​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.
 

Captive Carnivores Working Group
From left to right
Chris Mercer CACH, Mike Fynn Lion and Safari Park (LSP), Andre La Cock LSP, Mandla Mdluli DAFF, Petri Viljoen ALWG, Tom Wittenberg Economist, Riaan Crafford Ondestepoort Vet, Carla vd Vyver SAPA, Katja Koeppel Ondestepoort Vet, Pieter Van Zyl SAPA, Linda Park CACH, Magdel Boshoff DEA and John Werth PAAZA/WAZA.

A group of concerned members from diverse areas of operations and interests established a Captive Lion Working Group, with an initial specific focus on lion breeding and cub petting. The group met at Lion & Safari Park on 21 January 2017 to discuss the subject of captive lions, and cub petting in particular.

The diversity of the group is demonstrated by the mix of representatives, namely Onderstepoort, SA Vet Council, PAAZA, African Lion Working Group (IUCN SSC), Lion & Safari Park, SA Predators Association (SAPA), Campaign Against Canned Hunting (CACH), as well as independent specialists and consultants. The Department of Environmental Affairs and the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries were also invited to participate in the discussions, and representatives from both departments attended the meeting.

Under the facilitation of CBSG (IUCN Breeding Specialist Group), constructive debate and input from this group of professional and experienced participants resulted in consensus that, despite differences in opinion and priorities, the working group would continue to operate and would pursue the drafting of an industry management plan for cub petting that can be circulated to the industry and key stakeholders for input.
It was agreed during the meeting that the group will continue as the Captive Carnivores Working Group.

CACH believes that an agreement on regulations for carnivores in captivity, thus far totally unregulated, with a universal welfare plan is a step forward, whilst our push for an entire ban on the industry continues unabated. Our teams continue to press tourism stakeholders not to promote or support cub petting.

The year has been overshadowed by the unexpected illness and death of my partner Bev. The cancer struck in August last year but from the beginning of this year she was in and out of hospital. Her egregious suffering finally came to an end on 30th April. She was 68 years old.

Her death was followed by all the bureaucracy involved in winding up a deceased estate; the visits to the office of the Master of the High Court, the compulsory attendance at the tax offices to register the estate etc all involving travel away from home in the Karoo.

A word about cannabis oil. Still illegal in South Africa, notwithstanding the heroic efforts of IFP parliamentarian Dr Mario Ambrosini who fought for the legalisation of medical marijuana until the cancer claimed him too. When you are desperate you will try anything and through various contacts we managed to obtain a supply of medical grade cannabis oil at horrendous expense. Bev took her dosage regularly but looking back on it, I don’t think it had any beneficial effect at all.

When the pain got too bad Bev just wanted to die but assisted suicide is not legal in South Africa either. I cannot understand why an elderly terminal patient who wishes to choose the time and manner of her death should not be allowed to do so. It is uncivilised. Instead Bev was condemned to suffer the most unimaginable pain for many months and for what?

As for the treatment of pain in advanced cancer patients, medical technology has not advanced since the Second World War. Drown the patient in morphine is the primitive treatment. Why on earth in the modern era they cannot target pain receptors in the brain and disable them with lasers or something 21st-century I do not know.
 
The Karoo Wildlife Centre.
We were very busy at the beginning of the year building camps and enclosures and developing the KWC. It was difficult for me to properly supervise the labour force when Bev required such constant care and attention. Eventually, I had to bring in contractors to complete the work. We are proud of the infrastructure that you can see today and which will last for many years.

Labour issues.
We think that the Karoo is Paradise - but there are thorns in paradise and our thorn is the old drunkard who we inherited when we bought the property. We have been fighting a running battle with him on top of all the other responsibilities. Dismissal for misconduct was only a first step in a torturous process. Next comes battling to evict him from the staff quarters which he and his family use as their private retirement home. Political issues are raised when a white landowner wishes to evict a black family from his land and the law has been changed to make it well-nigh impossible. Basically, the employer has to provide the dismissed worker with suitable alternative accommodation at his own expense. The process will, I am told by our labour expert, take anything up to 18 months to complete and in the meantime the staff quarters are occupied effectively by squatters.

Animal rescue.
Birds and animals have begun arriving at the centre even though we cannot obtain permits from provincial conservation authorities to operate the centre. We have tried; we really have. I even employed a consultant to draft the permit application and motivation, and have given the authorities all the information they could reasonably require. But the authorities are not reasonable. Their bureaucracy is patently ridiculous. First, there was an issue over a full rezoning process and when we put our foot down against that, up popped demands for environmental impact assessments.
So we go on functioning without permits, relying on section 3 of the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act, which protects us against unreasonable or excessive bureaucracy. If we have any trouble from conservation authorities, we will challenge them in court. We have had to fight battles on many fronts this year.

CACH HQ
On 15th of August the deed of transfer of the 175 ha Karoo property was finally registered. Bev and I provided about 90% of the funding out of our life savings, but we have registered the property in the name of CACH (Campaign Against Canned Hunting.) The KWC is the headquarters now of the campaign and when I turn my toes up and join Bev in the next world, the CACH team will take over management of the centre, which CACH now owns.

Although our location is remote, modern satellite communications allow us to function with VOIP phone, Skype, email and the Internet. We have had a steady stream of visitors and apart from CACH representatives such as Sarah Dyer from UK  who was here from 24th March to 1st April, we hosted Phil and Trix Wollin on March 12, Donalea Patman from Australia on May 12 and Jill Robinson MBE of Animals Asia on November 1. Other guests included the GoPro for a Cause team from San Francisco.

CACH work.
On top of all this hectic activity around Bev and the KWC, the work of the campaign has continued relentlessly and I and the CACH team spend many hours every day dealing with campaign issues; educating the media, assisting documentary film makers, giving input to conservation authorities across the globe, proactively persuading the tourism industry to become more responsible and to discourage unethical practices like cub petting.
Much of the groundwork has already been done to set up the Captive Lion Forum which we have established with the help of the Lion and Safari Park near Johannesburg. We have attracted a lot of heavy hitters to the Forum, including politicians, conservation officials, regulators, lion farmers, cub petting facilities, agricultural economists, wildlife vets; indeed representatives of all stakeholders. The first meeting will be held in January and the purpose of our engagement with all role players is to try to find common ground on two issues:

•  the ethical treatment of captive lions, and
•  a timetable for the deconstruction of the lion breeding industry and a ban on canned lion hunting.

Updates on Facebook
We try to post interesting news weekly on the KWC Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/karoowildlife/
 
 
 

Conservation has been hijacked. The culprits are both exploitative industries and supine governments.  Their banner is the policy of sustainable use.

"Forget preservation of natural functioning ecosystems", they argue dogmatically. “It is not practical in the modern overcrowded world. For the socio-economic benefit of rural Africans and other human communities we have to sacrifice the conservation ideal.” How very convenient for the hunting industry.

Well, we've had this paradigm for decades now, long enough for us to see that sustainable use is not working. Wildlife populations are plunging all across Africa.
Like a stolen car at a chop shop, African wilderness is being hacked into little pieces to be sold off for the highest profit.

In place of magnificent stretches of pristine wilderness where animals continue to evolve against each other as nature intended, we now have little fragments of land called ‘game farms’ where selected species are bred and kept like sheep or cattle. "Active management" is the euphemism for this ghastly parody of conservation.

Picture this:

• here is a rhino farm; a piece of land where rhinos are being bred. You can see rhinos and even shoot them if you have the money and that is your pleasure.
• over there is a lion farm. There you can pet cubs and shoot lions too.
• on another fragment of land is a buffalo farm, breeding animals with out-sized horns because that is what the hunters want.
• And over there is a tree farm, where for an entrance fee, you can admire plantations of imposing indigenous trees, which used to grace the wilderness but which were chopped down for firewood by local inhabitants in order to cook the meat from the poached animals.
• provincial game reserves host prides of "wild" lions, many with radio collars around their necks. "Actively managing" their numbers should be done scientifically, but the tourist lodges will not allow the females to be contracepted, because tourists want to see cubs all the time. The result is a surplus of lions for the available prey base, allowing the reserves to profit yet again by offering lion hunts.

 
This is not the future.  I am describing SA conservation here and now. It is all about money. Wildlife must pay for itself. Protecting wilderness for its own sake, and for that of future generations is "elitist".

Extinction looms for many species. Scarce funding is squandered on wasteful talk shops like COP 17. While anti-poaching units struggle to provide boots for their rangers, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on useless debate about whether this species should be moved from this Appendix to that, when enforcement of such technicalities is so poor that it really makes no difference. Lions are Appendix 11, leopards are listed as Appendix 1. Yet permits to hunt and export the trophies from both species drop like confetti from useless SA conservation structures.
Wildlife numbers continue to plunge. The only elephant that is not threatened is the fat white elephant – CITES.

We need a new conservation paradigm. Sustainable use has become sustained abuse. A return to rigid protection of wilderness and the politically difficult expansion of wilderness areas to allow for the migration routes of old, is the only way to arrest the disastrous decline in unspoiled wilderness and wildlife numbers.

If we fail to raise the bar of protection for wildlife populations then they will be driven to extinction. Those animals that survive the slaughter will find a fate worse than death, domesticated, living artificial lives in fenced camps as alternative livestock and being truly treated as human commodities. The "wild" is being taken away from wildlife as I write. This is an unintended consequence of the doctrine of sustainable use.
In my life time in Africa I have personally witnessed the wanton destruction of the greatest show on Earth. As a child, I learnt to play golf on a small town golf course in Zambia where it was not unusual to see lions roaming around the course. Now you can travel for hours in Southern Africa and not see a living thing – just miles and miles of barbed wire fences.

I cannot see African governments finding the political will to stamp out poaching and trespassing by local inhabitants and their livestock, let alone extending the parks to join up fragments of land into one meaningful whole. "Forced removals", “putting animals before people”, “neo-colonialism” etc - can you not just hear the angry accusations by political agitators?
Besides, why would governments ‘waste’ public funds – funds that could be better spent on buying patronage and political capital, executive jets and luxury cars, than on protecting voter-less wild places, when they can abandon these to the hunters and call such destructive activities "conservation".

People vote; animals do not. Democracy becomes tyranny in time, as the Greek philosophers remind us. For animals, the tyranny has always been there. It just gets worse. And animals are the sentinel species on the planet. Their fate today will be ours tomorrow.

For those of us with eyes to see it is all happening right now, right in front of us.
 
What a scary prospect for the future.

For years we have complained long and loud about how the hunting industry controls the conservation structures of southern African rangeland states.

Nowhere was that more evident than at COP OUT 17, when CITES failed to upgrade the status of lions to Appendix 1. For those unfamiliar with CITES categories, leaving lions on Appendix 11 means that they may continue to be hunted freely.

This is a major victory for the hunting fraternity, and a devastating blow to real conservation, which is the preservation of natural functioning ecosystems.  CITES decided years ago in Decision 14.69 that tiger farming and the trade in tiger body parts should be banned because it would camouflage and thereby fuel poaching and the illegal trade.  You would think that the same reasoning would apply to lion farming, but the ferocious lobbying and wealth of the hunters prevailed. 

Motion 009 of the recent IUCN Conference in Hawai, called on the SA government to ban lion farming and the lion bone trade for the same reasons that tiger farming is ‘banned’. The considered views of the global conservation community, 1300 global organisations comprising  something like 16,000 scientists, were treated with contempt by the SA government.  Such is the lobbying power of the animal abusers.

SA conservation officials are mostly unqualified and the services in most provinces severely dysfunctional. They have a primitive belief, skilfully fostered by hunting propaganda, that money is conservation. Wave a Benjamin ($100 bill) at an SA conservationist, and he’ll clutch at it mindlessly, probably even after death and rigor mortis has set in.  Easy prey for the hunter predators.

Hunters’ claims that land used for hunting benefits conservation is false and misleading in so many ways.  The worst elephant massacres by poachers in the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania took place in ‘protected’ hunting concessions.  And SA government claims that ‘wild lions’ in SA provincial and national reserves are conserved are also misleading. Lion prides in SA’s small fragmented reserves are hardly wild.  They are ‘actively managed.’  Is a small lion pride in a provincial reserve like Madikwe really wild when half the animals wear radio collars and the contraception of females is determined not by ecological imperatives but by the lobbying of the Game Lodges who require a constant stream of cubs for the tourists?
​
Conservation in SA is an ugly dysfunctional mess.  Do not believe one word of the self-congratulatory Press releases put out by the Dept of Environment.   

Linda Park, Jo'burg director of CACH, writes:
Late night musings led me to the remembering of a study that was done some years back on the wild lion population in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park (HiP) in KwaZulu-Natal where it was discovered that inbreeding depression increases susceptibility to bovine tuberculosis.

I wondered if, given that the same conditions of inbreeding and stress are prevalent with captive bred lions, there was a risk of possible infection to end users of lion bones or, indeed, the people who handle and prepare the carcasses.

I had a good discussion with Prof Nick Kriek of Onderstepoort Veterinary Academic Hospital. We discussed the research and my feelings that there could be a link in the captive bred population.

Signs of BTB usually do not exhibit before 2 to 3 years of age, by which time many of the lions would be out of the loop and into the lion bone market. I wondered if there was a correlation between the hygromas that are often seen in captive bred lions and BTB and he agreed that lions will develop lesions in the joints and bones when they have BTB.

He said that there was some research done in Kruger on tissue from BTB affected animals (possibly buffalo) and they found that left out in the sun the bacterium was dead after a period of 5 - 6 weeks.

Prof Kriek did say that immuno-compromised people handling the bones would be at greater risk.

The handling of the carcass after the kill is done by farm labourers and the preparing of the bones at the taxidermist would also be labour intensive. That labour force could very well be immuno-compromised.

At the end of 2014 there was a shipment of 92 lion carcasses that was impounded by the State Vet at ORT Airport. The lions were all young and had only been cleaned with ethanol so there was a lot of tissue still on the bones. The State Vet’s concern was a health one. I asked Prof Kriek about using ethanol and if that would kill the bacterium. He said that the crux of the matter would be the concentration used. If that was insufficient, the process would be ineffective.

Subsequent to this, Prof Paul van Helden from Stellenbosch University has issued a statement - see below - which confirms the risk to humans and states that South Africa may be exporting tuberculosis through the lion bone trade. In his statement he also talks about hygromas and cross-
contamination from handlers to lions.​


Opinion from Prof Paul Van Helden, Stellenbosch University
Tuberculosis (TB) in Lions
 South Africa May Be Exporting Tuberculosis Through the Trade in Lion Bones
Tuberculosis is a disease that has plagued mankind for millennia. In humans, it is most commonly found as a lung disease, although it can affect many other organs or body structures, including bones. For example, TB of the spine can cause deformity and is known as Potts disease.
Tuberculosis can occur not only in humans, but in many vertebrate species, including lions. Since TB may be common in various prey species of lions, these apex predators concentrate the disease in themselves by consuming preferentially affected prey. Thus it is not surprising that TB has been reported in lions in African countries, including South Africa.
Unlike humans, TB in lions may not occur primarily in the lung, but is frequently disseminated in the body. This includes being found in lion bones. It can sometimes be seen in live but infected lions, where large swellings can be seen on the limb joints (TB hygromas).  When bones  (not only limb bones) from such lions are examined, lesions identical in appearance to those seen in humans with bone TB can be seen.  It should  be noted that lions can be infected with TB by consuming prey with TB as stated before, as well as by exposure to humans with human TB, eg handlers or care givers.
Thus, it is clear that infected lions and lion bone have the potential to infect other animals or humans with TB.  It should be noted that the organism that most commonly causes lion TB is Mycobacterium bovis (which causes bovine TB). This differs very slightly from that species most often causing human TB.  Unfortunately, this organism has the propensity to cause TB in humans often in organs other than the lung, making it very difficult to diagnose.
Furthermore, it is inherently resistant to one of the four most important drugs (antibiotics) used to treat primary human TB. Treatment of humans with this form of TB is therefore compromised. This therefore poses a potential risk to humans which is arguably greater than the most common form of TB in humans. 
I am therefore of the opinion that uncontrolled exposure of humans to bones from animals, in particular lion bones, poses a risk for development of the form of TB known as bovine TB in particular, although not necessarily being limited to this form of TB only. 

Anyone who naively believes that the SA government will ban canned lion hunting should read this response by SA media release.  The full statement is quoted below, but the only meaningful sentence in all the self-congratulatory and misleading waffle, is this one:
"However, South Africa, cautions against assumptions that the adoption of this motion will result in the shutting down of facilities."

MEDIA STATEMENT 
SOUTH AFRICA’S POSITION ON A MOTION TO TERMINATE THE HUNTING OF CAPTIVE-BRED LIONS AND OTHER PREDATORS 
4 SEPTEMBER 2016 
South Africa has noted the motion moved by seven Non-Governmental Organisations calling for the termination of hunting of captive-bred lions (Panthera leo) and other predators and captive breeding for commercial, non-conservation purposes in South Africa. 
The motion was presented for/at the 2016 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress (WCC) currently under way in Hawaii, United States of America. The motion expresses the NGOs’ concern on the alleged escalation of the breeding of lions for the specific purpose of 'canned lion hunting' or 'canned lion shooting', by sectors of the wildlife industry in country.
 
While South Africa does not support some of the aspects in this motion, it will however consider the implications associated with the motion and engage the IUCN Director-General and the IUCN members on the requirements contained therein. The IUCN has always recognized the role that sustainable, legal hunting plays in conservation and supports human livelihoods in areas where other farming and land use options are less viable. 

Subsequent to the motion, initial discussions with the NGOs have been undertaken leading to a consensus on the need for continued cooperation in addressing non-compliance and research needs, as well as further strengthening regulatory framework. 

Speaking at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, Deputy Director-General responsible for biodiversity and conservation Mr Shonisani Munzhedzi said that “while hunting makes a substantial and positive contribution to conservation management and economic growth, we also have a responsibility to preserve the resource base and ensure that the industry has a sustainable future. However, hunting activities must be undertaken within the framework of the regulatory prescripts.”
 
South Africa is recognised worldwide for its conservation successes which includes the African lion, in addition has a proud record of collaborating with the global community to ensure natural resources form the global common good are properly conserved, sustainably utilized and that arising out of them are shared fairly and equitably. It is in this light that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recently hailed South Africa’s advances in protecting the species such the African lion. 

”We would like to emphasise our commitment to the promotion of conservation, sustainable use of biological resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use its biological resources, , noting further that responsible utilization of wildlife contributes to the enhancement of socio-economic development, rural livelihoods, and job creation in the sector,” added Mr. Munzhedzi. 

However, South Africa, cautions against assumptions that the adoption of this motion will result in the shutting down of facilities. As it is known, biodiversity contributes to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Existing legislative tools and frameworks therefore regulate this sector including the aspects of captive keeping and hunting of lion in South Africa in a manner that ensures a balanced approach to its overriding developmental priorities and challenges. 
South African government remains committed to the sustainable use of the country’s biodiversity, and will continue to develop and implement an effective system for managing and monitoring trophy hunts in the country. 
For media queries, contact Albi Modise on 083 490 2871 
ISSUED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS