My name is Simone Eckhardt and I am founder of the Dutch NGO SPOTS. Many wild felids are threatened with extinction. SPOTS focuses on protecting these species. 

 SPOTS operates in the Netherlands.  Our major goals are educating, creating a network for several wild cat projects and raising funds for our supported projects in Africa and Iran.

SPOTS officially stands for Save and Protect Our TreasureS but also refers to ‘places’ to visit in the world. 

Lots of people visit places where you can cuddle or walk with lion cubs. "Cub-petting."

We as SPOTS are very worried by this phenomenon since it can be a threat for wild lions because wild lions get taken away from the wild for new blood. Further we think many of these projects are unethical. They suggest that cubs will be put back into nature when matured but this is nearly impossible. 

Most probably these cubs end in the Canned Hunting Industry. We think that many volunteers and tourists don’t support this but simply don’t know. Therefore we are focusing on giving education in the Netherlands. 

One thing we do is to actively lobby Dutch tour operators, urging them not to promote  places where cub petting takes place, and to withdraw them from their itineraries. 

      
‘Game’  farmers claim to be conservationists; that hunting is a ‘tool of conservation’.  Are they?
      
They love to recite numbers.  “Look how few wild animals there were 50 years ago, and now look how many there are on our game farms”.

Let’s test their claim.  Take a proper definition of real conservation:
True conservation is the preservation of natural, functioning eco-systems.  

Now try to apply this definition to a game farm, or lion farm.  It does not fit. You can twist and turn it any way you like, but you cannot make a conservationist out of a 'game' farmer. 
 
Why does a farmer sell his sheep/ cattle and go 'game farming?  Answer:- because it is more profitable. He can make more money going to the game auctions and buying up a parcel of ‘wild’ animals and then getting high paying hunters to shoot them. Does this make him a conservationist?   No, he is still a livestock farmer, but now he is farming with alternative livestock.

These farmed animals are not evolving freely with other species, as they would in a natural environment. They are being actively managed, in-bred and cross-bred, to be hunted.  Hunters do not take the weak and sick, like a natural predator.  They kill the strong and fit, the trophy animals.  

This has genetic consequences. Compare the small size of Karoo springbok, who have been hunted for centuries, with their bigger, stronger cousins across the Orange river, the Kalahari springbok, who were protected until 1948.

Even worse, game farmers/hunters are a distraction from real conservation issues, such as loss of habitat.  Hunting moves the debate away from real issues. 
 
So here is our message to game farmers: join us in lobbying for a mass consolidation and expansion of protected wilderness areas.   

Then you can call yourselves conservationists. 
      
      

How cute!  How adorable!  say the tourists, and pay hundreds of Rands to spend a short time petting a lion cub and getting their photos taken.  

Imagine the stress on the cub, being pawed by tourists all day. Volunteers have described to us how stressed cubs become, lose their fur, vomit and get diarrhea. People pass on diseases to the cubs which also impact their health.  And that cub will almost certainly end up in a canned hunt after suffering a miserable captive life.


One needs to know what really happens so that a tourist can pet a cub.

After the lioness has given birth
she is driven out so that the cubs can be removed to be hand reared. The plaintive cries from the lioness can be heard for days as she calls for her missing cubs. All her instincts call out to her to protect her lost cubs.  

She will come into oestrus again quickly now. This proud lioness is now a production line and will produce more cubs like a battery hen drops eggs.  This is unnatural, for in the wild she would only give birth once every two to three years - not three times a year as she does in a captive breeding farm.

The cubs are (ab)used as human playthings by day, relentlessly pawed by tourists who are deceitfully assured that they will be set free. The cubs are beaten for biting and scratching; natural  play for a cub, but not good for tourism.  

The end for these animals is barbaric. Often drugged, they will be moved to an enclosure where a piece of meat is left out to bait them. Often while they are feeding, a hunter shoots arrows or bullets into its body.

We owe these exquisite animals more than this.  
The only way we will stop this evil is if we spread the word about what happens to these animals and tell everyone - DO NOT GO CUB PETTING.

Next month, in Part Two, we'll follow the money from cub-petting.

“Compassion for animals is un-African”. 
- South African President Jacob Zuma. (pictured left)


This revealing statement partly explains why S.A. is the world capital of canned hunting. It is S.A. government policy not to care for animal welfare. 

Indeed, conservation officials who would like to regulate for animal welfare are unable to do so. The legislation only allows them to protect biodiversity, not animal welfare. 

The Convention on Biodiversity mixes animals and bacteria together in its definition section. In plain words the Convention on Biodiversity sees no difference between an elephant and a bacteria.

There is the Animals Protection Act of 1962, an old statute which does protect domestic animals, livestock and captive wild animals. But not wild animals. 
Enforcement is left to the NSPCA, which has the frustration of having to grapple with unsympathetic judicial and prosecuting staff, and a creaking, dysfunction legal system. As for the Police force … well, the less said the better.

S.A. has so far refused to sign the UDAW –Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare, which has been signed and adopted by most other nations in the world.

No account of wildlife warriors in South Africa would be complete without mentioning Rita Miljo.  Of her, I can speak only with reverence.

She was by far the most knowledgeable wildlife rehabber in South Africa, and an internationally renowned expert on primate behaviour.

In her 80s she still ran CARE, the baboon sanctuary up in Limpopo province, which currently gives sanctuary to around 500 baboons. Contrary to conservation dogma, which insisted vehemently that it could not be done, she pioneered the release of baboon troops back to the wild. Even the great man himself, Nelson Mandela, attended one of her baboon troop releases.

Widowed by a light aircraft crash that took her husband and her daughter from her, Rita established CARE as a sanctuary for baboons against ferocious opposition from what must surely be one of the most hostile conservation services to animal welfare anywhere in the world. Baboons were classed as vermin. It was illegal to rescue or care for them.

She used to phone me of an evening, most often just to chat with someone who understood the problems she had to live with. Officials learnt to respect her. Once she rescued a baby baboon from far-off Barberton, and found herself once again in court on the usual charges of transporting and keeping an animal without a permit. She phoned me, chortling with glee, to give me the news.

“Well, Chris, there I was in the dock giving evidence and the prosecutor asks me in cross-examination: ‘Why do you waste your time on problem animals like baboons?’

So I said to him: “Who are you to tell God that he should not have created baboons?”

I saw the magistrate smiling at that. Anyway, I was acquitted. The magistrate said I was acting out of necessity to save the animal’s life and that was a good defence, even though I did not have a permit.”

And she chortled with glee again. What an indomitable woman. It takes a special strength of character and purpose to derive humour from a situation where one is being victimized.

– The Baviaans Leopard Story.

The Eastern Cape is the bloodiest of all the provinces. Of the more than a million animals that are sport hunted in South Africa every year, more animals are shot in the Eastern Cape than in any other province. And now, incredibly, provincial conservation services want to introduce trophy hunting of leopards for livestock losses. Leopards are threatened with extinction, and are listed as Appendix 1 of CITES.
There are only 35 leopards left in the Baviaanskloof reserve, a 200,000 hectare proclaimed international world heritage site.   See www.baviaanskloof.net

PLEASE READ HOW YOU CAN HELP THE LEOPARDS OF THE BAVIAANSKLOOF

On the 9th February, 2011, after a lengthy campaign to force transparency on to a reluctant provincial conservation eventually prevailed, a one day workshop on the management of leopards was held in Port Elizabeth. The conference was well attended by about 80 people. The subject of the workshop was a Policy which has been signed off and approved by Phumla Mzazi, the senior manager for biodiversity in the province, which will permit the trophy hunting of so-called ‘Damage Causing Leopards’. 

There are no provisions in the Policy to require farmers to take reasonable steps to prevent predation. No clauses require them to employ herders or to compel them to bring in their flocks at night. They can throw their sheep out unprotected in to the mouths of leopards – and then profit from the inevitable stock losses by selling the offending leopard to the hunting industry. That is what the approved Policy says.
Nine speakers gave presentations at the Workshop.

THE EXPERTS

Quinton Martins of Cape Leopard Trust, Liaan Minnie of Nelson Mandela Bay University, Bool Smuts and Jeanine MacManus of Landmark Foundation all made the point that the statistics show that less than 1% of stock losses in the province were caused by leopards and that killing a leopard would not solve the farmers problem since this would merely open up territory for another leopard to move in. 

Some of the knowledge shared by the researchers were interesting:

1. By far the major food source for the Cape Leopard - up to 60% - consists of rodents.
2. Second on the predation list are Dassies, with Klipspringers third. Very few baboons get taken.
3. There are only 35 leopards left in the whole of the Baviaanskloof area.
4. Unless corridors are opened to connect the various fragments of wilderness left in the Cape, the Cape Leopard is doomed to extinction.

THE LANDOWNERS

Ernest Pringle of Eastern Cape Agri, representing the farmers, and Arthur Rudmen on behalf of the hunting industry, both gave angry, emotional presentations in favour of killing leopards, stressing the financial losses through predation of livestock. Both speakers demanded to be allowed to dictate management policies in the conservation areas, and to influence complex predator conservation policies to meet their own private financial concerns.

Rudman went further and alleged a conspiracy of international Animal Rights groups, working with local groups, to ‘destroy conservation by advocating sentimental and impractical solutions which favoured animal welfare over farmer’s rights.’ Pringle also issued a warning to the meeting that if farmers concerns were not addressed farmers would go into the conservation areas and kill every leopard there.

THE CONSERVATION OFFICIALS

It became quite clear at the meeting that the conservation officials were completely out of touch with the issue. For example Phumla Mzazi, replying to a question asking why farmers were not being prosecuted for illegally hunting leopards, stated “we have no knowledge of illegal hunting of leopards.” This astonished the whole meeting, since the Landmark Foundation has carefully documented and published the brutal deaths of at least 30 leopards in the Baviaans Area since November 2002.

This Policy is intended to compensate farmers for losses. Clearly, the officials have not done their homework. These compensation schemes have been tried all over the world and they always fail for the same two reasons:-
1. They promote poor and unsustainable farming methods.
2. The so-called “safeguards” are easily overcome by resourceful soldiers of fortune, and then the system becomes a money making racket.

None of the conservation officials had the slightest idea about the damage which this Policy would inflict upon legitimate tourism enterprises in the province. News of the Policy to trophy hunt endangered leopards in a world heritage site will travel virally through the Internet, reaching all corners of the pool of tourists. Ethical tour operators will boycott the province. 

South Africa’s share of global tourism is already dismally small – less than one quarter of one per cent. Further loss of business by tourism facilities in the area (some are already operating at a loss) will cause staff retrenchment and unemployment.

Provincial conservation officials were so steeped in outdated farming practices that they confuse the perpetrator with the victim. Instead of trying to kill ‘problem’ leopards, officials should be working with agriculture extension officers to compel recalcitrant farmers to use sensible methods of stock management to mitigate predation. They should know that there is no such thing as a problem animal – there are only problem farmers.

The ignorance in Conservation structures extends beyond the provinces. Even National conservation officers obdurately refuse to focus on livestock management rather than predator control. Magdel Boshoff, of the National Department of Environmental Affairs, told the Workshop that in terms of the TOPS regulations, it was perfectly legal for farmers to hunt leopards by inhumane methods, including gin traps, baiting, poisons( including 1080!), dog packs and vehicles. She said they were even considering permitting the use of aircraft!

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Civil society now has a real chance to help save the Cape Leopard from extinction, and to save the Baviaans. The Baviaanskloof is a jewel of outstanding natural beauty which needs to be preserved for posterity. The Workshop may have shocked complacent officials out of their mindless appeasement of farmers’ never-ending complaints. 

Now is the time to help officials to understand the wider issues around permitting the asset stripping of our wildlife heritage for purposes which are scientifically proven to be doomed to fail. We list below some relevant email addresses. If you care about the survival of the Cape Leopard, please send your protest, in polite language, spelling out the consequences of this foolish policy. 

Ask them if they understand that this policy will:-
1. promote poor and unsustainable farming practices;
2. will not solve the predator problem;
3. confuses the perpetrator (farmer) with the victim (predator) and
4. fail to help the farmer.

On the other hand, it will surely:

1. impoverish our environment and push the Cape Leopard closer to looming extinction.

2. succeed in mobilising a mass boycott by ethical tourists of Eastern Cape and Baviaans tourism facilities, causing financial losses and unemployment.

3. Promote skewed social values: While millions of South Africans struggle to survive without the privilege of land ownership, here are a small number of landowners being given permits to asset-strip the surrounding public conservation land of its apex predators, for their narrow private gain. Why should taxpayers subsidise the hunting industry and wealthy landowners who are sitting on land worth millions?

You could ask government to attend to the following:

1. Obsolete livestock farming methods are neither compatible with conservation nor sustainable in the mountainous Baviaans landscape, and should be prohibited. The use of gin traps must be banned.

2. Delinquent landowners inside the Baviaanskloof must be evicted. Their land should be expropriated and integrated into conservation under the control of Eastern Cape Parks Board.

3. Conservation officials must understand how, when a predator takes livestock, it is the farmer - not the predator - who is to blame. It is so easy to farm among predators if one employs herders (thereby giving employment) and by bringing in the sheep overnight.

4. Listen to what the experts told you at the Workshop.

5. Prosecute the farmers who have killed leopards.



PLEASE WRITE TO THE FOLLOWING:

Eastern Cape Tourism info@ectourism.co.za
Eastern Cape Conservation - Phumla Mzazi phumla.mzazi@deaet.ecape.gov.za
- Albert Mfenyana Albert.Mfenyana@deaet.ecape.gov.za
- Leon Els Leon.Els@deaet.ecape.gov.za

Dept of Environment - Magdel Boshoff MBoshoff@environment.gov.za
- Thea Carroll TCarroll@environment.gov.za

E. Cape Parks Board - Tracey Steyn tracey.steyn@ecpta.co.za

On Thursday 25th October the Wildlife Forum met in Cape Town to consider a Protocol which is nothing short of a declaration of war on our wildlife.

Small livestock farmers have complained that their livelihoods are threatened by stock losses caused by predators, mainly caracals and jackals. They say that their only defence is to launch a predator extermination program..

Conservationist respond by pointing out:-

1. That the farmers’ refusal to employ herders or to kraal their animals at night is the real cause of stock losses. Poor animal husbandry is to blame. Farmers throw their sheep out into the mouths of predators, leaving them unprotected day and night out in the veld.

2. Extermination of wildlife will not solve the farmers’ problems. These methods have all been tried before and have failed. The report by Professor Bothma, commissioned by Cape Nature, examined the infamous “Oranjejag” where a similar predator elimination campaign was conducted in the Free State. That slaughter by hunt clubs over a period of years killed 87,000+ wild animals - of which more than 60,000 were harmless non-target species, such as Cape Foxes.

3. Bothma points out that more jackals and caracals were killed in the last year of the Orangjejag than ever before. In other words, the mass slaughter certainly devastated wildlife populations - but did not eliminate the clever predators.

Unfortunately, the Bothma Report was only completed after government had already decided to give in to the farmers’ demands. Citing food security as an overriding factor, government pressed Cape Nature to sign a Protocol with farmers’ representatives, permitting livestock farmers to form district-wide hunt clubs and to use gin traps, guns, poison and even helicopters to assault the province’s predators.

One would expect that the Bothma Report would have knocked out the Protocol and saved our wildlife from persecution but politicians everywhere are more interested in votes that in science.

If government does not care about the science, perhaps it will care about losing votes. South Africans who care about their wildlife heritage should talk to their MP’s.

(There is indeed a threat to food security in S.A. but it is not caused by jackal and caracals. In my humble opinion it is caused instead by political ideology and populist demand - the national government’s Land Reform Programme.)

Our wildlife heritage is under threat. Government intends to implement the Protocol notwithstanding the scientific evidence that this will impact biodiversity out of all proportion to any temporary respite for farmers.

The message from Professor Bothma is that both sides must compromise if we are to reach practical solutions. The conservationists publish horror photos of the injuries caused to wild animals by gin traps. The farmers respond with horror photos of stock animals attacked by predators, including gruesome pictures of calves being eaten alive as they are being born.

Gin traps.

If we had been given the time to question the farmers’ representatives more closely, I would have put the following ideas to them:-

1. We ban the manufacture, import, sale, possession and use of all leg-hold traps, soft and hard except where special permits have been issued by Cape Nature.

2. Farmers whose particular conditions require the use of gin traps must apply for permits to Cape Nature, who will only issue permits AS A LAST RESORT for the use of approved traps and after imposing strict conditions on their use. Permit restrictions might require the use of cell phone alarm systems so that the farmer knows instantly when the trap has closed.

Herders.

1. Farmers undertake to kraal their sheep at night and/or employ herders wherever possible and employ other defensive non-lethal methods of reducing stock losses. Margins in farming have shrunk and more active management is now necessary. Throwing sheep out in to the veld to look after themselves is outmoded.

2. If rigid labour laws are preventing farmers from employing herders then some special dispensation for herders is needed. Perhaps prison labour could be used, thereby reducing overcrowding in prisons and relieving the farmer from the burden of paying wages. In school holidays perhaps children could be allowed to earn a little money herding.

Gin Trap Destruction Festivals?

With good faith on both sides, this system could work. Farmers would avoid the damaging results of a confrontation with their own consumers and no doubt there are media and public relations opportunities in publicly destroying old gin traps. No doubt the big retailers would participate in enhancing the image of farming in SA.

You wonder if canned hunting can be made acceptable by any measures short of a total ban. 

Green hunting is the stalking and darting of large animals such as rhino to enable the “hunter” to have his photograph taken with the victim before the tranquillizer wears off and the animal recovers. This has fallen out of favour in S.A. because of the abuse of the idea: tranquillising is a life –threatening and traumatic assault , and some valuable animals have been killed thereby and / or darted excessively. 

Where money comes in, morals fly out and green hunting is no exception.

Regulations and control by an independent body is another idea that, like green hunting, sounds good until it is proved to be unworkable. Once again, money is the problem. When money comes in, rules and regulations fly out. 

There is no legal power for government to require an independent body of regulators to supervise every hunt, so it would have to be a voluntary control. The industry would never agree voluntarily to subject itself to such an intrusive form of supervision. And besides, if a rich hunter has an obsession to swing a lion from a chandelier and shoot arrows in to the victim, then hunting operators and regulators can be persuaded to look the other way.

Adding a regulator supervisor to the system merely adds another person to the payroll especially in a third world country like South Africa where officials are so vulnerable to corruption.

Of course, the canned hunting of captive bred animals is not a sport, where the rules of the game can be altered to remove distasteful aspects. In fact it is a form of farming. Farming with wildlife bred as alternative livestock. And really the shooting of bullets and arrows into defenceless captive bred animals is as unthinkable as shooting them into sheep or cattle.

Any attempt to regulate such despicable misconduct implies that the behaviour is acceptable so long as there is some (undefined) regulation.

So, by way of comparison, should we legalise cocaine because it is perhaps “less harmful than heroine? 

Should we legalise human trafficking so long as there are toilets in the shipping containers?

Or do we just use common sense and decency to ban canned hunting on the ground that is is inherently cruel and harmful and that hunting animals for fun is morally unacceptable. For an idea of what life is like for the captive bred lions, see Kirsten’s blog:
http://lionexploitation.wordpress.com/real-life-experiences/kirstens-blog/

If the animal protection laws do not allow farmed sheep and cattle to be shot at, wounded, and terrorised, why is it acceptable to inflict such suffering on farmed wild animals? For an idea of how prolonged and severe the agony of the target animal is, read our blow by blow account of the canned rhino hunt at Kuruman, in our book Kalahari Dream. It is available on Amazon or Smashwords.

The doctrine of sustainable use has failed. Everywhere we look we find that in practice, sustainable use has become sustained abuse. Everywhere we look, we see our precious natural heritage being destroyed. Sustainable use has become just a licence to kill. 

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 on a global scale.

We have forgotten that conservation means “the preservation of natural functioning eco-systems”. Nowadays every hunter calls himself a conservationist – because he is only killing some animals not all of them.

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

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 utter environmental ruin. On the Dominican side, some rich natural forests still survive. Why? 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 Haitians stopped coming over the border to poach. The results can be seen today, and right there is the lesson.

Most African governments lack the political will to preserve their natural functioning eco-systems. Even if they had the will, they lack the money, the capacity and the technology to protect their heritage. Right now, Africa is heading steadily in the direction of becoming a continental Haiti – a self-defeating cesspit of poverty, misery and environmental degradation. What is needed is rather for Africa to aim at becoming a continental Dominican Republic.

Yes, involving local tribesman is important. Yes, every effort must be made to divert funds from eco-tourism to 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 military ruthlessness. 

That needs the support of the developed world. That should not be too hard to get.
However, rigid protection of biodiversity also requires African governments to pursue unpopular policies that will inevitably alienate some sections of their voting constituencies. Based on experience to date, this is most unlikely to happen, if not inconceivable.

There are examples where indigenous people have organised resistance to exploitation of natural resources, such as is happening right now in Amazonia, but this pits them against their own governments and they must needs fight against the national army.

I am not aware of any such grassroots resistance among indigenous tribes of Southern Africa.

Hunting is to conservation what pornography is to art. Watch this video as proof.
What do you think of people who shoot arrows in to helpless tame lionesses - for fun?