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To ban hunting as a measure to conserve wildlife: Wisdom or folly?
Kenya Nakuru Update The fungicide factory which has threatened the habitat of more than one million flamingos at Lake Nakuru, Kenya is to be moved. The Kenyan Government has confirmed that a new site has been given to the firm in the "noxious area" of an industrial site at Chamgamwe, Mombasa. The factory has been told to move and it is anticipated that this will take about 8 months. As a result, the German Government has agreed to lift its suspension of a loan to Nakuru for the development of new sewage works. The Kenyan Government is to compensate the factory for its move and a figure of approximately 4 million Kenyan shillings (U.S. $ 500,000) has been suggested. The amount of compensation is interesting considering that the company moved into its warehouse
Courtesy: WWF Switzerland
Photo: Prof. U. Rahrn
Because the government has required a pesticide f a c t o r y which could poison Lake Nakuru to move, these flamingos can return to their home in safety.
in Nakuru without declaring that it proposed to operate a munufacturing company; that the company obtained a manufacturing licence after it had started business; the share capital of the company is two £ 1 (U.S. $ 2.50) shares
held by the two directors - the Kenyan Minister for Land and Settlement and the company's managing director; and that the original funding of £ 5,000 (U.S. $ 12,500) to operate the company was a loan from the bank. HM []
To ban hunting as a measure to conserve wildlife: Wisdom or Folly? by BERTRAND DES CLERS* Children and sentimental old ladies have a. tendency to visualize nature as a sort of Disneyland where death and suffering have no place in a world of sweetness and innocence; such of course was Paradise, before Man's Sin brought about blood and murder; such would nature be again, if humans only left it alone. Alas, the real world of nature is, like the human would, made up of life and death, and believe me, "natural" death is usually pretty horrible: the choice lies mainly between starving and being eaten alive; in this catalog, death by the hunter's gun appears as one of the most merciful alternatives. But let us leave these philosophical considerations aside and take a hard look at the status of wildlife in the world today. Talking in general terms, it can be said that wildlife and the wild places that support it are shrinking day by day, *Director of the International Foundation for the Conservation of Game, based in Paris, France.
Environmental Policy and Law, 3 (1977)
as human pressure on the land is ever increasing. There are, however, two general exceptions in the developed world to this general decrease: both parasite and game species are increasing in number; the first category, because their habitat, which is made up of humans' garbage dumps and other polluted and degraded ecosystems, is constantly broadening; the second category, because hunters are constantly spending their time and contributing huge sums of money towards the management' of game populations. In this day and age, the lesson is very clear indeed: humans' total dominance over nature and the ever increasing urge to improve for profit the productivity of the land leaves no room for "useless" wildlife or for "unproductive" wilderness areas; there are just luxuries for the very rich, provided they also still have vast unpopulated areas at their disposal. In poor and developing countries, where demand for more land and more food is acute, the alternatives open to wildlife are clearcut: either be tolerated
because it provides meat or money to buy food for the local population...or... sooner lr later...go. All our noble speeches about our wildlife heritage, being kept intact for somebody's grandchildren or for the world even, don't hold water to a man hungry for meat, which he just seeson the hoof, out of his reach; can we blame him ? There are still a few African countries where poaching, at least in National Parks, is severely curtailed; there are many others where the central government does not have the strength, or the political will, to do much about it. What about the impact of legitimate hunting ? What of the recent hunting ban decided by the Kenya authorities ? Will this measure help wildlife ? These are the questions I will try to answer; but first a few words on the evolution of the status of wildlife in Kenya during the last few years. When Kenya won its independence nearly fifteen years ago, the wealth of wildlife could be shown to the world as an example of what proper conservation 155
could represent; the British colonial authorities had indeed wisely managed the natural resource in their trust; hunting was severely controlled, the country being divided in blocks where only a certain limited quota of each species could be harvested; professional hunters, responsible for guiding their clients, had to pass severe examinations, as well as spend a probation period of two years in the field as apprentice before obtaining their license. Hunting laws, practically identical to this day, were very severe, strictly enforced, and their violation very severely punished by the courts. Altogether, safari hunting in Kenya resulted in the harvesting of less than one thousand animals of each species every year; for some species, much less: 50 to 80 leopards, less than 100 elephants; one can easily calculate what impact such a crop could have on wildlife populations numbering in the hundreds of thousand or even millions for some species. Hunting safaris were bringing in about 1.5 million dollars a year in foreign currency, furnishing employment for a large number of people. In parallel, several National Parks were being created by the new State, hotels built, and the greatest wildlife tourism boom the world had ever seen started: Wildlife proved to be a major resource for the economy and surely ,Kenya would conserve it wisely; the future of wildlife waa assured and the heart of every conservationist brimmed with joy at this shining example of how wildlife could pay its way in a developing country. To-day, after several years of the most severe slaughter the world has ever seen, the elephants of Kenya can be considered as endangered; zebras have dwindled to a small fraction of their former populations, Grgvy zebras have been nearly wiped out; rhinoceros have all but disappeared; the reticulated giraffe population is down to a few hundred animals and is on its way to extinction; the elephants killed for their ivory, the rhinos for their horn, the zebras for their skin and the giraffes for their tails to be sold as flyswatters; all the meat...left to rot! What has gone wrong? Can the law be incriminated in any way ? Or has the situation purely come about from law-breaking ? As usual, the answer is not simple, and the roots of the present collapse are multiple : 156
First of all, game protection legislation is quite meaningless to the average African peasant or herder; to him, game is just meat on the hoof, "nyama", "la viande", basically res nullius to be grabbed and eaten, but for some folly of the white man, carried over to this day; as time has passed, conserving game just for the enjoyment of foreign tourists or for the profit of central governments and national budgets has appeared less credible and more unjust to the African villager. If there is to be hope for wildlife, it is the local people who will have to be convinced that it is worth their while; as long as we rely on brute force only, wildlife will always be on the defensive, its survival at the mercy of fragile centralized power.
We have heard that at least some of the few white rhinoceros in Meru National Park, Kenya, have fallen victim to poachers. These animals were brought from outside the country to reestablish the species in Kenya. []
In Kenya, a timid experiment has been made with the Masai to plough back to them some of the returns generated by wildlife tourism on their tribal land; there is a lot of hope in this approach, although there is no doubt that whenever there will be competition for pasture or water between wildlife and livestock, a pastoral people like the Masai will always give preference to their cattle. We are therefore faced with a general lack of concern on the part of the public. In parallel, as aired by the Kenya press itself, a regime of intimidation and corruption unequaled since the heyday of Chicago prohibition days has set in at high levels of government and administrative circles; honest police, judges, game wardens are first reprimanded, then sacked if they insist on investigating poaching or trade in the spoils of the massacre. Nairobi shops are brimming with ivory and elephant hair objects, with dikdik horns and hoofs, with zebra and colobus skins; all these, merrily bought by thousands of tourists who thus ensure the continued prosperity of the poacher and the accelerating extinction of those species. Even though elephant hunting has been banned for several years, Kenya, in
1975, exported 146 tons of ivory, coming from 9,341 elephants and 231 tons, representing 17,274 elephants in 1976. How does this compare with the less than one hundred animals which used to be shot by hunters every year ? How can anybody claim that the ban on elephant hunting, proclaimed in Kenya already several years ago, has improved things for the elephant ? Only the will of the Kenya Government to enforce strictly the law could provide an improvement; this will is not present to-day: the anti-poaching team is still not given the material means to carry out the job for which it was intended; to a question regarding the now possible ban on trade of illegal game trophies through curioshops, the Minister for Tourism and Wildlife, Mr. Mathews Ogutu, told the Kenyan nation over television on May 31st that: "the ban on hunting - just announced - would not affect the curio dealers as they do not obtain their stocks from professional hunters". There are only three ways for the international community to help Kenyan wildlife: The first is, through the international convention on trade in endangered species, to put a stop to the purchases of poached animal products by the international community: for example, could Hong Kong not be persuaded to impose quota s on ivory imports instead of buying as much as the market (90% illegal) will furnish - 708 tons from 52,864 elephants in 1976. The second is to alert public opinion among the tourists who are buying in Nairobi and Monbasa curio shops, so that they are informed of the effect their purchases are having on certain species. The third is to realize that the international convention mentioned above is partly ineffectual when dealing with countries where corrupt public officials issue export licenses without any regard for the conservation of species. Let us hope that the Kenya example will help the rest of the world realize that plundering revewable natural resources for short-term profit is not consistent with long-term wealth. Let us hope, instead, that management and rational cropping (hunting) of game will once again be shown to be the right approach, not only for the conservation of wildlife, but for the greater benefit of all people. []
Environmental Policy and Law, 3 (1977)
Courtesy: WWF Switzerland
Photo: Prof. U. Rahrn
Because the government has required a pesticide f a c t o r y which could poison Lake Nakuru to move, these flamingos can return to their home in safety.
in Nakuru without declaring that it proposed to operate a munufacturing company; that the company obtained a manufacturing licence after it had started business; the share capital of the company is two £ 1 (U.S. $ 2.50) shares
held by the two directors - the Kenyan Minister for Land and Settlement and the company's managing director; and that the original funding of £ 5,000 (U.S. $ 12,500) to operate the company was a loan from the bank. HM []
To ban hunting as a measure to conserve wildlife: Wisdom or Folly? by BERTRAND DES CLERS* Children and sentimental old ladies have a. tendency to visualize nature as a sort of Disneyland where death and suffering have no place in a world of sweetness and innocence; such of course was Paradise, before Man's Sin brought about blood and murder; such would nature be again, if humans only left it alone. Alas, the real world of nature is, like the human would, made up of life and death, and believe me, "natural" death is usually pretty horrible: the choice lies mainly between starving and being eaten alive; in this catalog, death by the hunter's gun appears as one of the most merciful alternatives. But let us leave these philosophical considerations aside and take a hard look at the status of wildlife in the world today. Talking in general terms, it can be said that wildlife and the wild places that support it are shrinking day by day, *Director of the International Foundation for the Conservation of Game, based in Paris, France.
Environmental Policy and Law, 3 (1977)
as human pressure on the land is ever increasing. There are, however, two general exceptions in the developed world to this general decrease: both parasite and game species are increasing in number; the first category, because their habitat, which is made up of humans' garbage dumps and other polluted and degraded ecosystems, is constantly broadening; the second category, because hunters are constantly spending their time and contributing huge sums of money towards the management' of game populations. In this day and age, the lesson is very clear indeed: humans' total dominance over nature and the ever increasing urge to improve for profit the productivity of the land leaves no room for "useless" wildlife or for "unproductive" wilderness areas; there are just luxuries for the very rich, provided they also still have vast unpopulated areas at their disposal. In poor and developing countries, where demand for more land and more food is acute, the alternatives open to wildlife are clearcut: either be tolerated
because it provides meat or money to buy food for the local population...or... sooner lr later...go. All our noble speeches about our wildlife heritage, being kept intact for somebody's grandchildren or for the world even, don't hold water to a man hungry for meat, which he just seeson the hoof, out of his reach; can we blame him ? There are still a few African countries where poaching, at least in National Parks, is severely curtailed; there are many others where the central government does not have the strength, or the political will, to do much about it. What about the impact of legitimate hunting ? What of the recent hunting ban decided by the Kenya authorities ? Will this measure help wildlife ? These are the questions I will try to answer; but first a few words on the evolution of the status of wildlife in Kenya during the last few years. When Kenya won its independence nearly fifteen years ago, the wealth of wildlife could be shown to the world as an example of what proper conservation 155
could represent; the British colonial authorities had indeed wisely managed the natural resource in their trust; hunting was severely controlled, the country being divided in blocks where only a certain limited quota of each species could be harvested; professional hunters, responsible for guiding their clients, had to pass severe examinations, as well as spend a probation period of two years in the field as apprentice before obtaining their license. Hunting laws, practically identical to this day, were very severe, strictly enforced, and their violation very severely punished by the courts. Altogether, safari hunting in Kenya resulted in the harvesting of less than one thousand animals of each species every year; for some species, much less: 50 to 80 leopards, less than 100 elephants; one can easily calculate what impact such a crop could have on wildlife populations numbering in the hundreds of thousand or even millions for some species. Hunting safaris were bringing in about 1.5 million dollars a year in foreign currency, furnishing employment for a large number of people. In parallel, several National Parks were being created by the new State, hotels built, and the greatest wildlife tourism boom the world had ever seen started: Wildlife proved to be a major resource for the economy and surely ,Kenya would conserve it wisely; the future of wildlife waa assured and the heart of every conservationist brimmed with joy at this shining example of how wildlife could pay its way in a developing country. To-day, after several years of the most severe slaughter the world has ever seen, the elephants of Kenya can be considered as endangered; zebras have dwindled to a small fraction of their former populations, Grgvy zebras have been nearly wiped out; rhinoceros have all but disappeared; the reticulated giraffe population is down to a few hundred animals and is on its way to extinction; the elephants killed for their ivory, the rhinos for their horn, the zebras for their skin and the giraffes for their tails to be sold as flyswatters; all the meat...left to rot! What has gone wrong? Can the law be incriminated in any way ? Or has the situation purely come about from law-breaking ? As usual, the answer is not simple, and the roots of the present collapse are multiple : 156
First of all, game protection legislation is quite meaningless to the average African peasant or herder; to him, game is just meat on the hoof, "nyama", "la viande", basically res nullius to be grabbed and eaten, but for some folly of the white man, carried over to this day; as time has passed, conserving game just for the enjoyment of foreign tourists or for the profit of central governments and national budgets has appeared less credible and more unjust to the African villager. If there is to be hope for wildlife, it is the local people who will have to be convinced that it is worth their while; as long as we rely on brute force only, wildlife will always be on the defensive, its survival at the mercy of fragile centralized power.
We have heard that at least some of the few white rhinoceros in Meru National Park, Kenya, have fallen victim to poachers. These animals were brought from outside the country to reestablish the species in Kenya. []
In Kenya, a timid experiment has been made with the Masai to plough back to them some of the returns generated by wildlife tourism on their tribal land; there is a lot of hope in this approach, although there is no doubt that whenever there will be competition for pasture or water between wildlife and livestock, a pastoral people like the Masai will always give preference to their cattle. We are therefore faced with a general lack of concern on the part of the public. In parallel, as aired by the Kenya press itself, a regime of intimidation and corruption unequaled since the heyday of Chicago prohibition days has set in at high levels of government and administrative circles; honest police, judges, game wardens are first reprimanded, then sacked if they insist on investigating poaching or trade in the spoils of the massacre. Nairobi shops are brimming with ivory and elephant hair objects, with dikdik horns and hoofs, with zebra and colobus skins; all these, merrily bought by thousands of tourists who thus ensure the continued prosperity of the poacher and the accelerating extinction of those species. Even though elephant hunting has been banned for several years, Kenya, in
1975, exported 146 tons of ivory, coming from 9,341 elephants and 231 tons, representing 17,274 elephants in 1976. How does this compare with the less than one hundred animals which used to be shot by hunters every year ? How can anybody claim that the ban on elephant hunting, proclaimed in Kenya already several years ago, has improved things for the elephant ? Only the will of the Kenya Government to enforce strictly the law could provide an improvement; this will is not present to-day: the anti-poaching team is still not given the material means to carry out the job for which it was intended; to a question regarding the now possible ban on trade of illegal game trophies through curioshops, the Minister for Tourism and Wildlife, Mr. Mathews Ogutu, told the Kenyan nation over television on May 31st that: "the ban on hunting - just announced - would not affect the curio dealers as they do not obtain their stocks from professional hunters". There are only three ways for the international community to help Kenyan wildlife: The first is, through the international convention on trade in endangered species, to put a stop to the purchases of poached animal products by the international community: for example, could Hong Kong not be persuaded to impose quota s on ivory imports instead of buying as much as the market (90% illegal) will furnish - 708 tons from 52,864 elephants in 1976. The second is to alert public opinion among the tourists who are buying in Nairobi and Monbasa curio shops, so that they are informed of the effect their purchases are having on certain species. The third is to realize that the international convention mentioned above is partly ineffectual when dealing with countries where corrupt public officials issue export licenses without any regard for the conservation of species. Let us hope that the Kenya example will help the rest of the world realize that plundering revewable natural resources for short-term profit is not consistent with long-term wealth. Let us hope, instead, that management and rational cropping (hunting) of game will once again be shown to be the right approach, not only for the conservation of wildlife, but for the greater benefit of all people. []
Environmental Policy and Law, 3 (1977)