VALUABLE OR VERMIN ??? SOME FACTS FROM THE FRONT LINE .. IF THERE WAS LEGAL HUNTING IN SOME OF THESE AREAS THESE ISSUES WOULD NOT EXIST ... DOES AN ELEPHANT DESERVE THIS ?? WITH WELL GOVERNED AND CONTROLLED HUNTING THESE ISSUES WOULD NOT EXIST ...ALL WOULD BE HAPPIER , INCLUDING THE ELEPHANTS ...THE PEOPLE WOULD BE RECIEVING MEAT AND MONEY AND ANIMALS WOULD BE VALUABLE NOT VERMIN. LIKE THIS PAGE IF YOU BELIEVE IN CONSERVATION THROUGH HUNTING ... Ten days ago, 200 Maasai “warriors”, in an act of vengeance, randomly speared a dozen elephants, 10 buffalo and a lion from Kenya’s Amboseli National Park – East Africa’s second most popular reserve. They complained they received too little spin-off from the park, yet had to put up with elephants damaging their crops and taking lives. A month before, six lions from Nairobi National Park were speared to death by disgruntled locals. The raids echoed the recent assault on one of SA’s most attractive reserves – Ndumo in KZN – when angry farmers destroyed the fence and moved in with their livestock and ploughs. African communities are becoming fed-up with wildlife – elephants in particular. And elephants are showing increasing signs of being fed-up with humans. Specialists in animal behaviour believe that after years of being abused and of being more and more constricted, translocated and poached, elephants are hitting back. African and Asian elephants are killing about 500 people a year, according to Brian Handwerk of National Geographic. He says it’s because they are being pushed into smaller and smaller pockets “and increasingly they are pushing back”. From SA to the Sudan there have been so many fatal conflicts between elephants and people as well as crop damage that scientists have set up a Human Elephant Conflict programme as part of a worldwide Human Wildlife Conflict initiative backed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). A paper – Human-wildlife Conflict in Africa, published by the Food and Agricultural Organisation in Rome – reported that the antipathy among rural Africans towards elephants “goes beyond that expressed for any other wildlife”. It said people living in central Africa “fear and detest” elephants; that farmers in Zimbabwe display “ingrained hostility” towards them. “(They) are the focus of all local animosity toward wildlife.” Sarah Silverstone Like
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 15:44:19 +0000
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