by Clay Wilson
The five-person delegation from the office of the president was headed by a retired lawyer and accountant, a confidant of HE who had been brought back to work to lead such fact-finding missions. They met with me and I sat them down and ran through the problems as I saw them.
The meeting was held at the Mowana Safari Lodge, a five-star hotel owned by the Cresta group, right on the Chobe River. When I arrived, I said: “Hey, guys, instead of sitting in a meeting room, why don’t we go into the bush and I can show you what this is all about?”
They agreed and I put them in the back of my Dodge game-viewer. We drove to Sedudu Gate and I paid entry fees for all of them. We had a brilliant game drive, including a great sighting of the elusive leopard, traditionally one of the hardest animals to see on a drive, sitting up in a tree. We also saw lions and buffalos.
“Basically, the problem is humans and animals trying to live in the same space,” I told them when we stopped in the park for a break, “and there are only two solutions. One, you turn the whole town of Kasane into a concentration camp and erect elephant-proof fences everywhere. Or two, you start educating people about the value of wildlife. It’s not just about protecting Botswana’s natural heritage; it’s about money. Yes, farming is important, but the main value of this part of the country to Botswana’s income is tourism. People need to learn that wild animals are not just a supplementary part of their diet, or something to be killed for sport; they generate income for the nation.”
As we drove through the park I told the delegation about the plans Laura and I had for running education programmes in local schools, and they nodded and said encouraging things. I wondered, however, whether I would receive any support from the president’s office for these initiatives.
They were also interested in the problems of poaching and crime in Kasane. They had totally underestimated the scale of these problems.
“We need more assets up here,” I said. “For a start, a BDF helicopter should be based here permanently.” I had already applied to Thuto Seema for permission to fly a gyrocopter (a cross between a light aircraft and a helicopter) over the park. I was prepared to put up the money for it, as I thought aerial surveillance was essential to combat ivory poaching. But permission was denied, as Seema didn’t want me disturbing tourists on their game drives. That was a crock, as I told him I would fly in the middle of the day (most visitors to the national park were taken on early-morning and late-afternoon game drives and then rested up by the swimming pool during the hotter hours of the day). Also, better-resourced national parks, such as those in South Africa, had their own helicopters for security work and for darting animals from the air.
As was typical, we didn’t see a single ranger on patrol inside the park. In fact in the more than 30 years I had been visiting Chobe, not once had I come across a patrol from DWNP, and nor had anyone ever checked to see if I had a valid permit to be inside the park.
The public image of Botswana’s national parks was that they were wildlife havens policed and protected by smiling, happy rangers. This was the facade that well-heeled tourists from Europe and America were shown, but behind the scenes the reality was very different. Roads were not maintained; camping facilities were rudimentary to the point of being non-existent or disgusting; rangers were mostly seen collecting money at the entrance gates rather than patrolling the parks; and poachers were roaming the bush at will.
There were two sides to the poaching problem – bush meat for local consumption, and commercial poaching. The big money was in ivory. Elephants have been hunted for centuries for their tusks, which were used as piano keys, ornaments and jewellery in the West, and as carved “chops” – printing stamps used to make imprints such as signatures on letters – in the Asian market.
Bans on the trade in ivory by the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) had curtailed the illegal market, but there was pressure to get the trade legalised again, oddly enough from the countries that still had the largest populations of elephants in Africa. While elephant numbers have drastically decreased throughout Africa in recent decades, the numbers in Botswana have more than tripled since 1987, to the current figure of about 180 000. This equates to about half of all the remaining African elephants.
A census done in 2011 by the conservation NGO Elephants Without Borders, using modern techniques of methodically photographing large areas and counting game species present, detected an alarming 30 per cent decrease in all animal species in Chobe and the Okavango. This was a highly debated subject, with no conclusions really being made as to why this was happening.
There are so many elephants in Chobe that no one really knows what the trend is. Record-keeping of previous studies and data are slim to non-existent. Undoubtedly, elephant poaching for tusks in many other African countries continues at an alarming rate that may see the eradication of these wild pachyderms before the end of the century. Ironically, while the species has disappeared from large parts of Africa, in others there are so many of them that they cause problems.
Elephants were so numerous in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, only about 100 kilometres from where we were having our meeting, that they were culled by National Parks rangers in the 1970s and 1980s. That practice had ceased and numbers had boomed. A similar thing was happening in South Africa’s flagship game reserve, the Kruger National Park, where culling had ceased after the country gained majority rule, and numbers were now increasing to a point that there was serious discussion of the deliberate killing of elephants to control population growth.
All the southern African countries with significant populations – Botswana, South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe – were sitting on huge stockpiles of ivory taken from elephants that had died of natural causes, or confiscated from poachers. These countries knew they were sitting on valuable resources and pressure was put on CITES to allow a legalised, controlled auction of ivory on to the world market.
I’d had a glimpse of the ivory room at the Parks office in Kasane. I often picked up tusks while on patrol, from animals that had died of natural causes or been shot by farmers. The tusks were kept in a large walk-in safe. The room was filled from top to bottom with all sizes and I estimated there were at least 300 stored there. This was only one Parks office that I worked with. Months later, on opening the safe to put in more tusks, I saw it was empty. I wondered if they had been moved to a repository in another location.
The idea of an auction of stockpiled ivory sounded good, and countries such as South Africa promised that the money raised would go back into animal protection, but the reality was that this auction, which went ahead, also kick-started a market in ivory products that had been on the decline thanks to the ban in ivory trade. When the flow of legal ivory was cut off again, the market for “chops” was back in business in the Far East. As a result, I was coming across more and more elephants that had been killed by poachers for their tusks.
Elephant poaching was back on the radar elsewhere in Africa. There were more and more reports appearing in the media of criminal gangs ramping up the ivory trade in countries such as Kenya, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and this was getting coverage around the world. Always conspicuously absent from these alarming but true reports was a mention of Botswana. That was not because there was little or no poaching in Botswana – there were plenty of elephants being killed here – but because the news never made it into the media.
“The problem goes even further,” I told the delegation. “A lot of the crime here is perpetrated by poor people from across the borders, from Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia, and that’s another reason why we need better resources to patrol the borders. Namibians are illegally netting the Chobe and other rivers for fish, but not enough is being done to stop them.”
Everyone in the delegation seemed to be on board. They agreed we needed more bodies on the ground, and air support. I even raised the idea of using a UAV. Ours wouldn’t be armed, but it would provide day and night aerial surveillance o
f the park. If an operator detected poachers on the move, then a National Parks patrol could be flown by helicopter, if one was available, to intercept them. This was a fight we could win, and none of the people I spoke to disagreed.
“I suggest you put a $10 tourism tax on every visitor that goes to a national park and spend half the money on direct efforts and resources to protect wildlife and combat poaching, and the other half on community education,” I told the delegation.
Botswana’s national parks were already the most expensive for foreigners to visit in southern Africa, and among the dearest on the continent, and the impression visitors were given was that this encouraged a “low-impact, high-yield” type of tourism. Fewer people paying more was supposed to protect the environment by minimising the impact of humans and generating money for conservation. The reality was that the money raised was not being spent on effective conservation and anti-poaching programmes, and that concession operators within national parks were largely being left to police themselves and to look out for poachers.
Botswana had already been caught napping in the second half of the twentieth century when it lost all of the rhinos in its national parks to poachers. At the same time, neighbouring Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa all managed to hang on to their rhinos (though Zimbabwe’s are now nearly non-existent) by adopting aggressive anti-poaching strategies.
Yes, it sometimes seemed that we had more elephants than we knew what to do with in Kasane and Chobe National Park, but if something wasn’t done, then the organised poaching gangs, with their military assault rifles and big-spending criminal backing, could devastate the population of the animal that, more than any other, was symbolic of this part of Africa.
I presented, at the request of the secretary of the delegation, a list of 43 proposals to assist in more efficient running of the park, to combat crime and poaching in Kasane, and to address the problems of human–animal conflict. The problem, as I saw it, was that the news was just not getting through to the top. It seemed to me, more and more each day, that the people in power didn’t want bad news spoken of, or maybe they just didn’t care.
Chapter 9
Injured giants
The Cape buffalo was known by big-game hunters as “black death” because of its unpredictable behaviour and propensity to charge. Many hunters, villagers and rangers have been killed by buffalos in Africa.
Buffalos are numerous in the floodplains on the edge of the Chobe River, in the national park and in and around town. I responded to many calls regarding human–buffalo conflict, and to treat buffalos that had been caught in snares and fences or shot but not killed by farmers.
In July 2010 I was called by a private citizen to attend to a buffalo wounded by a snare near Chobe Farms, a large-scale commercial farming operation near the turn-off to the Kazungula Ferry. Oranges, avocados, corn, mangos, hydroponic herbs and vegetables were grown on this impressive stretch along the river.
When I arrived I saw the buffalo, an old male. These guys are often solitary or in small groups, having grown too slow to keep up with the herd. They have a justified reputation for being cantankerous. This one was in some bushland inside the farm property, lying under a tree near the edge of the river. He was also close to the main road and I could hear cars whizzing past as I approached him. It was a reminder of how close to each other humankind and wildlife lived in this town.
I could see a very obvious wound on his right hind fetlock, what would be called the ankle in a human. I loaded a dart with M99 and drove up to him. I shot from the vehicle whenever I could, so I could get the hell out of the animal’s way if I needed to.
The dart hit the buffalo and he jumped up and ran about 40 metres before dropping to the ground. When I checked the snare I saw it was made from five or six strands of braided wire. It had cut at least two and a half inches into the flesh of this old boy’s leg. It was a pretty serious injury.
While the buffalo was still under, I had to use a scalpel to cut away the dead and infected flesh around the snare, just so I could get down to the wire. Laura was with me, along with Mr Khan, one of the wardens who worked in the National Parks research department, and Slash, another ranger I usually worked with. I went to the trunk and got out my heavy-duty bolt cutters. This was a mother of a snare, designed to catch something big, such as an elephant. There was no way a poacher would have set wire this thick – it was about an inch and a half in diameter – to catch an impala or some other antelope.
I strained to push the arms of the bolt cutter together, but finally managed to snap the snare. With the wire gone I went back to cutting away the necrotic tissue – the dead and dying muscle and flesh – until the wound started bleeding. This told me I was down to fresh tissue. We were close to the bone by this stage.
I then scrubbed the wound with a scrubbing brush and chlorohexadine, a potent antiseptic. This is the same stuff surgeons use to disinfect their hands before a procedure. Next I sprayed the wound with gentian violet and administered a large dose of penicillin, 40 cc dexamethasone anti-inflammatory and 20 cc of ketofen, a very powerful painkiller.
That was the best I could do for this gentleman, and it had taken less than 40 minutes. I reversed the M99 with a shot of M5050. The buffalo jumped up right away and limped off into the bush. I could see he was already putting weight on his foot, which was a great result.
This buffalo was so close to human habitation that I was sure he would have become a danger to people if his wound had remained untreated and progressively worsened, which it would have. It felt great seeing him heading off, and I felt certain that he would survive.
About three days later I saw a buffalo right behind my house up on the plateau. When I took a closer look at this animal I could see it was limping and, to my surprise, when I saw the wound on its leg I realised it was the same buffalo. I could still see the purple gentian violet spray. When I tried to get a better look, it charged me, and to my great pleasure I saw that it was running well, putting its full weight on all four legs. I got out of its way and the buffalo calmed down and thereafter took to hanging around my neighbourhood. It was almost as if he had sought me out and walked the 10 kilometres from where I had treated him to my house in order to say thanks for the treatment.
Then, on the morning of 12 August, I was woken early, at about six, by the sound of gunshots close by. I got up and dressed quickly, and drove two blocks up the road in the direction from which I had heard the gunfire. In a vacant plot between two houses I saw my friend the buffalo, lying dead.
I was so upset that I couldn’t even get out of the vehicle to go and see it. There was nothing I could have done for it and I knew without a doubt from the purple spray on its leg that it was my buffalo. Laura went up to the carcass and took some pictures.
That evening, after a busy day, I finally got around to having a look at the close-up pictures Laura had taken of the dead buffalo. I could see from a couple of shots that the buffalo had actually picked up another snare, which had overlapped the original wound just as it was almost completely healed. I was very angry that this had happened. The next day I went to Seema and Mogau.
“This is unacceptable,” I said, my hands clenched in rage by my side. “I’m treating animals and the Problem Animal Control guys are shooting them indiscriminately.”
The National Parks Problem Animal Control (PAC) unit operated as a separate entity to the Parks guys who ran Chobe National Park. PAC was a force unto its own and the overwhelming strategy when it came to problem animals was to shoot first, ask questions later.
The 20 or so members of PAC would have three patrols of two officers out and about around the clock. Their jurisdiction was outside the national park and the general idea was that they should try to deter animals from coming into populated areas and farms and chase away those that got in. However, it was usually easier for them to shoot. Recently there had been an incident where PAC wardens were shooting at an injured buffalo. They seemed to have no regard for the flight o
f their bullets as they missed the animal and stray rounds flew by a schoolyard full of children, much to the concern of angry mothers. It was not uncommon for them to expend 10 or more shots on a single animal, either totally missing it or wounding it in non-essential areas. In cases where they injured an animal, they would very rarely follow it up. On those occasions I was called in track down and end the poor soul’s misery.
As a result of my protest, Seema and Mogau met with the PAC and they worked out some new guidelines. Importantly, an edict was issued that PAC was to call me first, before shooting any animal – unless, of course, it was a life-threatening situation. All I wanted was a chance to see if an animal could be treated and relocated, if possible. I knew there would still be many instances where euthanasia was the only solution, but where possible we needed to try to save an animal.
We had been used to the sound of gunfire every night around Kasane as the PAC guys went about their grisly work, but very soon we started hearing thunder flashes instead. When I heard bangs at night I would usually get up and get dressed and go check on the guys, to make sure they were scaring the animals away and not killing them. By my reckoning, PAC was killing an average of three or four animals a week in Kasane and Kazungula. As a result of the new rule coming into force, hundreds of animals were saved, not to mention ensuring the safety of innocent bystanders.
An injured buffalo was hanging around the BDF’S riverside camp, near the old entry gate to Chobe National Park, posing a threat to the soldiers who lived there. Encouragingly, neither the soldiers nor PAC had taken pre-emptive action and shot the animal on site. The fact that I was called out was proof the new policy was working, and that was a good thing. I went out to check on the buffalo with Mr Khan, who was a really nice guy. I enjoyed working with him.
When we arrived at the camp we found the buffalo and he was limping. We were on foot and the buffalo sniffed the air as we closed on him. I had my dart gun loaded and my .416 rifle across my back attached with a sling. With Mr Khan backing me up, I took aim at the buffalo’s mud-encrusted black rump.