​DANGEROUS ILLUSIONS
 
                                                               by
 
                                                      Richard Peirce
          Author, wildlife campaigner      Website www.peirceshark.com
 
                                                               and
 
                                                       Chris Mercer
                  Director, Campaign Against Canned Hunting (CACH)
 
In AD 1028 when the Anglo Nordic King Canute decided to sit on the beach and command an incoming sea to recede he was conducting an exercise in futility, and he knew it.  To what extent are today’s conservation activists, naturalists, environmentalists and others conducting similarly futile exercises trying to conserve wildlife, and campaigning for humans to live sustainably on our planet? 7.48 billion people, ineffective national governments, giant profit driven corporations, and the lack of effective joined up global governance are a deadly combination.  Against this onslaught of irresponsibility are the world’s conservation and environmental organisations emulating King Canute?  If so they are unwittingly, and certainly not deliberately, contributing towards producing dangerous illusions.
 
The Paris climate summit, CITES meetings and others all generate reassuring headlines for the world’s public, and the illusion that effective action is being taken. What chance has the world’s public got of understanding the gravity of the global environmental situation when President Trump, the most powerful leader in the free world, peddles the illusion that climate change is all a Chinese invention?
 
A terrifying example of reality, as opposed to illusion, comes from the WWF/ZSL Living Planet report. In the 46 years between 1970 and 2016 global wildlife declined by 58%. On present trends that figure will be 67% by 2020.  By 2012 1.6 earths were needed to provide the natural resources and services we humans were consuming each year. These figures are the reality, the illusion is that we are taking effective actions to halt our headlong rush to decimate wildlife, combat climate change, and live sustainably.
 
Global problems need global solutions, and until national governments either act effectively in concert, or cede powers to a global governance entity, efforts to save wildlife, halt climate change and live sustainably are doomed to failure.  Only a radical re-think of the way we live will enable us to live sustainably and in harmony with nature.  I do not believe this will happen until the human race feels so threatened that survival becomes the prime consideration.
 
In the Second World War the people of Great Britain cheerfully accepted consumer austerity measures they would never have been accepted in peacetime, because they believed their survival was at stake.  When climate change starts to manifest itself by causing worldwide large scale human death and misery, then the world’s population will demand from their leaders the changes needed for survival.
 
In future decades, I believe that today’s pathetic climate change and wildlife conservation measures will be recognised as having been inadequate and illusory. It would be a suicidal NGO that stood up and said “We are not winning and we cannot win”, and this is one of the reasons illusions will persist.
 
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One thing is clear which is that current conservation paradigms, in which traditional conservation (preservation) has been superceded by policies of regulated exploitation (sustainable use), are not working. Wildlife numbers in Africa and elsewhere continue to decline dramatically. Some scientists have proposed combatting the incompetence and corruption of African governments by privatising wildlife conservation, but the unintended consequences of this are potentially disastrous.
 
The privatisation of wildlife has already been implemented in South Africa. More than 10,000 farms have abandoned agriculture in favour of game farming in which the ‘wild’ has been taken out of wildlife, and rural employment has declined.
 
The South African example shows that privatising wildlife management is no substitute for real conservation and so is another dangerous illusion.
Treating captive lions bred for canned lion hunting as ‘wildlife’ is not conservation. It is farming for profit and to call it conservation is illusory.
 
The doctrine of sustainable wildlife use has largely failed. Everywhere we look we find that in practice, sustainable use has become sustained abuse. Sustainable use has become mostly just a licence to exploit and kill. 

In Africa, whether it is the senseless destruction by rich white men (hunting), or by poor blacks (bushmeat and poaching), or by Asian syndicates (poaching) the result is the same – devastation of biological diversity and dreadful animal suffering.

We have forgotten that conservation means “the preservation of natural functioning eco-systems”. Nowadays hunters style themselves as conservationists because they are only killing some animals - not all of them.

We need an environmental philosophy that gets back to true conservation. However idealistic and aspirational it may be, it is better than adopting licences to kill as an overarching policy.

To preserve biodiversity, we need discipline and rigid protection. One example of this is the island of Santo Domingo. A clear line can be seen running down the border that divides Haiti from the Dominican Republic. On the Haiti side, no trees, no life, just environmental ruin. On the Dominican side, rich natural forests still survive, because right from the start, the Dominicans adopted a zero-tolerance approach to Haitian poachers and woodcutters. The army was deployed to shoot trespassers on sight.

This hard line did not result in substantial loss of human life. Once a dozen or so Haitians had been killed, the message got home, and they stopped coming over the border to poach. Africa is now heading steadily in the direction of becoming a continental Haiti – a continent failing to stem the tide of poverty, misery and environmental degradation. What is needed is for Africa to aim at becoming a continental version of the Dominican Republic.

Involving local tribesmen is important. Every effort must be made to ensure that a good proportion of funds derived from eco-tourism reaches local communities so that they feel that they have a stake in the preservation of biodiversity. But along with the carrot must come the stick. Experience has shown that benefits alone are inadequate. Nature reserves need also to be rigidly protected with the most effective modern technology and with ruthless military efficiency. 

Rigid protection of biodiversity also requires African governments to pursue unpopular policies that will inevitably alienate some sections of their voting constituencies. Sadly, based on experience to date, this is most unlikely to happen, at least in the short to medium term.

There are examples where indigenous people have organised resistance to exploitation of natural resources, such as is currently happening in Amazonia, but this pits them against their own governments, and their own national armies.

There is apparently no such grassroots resistance among indigenous tribes of Southern Africa. Until indigenous Africans reclaim and remember at least part of the culture and heritage that was so disastrously dismantled by white colonial governments, continent wide conservation successes will be few and far between.  Without a widespread reawakening of the value of the natural world, conservation successes are potentially dangerous illusions if we allow them to distract us from the general decline so evident all around us.
 

The Armyworm is a greater threat to African wildlife than all the the hunters and Rhino poachers put together.

And I am prepared to bet that no one reading this blog post has any idea why. But I do because I’ve seen it all before.

Droughts are endemic in Africa and are often followed by floods. When that happens, there is an explosion of growth of grass and other plant matter, and Nature in its wisdom, tells all the little locust and other insect eggs to hatch and go on the rampage.

Of course Nature in its wisdom knows that the locust swarms and insect pests will create a feeding frenzy for Africa’s bird and small mammal populations. But Mankind does not live by Nature’s rules. Mankind thinks it is smarter than nature. What would be a feast for bird and small mammal populations are a plague to humans. Worse, they threaten economic interests and therefore insult the great God Money to whom all humans pray daily, regardless of the subsidiary religions that they claim to worship.

Anyone who speaks out against economic interests is regarded universally as an heretic of the worst kind.

Here is how  this situation will play out and how so much of Africa’s wildlife is going to be wiped out.

I was farming in the Western Transvaal during the last drought and when the rains came we had locust swarms and a plague of army worms. Those army worms were awful things because they covered the ground like a carpet and everywhere you walked they stuck to the bottom of your shoes in a horrid squashed mess.

Of course all the landowners received government aid - in the form of poisoned corn, which they laid out and spread in long lines on their land. Sure enough the marching ranks of insect pests devoured the poisoned corn and died - but not before they had done great damage to the crops.

Insects provide the prey base for African wildlife. So behind the insect plague came every bird and small mammal in the affected area, gratefully feasting upon the plentiful insect food – and dying from poisoning in their thousands. All the little guinea fowl flocks, the meerkat families,the foxes –etc, they ate and died.
​Once the poison has entered the food chain, up it goes to the raptors, and kills them too.

I did not spread poison on my land. Instead I waited to see what Nature would do. After a week or so of army worm infestation there arrived on my land hundreds of sacred ibises. Where they came from I know not, but I had never seen ibises on my land before. They cleaned up the veld until it was hard to see any army worms left. And then they flew away.
The grasses and vegetation soon recovered and within a month there was no evidence of any army worm damage.

But, I have little doubt that after cleaning up my land for me, the ibises would have landed on farms most of whom had spread poison out for the insects - and been wiped out.

The big chemical companies will deny that their product causes secondary poisoning and they will reassure the public with sophisticated public relations that their organophosphate poisons are eco-friendly and will break down in the soil once they have done their job.

Do not believe these blandishments. The poisons may break down in time but not before they have wiped out much of Africa’s wildlife. This PR may fool the public, but you can’t fool Nature. 

And who will stand up for the wildlife in South Africa? We have a Department of Environment of course – the very same department that eagerly promotes canned lion hunting as 'conservation.' And we have the wildlife unit of the Department of Agriculture (DAFF) which eagerly promotes the use of gin traps and other forms of indiscriminate mass killing, which are aimed at small predators like caracals and jackals, but actually decimate bird and small mammal populations on South Africa’s farms.
 
In other words no one in SA will stand up for the wildlife. So buy shares in Bayer and Monsanto; the big chemical companies are going to make billions out of this calamity.
And turn a blind eye to the environmental destruction which you’re about to witness.

Do not forward the link to this post if you are afraid of being called ‘elitist’ or ‘racist’ or any other epithet dreamed up by chemical industry PR firms.

Cub petting and getting animal welfare on to the agenda.
 
The response on social media to the inaugural meeting of our Captive Carnivore working group has been mostly condemnatory and often downright abusive. The main theme of the criticism is that cub petting and lion farming should be banned and anything less than that amounts to a betrayal of the lions.

Let us be clear about this issue. CACH continues to campaign vigorously in more than a dozen countries for tourism and volunteer operators to withdraw their support for facilities that offer cub petting. We also liaise with more powerful welfare organisations to reduce demand for lion trophy hunts by banning the import of lion trophies into their countries. Other role players such as airlines are also targeted. So over the last 20 years, very few people have done more than us to bring lion trophy hunting to an end and to publicise the link between cub petting and canned lion hunting. That work goes on day in and day out.

We are a small group of volunteers, finding as much time as we can to fight for the lions. None of us draws a salary and none of us ever will.
 
We have found by bitter experience that the South African government is determined to promote lion farming and canned lion hunting, together with all its spin-offs, including the lion bone trade. All our campaign efforts have fallen on deaf ears in the SA Department of Environment which, as we have explained many times, has been captured by the hunting industry.
Indeed the SA government is eagerly promoting the exploitation of animals for the Asian traditional medicine trade and you may have read of the cruel killing and skinning of donkeys to provide donkey skins to Asia.
https://www.thedonkeysanctuary.org.uk/sites/sanctuary/files/under_the_skin_report.pdf
So it’s not just the lions who are suffering from a government culture which claims that compassion for animals is un-African.
 
While we continue to campaign against canned lion hunting, what are we to do in the meantime? Other than a provincial Ordinance in one of the nine South African provinces, there is no control over the interaction between animals and the public. Cub petting thrives in a vacuum where animal welfare regulation should exist. The Captive Carnivore working group decided at its first meeting to draft a management plan to submit to government which will fill that vacuum and introduce animal welfare into all animal aspects of lion farming and cub petting.
 
How can struggling to get animal welfare placed on the agenda in SA conservation be so distasteful to so many animal lovers?

• Do you want to see lion cubs so stressed from excessive human handling that they lose their hair? Is that what you want?
• Do you want to see lion cubs covered with mange, drinking from filthy water troughs? Is that what you want?
•  Do you want to see lion cubs dragging their hindquarters behind them because they have rickets from poor nutrition?

 
Over the last 20 years I have become cynical about clicktivists – people who clamour self-righteously to know what we are doing to make them feel better about the plight of lions. They should rather ask themselves what they are doing to improve the plight of lions.

Shouting on social media has its uses to raise awareness but that is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Thanks largely to our own efforts, everyone in conservation and many of the public role players and stakeholders are now fully aware of the link between cub petting and canned lion hunting. It is now time to engage with stakeholders- yes even lion farmers- if we wish to be effective in animal advocacy.
 
For those who refuse to see the importance of getting animal welfare placed on the conservation agenda, we would rather they just went away with short jerky movements, to rephrase an old Anglo-Saxon expression.

​Chris Mercer.