, on TV they look ok, dressed in clothes, they don’t even look hungry.

“The sad truth” she said, “is that the media is controlled. People are not surviving. People are going home and dying in droves. Ashamed, humiliated and miserable. The child mortality rate in Zimbabwe is lower than in Somalia, a country that does not even have a functioning government”. That says a lot.

With such enormous human tragedy, few people are reporting on another tragedy, the raping of the wilderness. In some places starving local communities have invaded protected areas where they are wrecking destruction on once pristine wilderness. The poaching of wildlife has now stripped the country of between 70 and 90% of it’s wildlife. Hundreds of thousands of trees have been chopped down. Private conservation areas have been the hardest hit, and it is exacerbated by a policy decision to feed the large military force Production on farms has collapsed and people have resorted to wild food. But one of the main cause of wildlife devastation is the hunting fraternity (tourists) and the Zimbabwean military.

According to this article on the Times Online “Tourists pay tens of thousands of dollars for permits to bag the Big Five (elephant, buffalo, lion, leopard and rhino) on private land, but safari operators have reported encounters with professional hunters and their trophy-seeking clients in the Hwange and Victoria Falls national parks, and tourists have heard shots fired and seen carcasses. The government denies the claims. Last week, Dr MZ Mtsambiwa, director-general of the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, insisted “no trophy hunting takes place in national parks”, adding that men seen with hunting rifles in protected areas were professional hunters engaged to train park staff in elephant culling techniques.
Poaching is also on the increase - 27 black rhinos have been slaughtered this year - and Zimbabwe’s national parks authority has given orders for more than 60,000lb of bush meat to be issued to staff every month, as a supplement to their wages.”

In the last few weeks, WildlifeDirect has been asked if it can help provide support towards wildlife rescue costs – basically saving the lives of animals caught in snares in the protected areas. Here’s a conversation I recently had with someone on the ground.

Q. We’ve heard distressing news about the poaching. With the recent developments in the government, has it eased up, what is the poaching situation now?

A. The poaching is horrendous and there right at the moment seems to be a free for all. It most certainly is not getting better. At least 75% of our wildlife was on private land and now that that has all but gone there is a serious problem. Elephants are being culled left right and center, even in Parks.

Q. Culled, poached or hunted?

A. All three if the truth be known

Q. By whom?

A. Officials, starving people, hunters. The starving people are the ones at the end of the scale as they do not have what it takes to poach an elephant.

Q. Is it safe for you to tell things as they are or do you still have to be extremely careful?

A. We have to be extremely careful as we are on the ground and working with the people in the different areas, if we are too out spoken there we have a huge price to pay in what we are doing. Being an NGO we have to be really careful as they have only just lifted the ban on NGO working in Zim

Q. How can we help?

A. There are two elephant calves with snares but the mothers will need to be darted first before anyone can get to the calves. It will cost US $300 for each for drugs alone. There are a 1000 cases such as this in Zim right now!!!

The elephant my friend was talking about is baby elephant had previously lost its trunk to a snare and now has a snare on it’s leg. The infection has caused the skin on its leg to sag. It will die unless rescued soon.

And it’s not only elephants that are affected. Rhinos, hippos, lions, buffalo, antelopes, you name it are being snared indiscriminately and dying by the thousands. National Geographic raised concern about this more than a year ago here. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature have warned that the breakdown in law and order has reversed 10 years of conservation gains especially on rhino conservation. The official website of the Zimbabwe Wildlife Conservation Task Force talks of’ horror stories and has pictures too horrible to reproduce here.

While it might seem callous to care for these individual animals at a time of such huge human suffering, saving the wildlife in Zimbabwe may be one of the most valuable assets that could help accelerate the country’s economic recovery.

Our Zimbabwe based bloggers, Lisa Hywood at the Tikki Hywood Trust on Zimbabwe7
And Peter Lindsay and Rosemary Groom on the Zimbabwe Wild Dogs are unlikely to tell you anything on their blogs that could get them into trouble. Both projects desperately need funds and we urge you to consider making contributions to their work which is continuing despite the near impossible conditions.

Other friends in Zimbabwe speak of a conservation crisis due to the decimation of wildlife. Hopefully the situation will begin to recover if only the power sharing agreement between Mugabe and Tsvangirai could stick. We will try to bring you more news and pictures in coming weeks and months and we will begin a cause to raise funds specifically for wildlife rescues in Zimbabwe.

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Tags: black Rhino, elephant snaring, poaching, wildlife conservation, wildlifedirect, Zimbabwe

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Category: Gorillas | Date: Oct 14 2008 | By: baraza

After visiting gorillas one can’t help wanting to know more about the individuals

I found the family photo of the Amohoro group in Rwanda that I visited and wrote about in June on the IGCP website.

This is the family album of the Amohoro Group. A google search reveals that many people have visited this group like  Mike Johnson who has some incredible photos of his visit on his blog here and Chris Will is in his spectacular photo album of the same group.

Have a  look at their photos and mine below, see if you can identify anyone from their unique nose prints.

This as an adult female - she had a new baby

How easy/difficult is it?

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Tags: Amohoro, IGCP, mountain gorillas, noseprints, Rwanda

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Category: Climate change, wildlife trade | Date: Oct 11 2008 | By: Maina

In a previous post in this blog, Paula reminded us that destroying the environment is far worse than the collapse of banking and other financial services that we are witnessing worldwide. But climate change, accelerated by the same factors that are contributing to loss of biodiversity, has an uglier face that could lead to further economic disasters.

A report produced by a team from the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Global Health Program and presented at the ongoing IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, Spain shows that climate change is not just a problem of rising sea level and melting ice-caps. Climate change, according to the report, will also bring with it the plague of emerging infectious diseases such as Lyme disease, yellow fever, plague, avian influenza, Ebola, cholera, and tuberculosis which have crippling economic consequences.

Reportedly, these diseases, which can be transmitted from wildlife to humans, could reach cataclysmic levels as climate change continues to ravage this planet. The WCS has selected 12 out of the 600 ailments that are shared between humans and animals and labeled them the Deadly Dozen because of their immense human health risk. There are 14,000 recorded ailments but the 600 are known to infect both humans and wildlife.

As climate change affects temperature and precipitation patterns and levels, wildlife is being forced to change their migratory patterns, their habitat ranges and other population behaviors. Pathogen carriers, such as ticks and mosquitoes, are also expanding their ranges to areas where the resident animals and humans have not evolved any defense mechanisms against the pathogens attacks. In short, diseases are coming into areas where no one is prepared to deal with them.

Wildlife, in their resident ecosystems, have evolved with their pathogens and therefore have mechanisms to limit disease prevalence such that there are hardly any epidemics. Where the hand of climate change has played havoc to the ecosystem, there may be new pathogens or the old pathogens may be favored by - say - warmer temperatures thus becoming more successful. This could lead to epidemics.

The health experts at WCS believe that programmes to monitor the health of wildlife could act as early warning systems that can help prevent the outbreaks of epidemics among humans. An example is the Global Avian Influenza Network for Surveillance (GAINS) programme which monitors the movement of bird flu through wild bird populations around the world. Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT3), a champion for the GAINS Program, is quoted in the WCS website saying that “Emerging infectious diseases are a major threat to the health and economic stability of the world.” She adds that “What we’ve learned from WCS and the GAINS Program is that monitoring wildlife populations for potential health threats is essential in our preparedness and prevention strategy and expanding monitoring beyond bird flu to other deadly diseases must be our immediate next step.”

Monitoring wildlife thus becomes important. But to monitor wildlife, such wildlife must exist. An article posted at the National Geographic website by Christine Dell’Amore quotes William Karesh, co-author of the report and vice president of Global Health Programs at the New York-based WCS saying “Without the presence of wildlife, we would be clueless about what’s going on in the environment.”

Wildlife, and its role in the propagation of infectious diseases is already aided by nasty unnatural factors such as poaching and illegal wildlife trade supported by the large wildlife products market in Asia. China’s appetite for Civet-meat for instance, according to Dell’Amore’s article, led to a sudden outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) which reached epidemic levels in 2002.

Dr Richard Leakey, in his statement against proposals to legalize bushmeat, cited the spread of these dangerous diseases as a good reason not to allow the killing and eating of wild animals. It is now even more imperative not to allow bushmeat hunting and trade given that climate change, a much more complex problem, has reared its ugly head into an already deteriorating situation.

This is a two pronged problem now. When bushmeat and climate change combine forces, then woe betide planet earth. Estimates of how much these disease outbreaks can cost have already been done, and it is pretty obvious that they are costlier than the credit crunch and collapsing banks. For instance, WCS says that “avian influenza and several other livestock diseases that have reemerged since the mid-1990s have caused an estimated $100 billion in losses to the global economy.”

Three things come to my mind right now: one, we have to adopt sustainable living as humans to reduce the severity of climate change and its effects; two, now more than ever, we have to safeguard our wildlife for they are our early warning systems against outbreaks of these deadly diseases; and three, bushmeat trade has to come to an end - and there is no question of whether it is legal or illegal.

What is your take on this matter?

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Tags: bushmeat, Climate change, disease, Dr. Richard Leakey, health, IUCN Congress, National Geographic, WCS, wildlife

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