An extract from the Game Rangers Assoc.
US Animal Rights Groups are Destroying Kenya’s Wildlife
Dr. Laurence Frank, from the University of California, Berkeley and the
Wildlife Conservation Society, has studied predators in Kenya for 37 years.
He runs the Living With Lions project, working on lion conservation outside
of national parks. He is not a big game hunter.
Once internationally famous for its magnificent wildlife, Kenya is in a
conservation crisis, due largely to the cynical and corrupt influence of the
International Fund for Animal Welfare, the US Humane Society and other
animal rights groups which spend millions to prevent rational conservation
policies that would benefit both wildlife and impoverished rural Africans.
Seventy percent of Kenya’s wildlife has died in the last thirty years,
strangled slowly in snares and sold as cheap, unidentified meat. Even
animals in national parks are in serious decline due to poaching and habitat
destruction on their boundaries. Lions are being speared and poisoned into
extinction.
In that same period, South Africa and Namibia saw an immense increase in
wildlife numbers, as over ten thousand ranches found that wildlife for
trophy hunting is more profitable than cattle. Wildlife in Zimbabwe
quadrupled with the growth of hunting on large conservancies, until Mugabe’s
‘land reform’ resulted in most of it being snared. Wildlife continues to
flourish in Tanzania, Botswana, and Zambia, where hunting contributes
significantly to national economies.
Sentimental love of animals is a luxury affordable by comfortable
westerners, but meaningless to the world’s poor and hungry. With
ever-increasing human numbers, wildlife in Africa is doomed unless it
produces income for rural people. That is not possible in Kenya because
retrogressive policies, bought by tragically naive American animal lovers,
ensure that rural people resent wildlife instead of profiting from it.
For rural Kenyans, wildlife is an unmitigated nuisance: lions kill precious
livestock, wildebeest and zebra compete with cattle for grazing, elephants
and buffalo destroy crops and occasionally kill people. While tourism brings
wealth to hotels and tour companies, virtually nothing reaches the rural
people who bear the costs of living with wildlife. Telling a Masai herdsman
that he should cherish wildlife is like telling an urban American that he
should cherish muggers and murderers.
Although unpalatable to many urban westerners, carefully regulated trophy
hunting is the one avenue through which wildlife can bring serious money to
rural Africans. Foreigners pay over two hundred million dollars for hunting
safaris elsewhere in Africa, taking old males with impressive horns, tusks
or manes, animals that are no longer of importance to the population (as any
man my age knows all too well). In North America, Europe, and southern
Africa, carefully managed hunting has greatly increased wildlife populations
because people value them.
Tanzania has set aside over 100,000 square miles of wilderness for hunting.
It has more wildlife than any country in Africa, and half the world’s
remaining lions. In Botswana, a very few male lions are shot every year,
earning $65,000 each for the rural community in which the lion was taken,
and half that amount for the national conservation agency. The community
profit would pay for 350 cattle taken by lions, or support teachers, nurses
or wildlife rangers. Lions and all the associated wildlife are a source of
income, to be valued and protected.
In Kenya, that lion is only a cattle-killing nuisance, to be poisoned and
left to rot in the sun. A rural community would earn far more from a single
old male impala shot as a trophy than a poacher earns from snaring an entire
breeding herd of females and young for bushmeat.
Kenya shut down legal hunting in 1977, when the world was outraged by
hunters’ reports of industrial scale poaching of elephants for ivory,
abetted by high government officials. The ban silenced the hunters and the
elephant slaughter continued. In the absence of the hunters’ anti-poaching
patrols, bushmeat snaring exploded. Vast regions of this country that
teemed with large mammals thirty years ago are now barren of any animal
bigger than a rabbit.
In spite of plummeting wildlife numbers, that failed policy has been
maintained by foreign animal rights groups. Whenever real conservationists
try to reform Kenyan policy to reverse the decline in wildlife, these groups
launch disinformation campaigns in the local press, relying on racial
resentment combined with outright fabrication: “Rich white foreigners want
to kill all the animals in our national parks; only rich whites will profit
from hunting”. They hire mobs to disrupt public policy meetings and fill
the press with nonsensical claims that hunters would indiscriminately
slaughter all game.
It is widely believed that these groups rely heavily on bribery, spending
huge sums to buy sympathetic media coverage for their propaganda, and to buy
influence at the highest levels of government. In a young democracy
struggling against entrenched corruption, large scale bribery by westerners
is stunningly irresponsible.
Worst of all, these ideologues apparently do not seem to care that millions
of animals die wretchedly in snares, so long as none are shot for profit.
They boast to their American supporters that their donations prevent hunting
in Kenya, never telling them that, as a result, there is little wildlife
left, either.
Alleviating poverty is not only about money in the pocket!
