Baraza

Recently, as is usually the case, a passionate discussion erupted here at Baraza following a post about Uganda’s sport hunting plan. While I believe that Uganda’s plan to get into sport hunting is unwise, not all agreed with me. Although the ‘to hunt or not to hunt’ debate is not anywhere near the end, when a new voice comes in, a new view emerges. Most of the time, this new view continues to discredit this barbaric and unnecessary so called ’sport’.

A lion in Kenya (photo courtesy of Ewaso Lions)

Some time ago, an article appeared on Bloomberg.com showing the dilemma that South Africa has found itself in after a court ruling more or less banned canned the so called hunting. Now they are grappling with some 3,000 odd lions that have been bred in captivity for the sole purpose of being shot by foreign tourists at the price of  $22,000 per lion. As Mike Cohen writes on Blomberg:

“Lions bred for hunting are often shot after just a few days in the wild. In captivity they are mostly fed on donkey meat bought from rural communities. After their release from breeding cages they catch and eat game that the farmers have acquired for their estates.”

This case exposes one of the hidden vices of sport hunting – canned hunting – a cruel and mindless practice that should never have seen the light of day.

When the sport hunting becomes popular in Uganda for instance, the chances are that many ranchers will want to convert their land into wildlife producing factories where, say, lions can be bred for shooting or antelopes can be bred for feeding the lions. Eventually, someone will challenge canned hunting in Uganda and they will find themselves in the same situation that South Africa is in presently.

Kenyans are currently bothered by there being only 2,100 lions in the country and that if they continue losing the lions at the current rate of 100 lions a year, they will have no lions in 20 years. South Africa on the other hand has more lions than Kenya but they are hunting them at a higher rate, and Tanzania is even worse. Cohen says

More than 300 lions are hunted in South Africa every year, with trophy hunters coming from countries including the U.S., Russia and Spain. That makes South Africa the second-biggest destination for lion hunting after Tanzania, where wild lions are shot. About 1,000 lions are hunted each year in Africa. 

You should note that South Africa has not stopped hunting of lions. Only canned hunting – which more or leas means the captive breeding of lions for the sole purpose of being shot – has been made illegal by the court of law. Of course, the greedy business people who make millions from this ugly business have appealed to have the court ruling overturned. What did you expect?

They are even using the prospects of losing some 5,000 jobs as a reason why canned hunting should be reinstated. They even have an association for that. Cohen writes:

The South African Predator Breeders Association has warned that the judgment may shut an industry that employs 5,000 people because farmers can’t afford to keep lions on their estates for long periods of time due to the cost of the antelopes they would eat. It also argued that the lions may need to be euthanized as the legislation reduced their commercial value.  

Let’s see how the court handles this.

I’m sorry friends but here is even more bad news about the statue of wildlife in Africa.

West African chimpanzees have declined by 90 percent in the last 18 years in an African country that is one of the subspecies’ “final strongholds,” a new study stays.

Scientists counting the rare chimps in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) found only about 800 to 1,200 of the apes—down from about 8,000 to 12,000 in 1989-90. Ivory Coast had been thought to  harbor about half of all West African chimps.

Why? Human population, hunting and deforestation

Côte d’Ivoire’s human population has grown by about 50 percent since 1990. As a result there is more hunting and deforestation. One of the country’s sanctuaries, Marahoué National Park, has lost 93 percent of its forest cover in the last six years. The habitats are damaged and occupied by people, they are no longer suitable for chimpanzees or any other animals.

We can’t lose hope. Help us to tell and share these stories, to inspire actions, and to save Africa’s endangered species.

I just received this extraordinary story from someone who describes it as ‘disgusting, revolting’

What do you think?

MELISSA SANTOS; MELISSA.SANTOS@THENEWSTRIBUNE.COM

Published: 02/16/09  12:09 am   |   Updated: 02/16/09   7:31 am

Madeline Jones has painted on all sorts of surfaces. But the Orting artist’s favorite canvases are the ears of African elephants.

Jones, 66, has spent the past 12 years painting elephant ears for hunters who bring them back from Africa.

Each measures about 5 feet tall by 31/2 feet wide and sells for several thousand dollars when she’s done – even in tough economic times, like now.

“I have a nice niche,” she said. “Having a specialty allows me to survive.”

Jones is a fixture in the Orting Valley, having helped design the community’s Daffodil Festival float for 18 years. A local resident for more than 50 years, she is the wife of former Mayor Dale Jones.

Painting elephant ears allows her to tap into her love of Africa on a daily basis.

In her studio on her longtime family property, portraits of African tribesmen line the walls. Impala fur rugs adorn the floors. And a half-dozen painted elephant ears complete the decoration.

On an easel near a window rests her current project: an elephant ear she’s decorating with a map of Africa. The map of the continent is one of her most requested designs, she said.

She embellishes the ear with illustrations of Africa’s five most popular big-game hunting animals – the leopard, the cape buffalo, the lion, the rhinoceros and the elephant.

She said she likes working with the elephant ears because each is unique.

“You don’t have the confines of a rectangle,” Jones said. “Even if someone wants the same design, it has to be different because the ear is different. There’s never going to be another ear like that one.”

All the ears she paints are from legally hunted pachyderms, she said. When hunters send her an ear they’d like her to adorn, they include a copy of the permit proving they had permission to hunt the animal.

Though commercial trading of ivory has been banned since 1989, U.S. hunters are allowed to import elephant trophies from countries including South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Tanzania.

The countries typically use fees they collect from hunters to help pay for conservation efforts. They also use hunting to control the animal population and limit conflicts between humans and elephants, which occur partly as a result of human encroachment on the animals’ natural habitat.

Though some animal rights groups, such People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, oppose the practice, Jones said conservation hunting provides valuable income for local governments in Africa, as well as food for villagers. Tourists who go on hunting safaris often spend tens of thousands of dollars to hunt a single animal.

“It’s only done where there are too many,” Jones said. “Everything that isn’t needed goes right back to the villages. Nothing is wasted.”

Lisa Wathne, a PETA spokeswoman, said the issue is more controversial than hunters would like to think.

“Most people actually assume that it’s illegal to hunt elephants and are appalled when they find out it’s not,” Wathne said. “Really, ‘conservation hunting’ is a misleading term for trophy hunting.”

The ears themselves don’t carry any inherent value like ivory does, Jones said. Hunters typically want them for personal reasons, such as to display in a trophy room or office.

“The value is added by the artist,” she said.

Hunters typically have the elephant skinned in Africa and send the ear to a tannery before mailing it to Jones. People will send her elephant ears from all over the world.

They typically arrive at Jones’ doorstep folded in a box. She sends them to a taxidermist, who stretches them and mounts them on marine plywood. When Jones gets them back about six weeks later, they’re ready to paint.

The ear Jones is working on now is rough, with thick hairs protruding from the surface. That’s because this piece of skin was cut from an elephant’s outer ear, Jones said. She also works with skin from elephants’ inner ears, which feels like smooth leather.

The first ear Jones painted came from a friend who lives in Seattle. About 12 years ago, he asked the artist if she would paint an ear for him.

Since then, she’s painted about six to 10 a year for different clients.

Her designs are based on photographs she took during a two-month trip to Africa a decade ago.

The experience changed her life, she said. She spent most of her time in Kenya and Tanzania, getting to know members of the Masai tribe.

“Ever since I was young I had an interest in Africa,” said Jones, who started painting at 16. “I thought, ‘I have to be there to see what the real thing is.’ You can’t paint things if you haven’t experienced them.”

Buzzi Cook, a taxidermist who mounts the ears on plywood for Jones, said her passion shows in her paintings.

“She does very fine detail work,” said Cook, who owns Olympic Taxidermy Studio Inc. in North Bend. “Everybody that’s had work done by her that I’ve talked to is totally impressed.”

Cook said poaching and illegal hunting of elephants in Africa has become virtually impossible due to increased regulations. Huge amounts of paperwork are required to export an elephant ear from an African country and get it into the United States, he said.

“It’s very controlled,” Cook said. “It’s not like you can go out and kill 20 to 30 elephants and come home.”

Recently, Jones has begun creating replicas of her elephant ear paintings on canvas. The replicas are about one-fifth the cost of a real painted ear, she said, and are growing in popularity.

She said she’s just happy she’s become successful doing what she loves.

“Some people don’t paint anything but seascapes,” Jones said. “This is my passion.”

A US geneticist from the University of Arizona is planning to use DNA testing to study the roaring bushmeat trade in west Africa with a view of identifying “species that can be harvested sustainably”.

According to a report on KTar.com, the geneticist, Hans-Werner Herrmann, will analyze the bushmeat at village markets, track how it got there and study how the information could be used to better manage affected wildlife populations. He hopes that finding species that can be hunted sustainably will curtail poaching and halt wildlife decimation particularly in African forests.

According to Herrmann, rural Africans are driven into bushmeat hunting and trade by extreme poverty and he cannot just say it is bad to hunt without answering the poverty question.

Roughly 1 million tonnes of bushmeat are harvested in the badly ravaged African forests. a CIFOR report that Dr Richard Leakey felt had erred in its recommendations says that 80% of proteins and fats in rural Africans’ diets come from bushmeat. This is a big problem and solutions to bushmeat hunting need to be found before all wildlife becomes extinct.

The study will involve African researchers in Cameroon taking DNA samples from bushmeat in the markets, and sending it to Arizona for analysis and identification. They will then track how the meat got to the market and study how the information can be used to help in management of the affected wildlife populations.

How useful this study will be is subject to debate. Particularly, when they find wildlife species that they perceive to be “bushmeat viable”, does it mean that they will recommend legalization of bushmeat hunting? Perhaps we need this research to prove that there is no way bushmeat can be harvested sustainably.

There are three things that make sustainable hunting virtualy impossible: one, there is not enough wildlife, two, there are too many humans on the planet, and three, our African governments have problems implementing anti-poaching legislation. To me, these are the fundamental questions: not whether wildlife can be harvested sustainably.

Perhaps the researchers – who by the way have applied for a $1-million from the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) for the study – should use these funds to find out how we can prevent the malignant human population growth from overrunning the planet and all wild things that live in it. Better still, these funds could be used to find alternatives sources of protein and income (poverty reduction) for the rural poor in Africa. Alternatives that are not bushmeat.

For wildlife populations to recover, and to avoid imminent mass extinctions, all manner of wildlife trade needs to be stopped – at the very least, as a precaution. We don’t really understand wildlife population dynamics that well to sustainably use it. We haven’t yet fathomed the complex interaction between humans and wildlife to say that we are in control of hunting and trade.

We know a few things though. One, bushmeat hunting has already resulted in the empty forest syndrome, where the forest vegetation is relatively intact but no wild animals live there. Two, governments have good legislation intended to control bushmeat poaching but implementation is weak. Three, losing our wildlife is not good for the planet.

With these truths in mind, perhaps what we need is to stop all human-centric arguments that perpetuate eating of wildlife and start focusing on finding ways to improve wildlife’s welfare.

Yes, it’s hard to believe, but two websites are reporting that military helicopters are leaving the battleships anchored off the Somalia coast to combat Somali pirates, and getting into the mainland to hunt wildlife illegally .

According to a report published today in one of the websites (Garoweonline.com), foreign choppers, which the the local Somali elders have not properly identified, arrived in three separate days and left with live specimens of ostrich and deer. The choppers were later seen landing in warships offshore. Although the elders have not been able to infallibly identify whose warships these are, one was seen to be flying the American flag.

In the other site (Mareeq.com), a reporter, Abdi Guled – despite writing in very bad English – almost certainly believes that the choppers bear the American banner. According to Guled’s report, the local authorities in the pirate infested central Somalia region are colluding with the purported hunters. Apparently, the local chiefs have signed contracts with foreign agencies to transact this illegal business.

The report on Garoweonline says that a local elder in the Maduq region of central Somalia, Mr Mohamed Hussein Warsame, has been interviewed by reporters from the BBC Somali Service about the trade. I have searched for the report on BBC website but I have not yet found it. AllAfrica.com, an aggregator of African news has also carried the report from Garoweonline.

While these might be outrageous allegations, we cannot rule out the possibility of this happening. We have seen foreign military and work forces getting involved in illegal activities in their outposts before. We have all heard the Chinese workforce in Africa being blamed for the escalation of ivory poaching in DRC, Zimbabwe and other states with dysfunctional governments.

If indeed this is happening, then it would be quite a shame. I hope the alleged BBC reporters who have the story can publish it so we can quote from a source perceived to be less biased. A source with a global voice. I hope other independent or big media house journalist can do an independent investigation into that matter. As long as they don’t get kidnapped by Somalia gunmen.

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.