Today, Fergusson hopes to establish a niche market for “ecofriendly,” “sustainably sourced” crocodile leather, if such a thing is possible. The conceit relies in large part on the transition from croc farming to “ranching,” using crocodile eggs laid in the wild instead of those produced in a hatchery. Even wild hatchlings have a dismal survival rate—about 10 percent—but many croc farmers have already embraced ranching on that basis alone. Hatchlings born of parents in captivity do even worse. Any damage done to natural reproduction, Fergusson says, can be managed as it is in Zimbabwe: by reintroducing a controlled number of hatchlings to the wild.
The term “ranching,” though, may give the wrong impression. Eggs laid in the wild still hatch in a bed of warm sand inside a styrofoam box kept in a temperature-controlled room. Instead of learning to hunt, the crocs spend their days slithering around in a heap with hundreds of other juveniles, crawling through a slurry of lake water and feces in a heated, glass-smooth concrete pen, the better to protect their hides from the abrasions and clawmarks that are commonplace in the wild. “Wild skins are buggered,” Fergusson told me when I visited the farm he oversees on a peninsula beside Cahora Bassa. Rather than hunt for bugs, fish, or even smaller crocodiles, as they would in the wild, ranched crocs get a mix of frozen fish and skinned crocodiles on a regular schedule. Cannibalism accounts for 30 percent of their meat intake.
Crucially, for Fergusson, ranching gives crocodile leather producers a stake in protecting habitat for wild crocs: without viable nesting grounds, there will be no eggs to collect. What’s good for crocodiles, he says, is good for crocodile leather. And protecting crocodiles, Fergusson will tell you, can only be achieved by protecting humans from them.
Other work makes him well positioned to act as an ambassador for these ideas. Through a trade association called the Crocodile Specialist Group, Fergusson has conducted surveys of wild crocodile populations across sub-Saharan Africa, and as a side project, he maintains a database of reported crocodile attacks around the world, now running to well over a thousand separate incidents. In Bawa, I spoke to people who worried that crocodiles could chase you over land, but one of the more striking patterns in Fergusson’s data is that crocs invariably attack humans in the water or on the bank, where surprise and terrain both play to their advantage. Fergusson thinks this sense of mystery is part of what separates attitudes around crocodile attacks from the rest. “With elephants and lions you generally see them before there’s a problem. That’s all I can put it down to.” According to his records, people who struggle or beat the crocodile across its sensitive snout are likely to escape attacks alive, but few people do.
The crocodile, Fergusson says, is “a tremendously powerful animal.” When, in the midst of fieldwork, he has had occasion to wrestle crocodiles with his bare hands, he has never single-handedly subdued a crocodile that weighs more than thirty pounds—a fraction of the size of the crocodiles responsible for attacks on humans.
The Inspector
On the wall of his office in Tete’s Provincial Directorate of Forests and Wildlife, Florencio Gerente Sixpence keeps an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch color photograph of human remains arranged neatly on a reed mat: a man’s right leg, severed below the knee; his right arm, a bloody mess of tendons where it once attached at the shoulder; his disconnected left hand; and sundry unidentifiable internal organs, all pulled from the stomach of a fifteen-foot crocodile. Beside the photograph hangs a series of charts detailing the frequency of human wildlife conflict (HWC) throughout the province, so far as it’s known. Since most incidents occur in remote areas, Sixpence takes it as a given that HWC is underreported.
“In Mutarara, it’s crocodiles and hippos,” he says, rattling off the specifics of the problem by district. “In Changara, elephants, crocodiles, lions, and hyenas. In Zumbo, elephants, hippos, and crocodiles. In Marávia, lions, leopards, and sometimes hippos. You know, co-habitation between men and wildlife has never been peaceful, but then, the human population has never been what it is now.”
As the ranking wildlife inspector for the province, Sixpence coordinates the work of Tete’s Problem Animal Control (PAC) teams, rotating groups of three rangers drawn from a staff of twelve, charged with shooting animals that pose a danger to humans. Usually, the PAC teams respond to reports relayed by the local governments in what Sixpence calls “conflict zones,” where large wildlife populations live alongside human settlements. Sixpence may learn of conflict before it occurs—when an elephant or a hippo is seen on the periphery of an established village—or only days, even weeks, after a given incident. Rogue elephants, for instance, tend to stalk the same terrain, returning repeatedly to the villages where they have found a source of food. With elephants, Sixpence told me, “We fire in the air first, and if the animal isn’t scared by the shot, then we know they’ll be a problem.” The problem with this approach, according to Sixpence, is that “there are places where the animals have always been and where they are not going to leave.”
The core of the government’s response to crocodile attacks has been to conduct annual culls, or crocodile hunts, along the Zambezi River, where the vast majority of attacks occur. In 2009, with funding from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the Ministry of Agriculture set out a national strategy that called for killing a thousand crocs on the Zambezi over a period of five years. As the government’s man in the province of Tete—which curves like a five-hundred-mile bird’s beak to follow the arc of the Zambezi—Sixpence was responsible for more than two-thirds of the quota.
On the day before I arrived in Zumbo, across the river from Bawa, Sixpence had driven up from the provincial capital in a Land Rover pickup truck carrying 330 gallons of diesel fuel, six boxes of ammunition, and an ancient but seemingly well-served single-action .375 Magnum hunting rifle. For a week, he paid for the services of a fisherman with a fiberglass banana boat and a four-horsepower outboard motor and sent two local inspectors out on the river to shoot as many large crocodiles as they could. Sixpence and his colleague Isaac Omar stayed in a small guesthouse run by the local chair of the Frelimo party. Every morning, the team woke them with a knock at five to pick up the rifle and the day’s ammunition.
Florencio Gerente Sixpence, a technician with the Provincial Directorate of Forests and Wildlife in Tete, oversees crocodile culls and Problem Animal Control teams that respond to human-wildlife conflict.
A soft-spoken man in his fifties with a prominent scar below his right eye, Sixpence is a career civil servant who seems often to be caught between his wildlife expertise and the demands of following the chain of command. Late that morning, we walked to a large, twisted mango tree on a bare slope below the local government offices, whose entrances are decorated with crumbling elephant skulls. The spot functions more or less as Zumbo’s town square, overlooking a forlorn outdoor market and, below it, the marina, a sandy beach where boats offload merchandise from Zambia.
Sixpence took a seat between the local director of tourism and the director of agriculture and fisheries, and we all cracked cold bottles of Coca-Cola. Without getting up, Sixpence took a phone call from a crocodile rancher on the lake, which immediately took on the tones of cat and mouse. “Don’t waste your time talking with me. I’ve been sent here,” Sixpence told him. “I’m mandado.” Mandar, in Mozambique, is not only “to send” but to decide, to make fate, to call the shots. “Talk to the national office,” he said. “There is no sense talking to me.”
On a river that stretches through fifteen hundred miles of prime crocodile habitat, there’s no guarantee that culls will make a dent in the population of dangerous crocodiles. To begin with, the hunts usually take place weeks or months after any given attack, so there’s no way of knowing whether they target the specific animals responsible for the loss of life. More broadly, individual crocodiles rove over a large aquatic territory according to the availability of food—the headwaters of Lake Cahora Bassa will remain an attractive niche as long as the river holds fish
and animals come to its shores to drink. Short of decimating the entire crocodile population in the Zambezi, any large crocodiles that are shot in Zumbo will be replaced within a few years by opportunistic crocs swimming down from other parts of the river. But the culls’ most damaging impact is to obscure the true causes of the conflict. “We go and build our houses in the crocodile’s habitat, and we kill all the fish they need to eat,” Sixpence said. What, in other words, should we expect?
Today, much of the fish catch netted near the confluence is butterflied and smoked on sticks over an open fire, then trucked to Zambian cities and towns packed in large, cylindrical bales of hay. In an area where nearly everyone practices subsistence farming to survive, fishing is the primary source of cash, and it is almost entirely unregulated. As the catch diminishes in areas that are easy to access, local fishermen have ventured into the remote bays that are the crocodiles’ preferred nesting habitat. Some men have taken to fishing at night, when they are less likely to be fined by government inspectors for using oversized nets—which cut off entire channels of the river—or nets with small mesh that capture fish before they are fully grown. This is also the only time of day when crocodiles hunt actively. Crocs regularly drown when they become entangled in the fishermen’s gill nets; fishermen die when they are pulled from their boats while playing tug-of-war with the crocodiles, hoping to save their catch—and their nets—from being lost to the river. In a corner of Namibia where the Zambezi and several tributaries converge hundreds of miles upstream from Mozambique, it’s estimated that crocodiles damage more than seventy thousand fishing nets a year.8
In 2005, Fergusson authored a report for the World Wildlife Fund comparing the results of two surveys of human-crocodile conflict he’d conducted a decade apart on the same stretch of the Shire River, a tributary of the Zambezi in Malawi. Little about the region had changed in the intervening years except that an aid organization had installed wells in most of the villages where women previously collected water from the river.
In comparing the two surveys, Fergusson found a similar density of crocodile attacks (attacks per year per mile of shoreline) in each period, but he noted a major difference in the demographics of each group of victims. In the first, the victims were largely women and children, washing pots and fetching water at the riverbank. In the second, more than half the victims were fishermen who hauled their catch in dugout canoes and slept on reed platforms above their nets in the river.
It wasn’t that the crocodile population had grown or changed in character, but that their prey had changed behavior. With the addition of wells, Fergusson concluded, the women no longer needed to go to the river. “So, the women were easy and the fishermen were next easiest,” he says. “Humans are [simple]. We go every day to the same spot to fetch water, and we’re not nearly as alert as an antelope would be. When you think about human-crocodile conflict, you have to remember that you’re dealing with two species.” In 1992, researchers reported that the breakdown of a local water pump in a town in Tanzania had led to a death by crocodile attack once a week when people were forced to rely on river water.9 In all Australia, by comparison, home to saltwater crocodiles even bigger than Nile crocs, there have been about two attacks per year since the 1970s.10
The best alternative to crocodile culls, Sixpence says, would be to create special residential and conservation zones, to resettle people away from areas with large wildlife populations in order to conserve habitat.11 “But hunting is the only solution that the government considers cost-effective,” he concluded. “It is better to compromise conservation than to compromise politics. Because the place where we get the most votes is there in the villages. If I, as a technician, say I won’t do the cull, then I am complicating the work of the government. [If we don’t cull], whoever comes to stand in the elections will go out to the villages and they’ll say, ‘Go tell the crocodiles to vote for you, go tell the elephants to vote for you.’” Sixpence was laughing at the thought, but he insisted that it was a serious possibility. “They will; they’ll say it just like that,” he added.
Tete is the second-most rural province in an overwhelmingly rural and underdeveloped country, and Zumbo, in turn, is Tete’s farthest backwater. Once a hub of the international slave trade, Zumbo is now an outpost on the edge of Zambia, at the far end of a 220-mile dirt road from the rest of Mozambique. It’s an area with few public services to speak of: there’s a post office and some lackluster schools, but roads, electricity, and water are all unreliable, and none extends past the edge of the county seat. Nearby, or across the river in Bawa, wild animals seem to have more sway over day-to-day existence than the national government does.
As a result, culls have come to stand in for the more difficult long-term development work so sorely needed in the region. A crocodile cull won’t improve farmers’ yields, provide safe access to water, or encourage conservation. But in the absence of more meaningful measures to make people less vulnerable to attacks, it’s a fine way for the government to show its populist colors; you might even think of it as a political campaign.
In that sense, Sixpence’s cull was an undeniable success. By early afternoon, when the first two crocodile carcasses had been hauled to shore, a small crowd had gathered to watch them bake slowly in the sun. Neither one was close to the government’s declared ten-foot threshold for dangerous crocs. Only one, perhaps, might have had the gumption to attack a child. As it was, giggling children ogled the sallow corpses and wondered aloud what would be done with the skins. “They’re worth good money!” one boy offered. A half dozen guards from the Mozambican border patrol had just come off duty. They posed next to the carcasses one by one, snapping photos with their cell phones the way you might in front of a Ferrari or a bronze statue. One of the guards put his boot on a crocodile’s head and crossed his arms triumphantly, wearing flashy sunglasses beneath an army-issued beret. “What an ugly animal,” said another.
After the first two crocodiles were ceremoniously displayed near the center of town for a day, the hunters returned them to the water—to be eaten, presumably, by other crocodiles. On the local level, Sixpence and his colleague Omar considered the political aspect of the mission largely accomplished: by now, everyone knew that the government had come to town to kill crocodiles and that they had succeeded. There was no need for them to continue dragging carcasses out of the water or doing all the things that Fergusson and his colleagues insist on for the benefit of science—measuring them, determining their sex, examining the contents of their stomachs, or taking note of the precise spot where they were shot. It sufficed to take a few pictures and keep track of how much fuel and ammo the team used, which Sixpence did in a small notebook. This stance makes Fergusson livid. “Last year, Fauna Bravia”—Sixpence’s department—“and the army slaughtered, to the best of my knowledge, 143 animals, and they did not even bother to recover the carcasses,” he told me. “I know half a dozen researchers in South Africa who would have given their left ball to get some blood, some tissue.”
On the first day of the cull, Sixpence’s team of crocodile hunters displayed their kills on the banks of the Zambezi River, in Zumbo.
A few days into the cull, Omar began to worry about satisfying the other side of the political equation—the people above him, in Maputo, who had never seen a crocodile carcass, who had no idea how difficult it was to hunt them, and yet who were terribly demanding when it came to the numbers. Omar sat on the edge of his bed as the afternoon rain sputtered on the tin roof: “Personally, I don’t think that shooting crocodiles will solve the problem. What we need is a change of mentality. You still have people bathing with their backs to the water, fixing their nets while standing in the river. We’ve already shot 29. But you know, it’s a lot of work without much benefit. I think the national target this year is round about 160 crocodiles. In Sofala they killed 67; in the city, near the bridge, they’ve killed 35, and we’re going to try and complete the tally so that we’ll get to 160, but I don’t know
if we’ll make it, because the crocodiles are getting scarce, or maybe they’re getting wary of going out in the river. It’s politics.” The president, Omar ventured, “is caught between the sword and the wall. I think he knows that killing is not the right path. Maybe he says, ‘We want to continue to govern this country,’ and he forgets, or pretends to forget, the technical side.”
Crocodiles and humans have seldom gotten on well. Historians have theorized that the fearsome Leviathan, imagined as a whale ever since Moby Dick and described at length in the Book of Job, is in fact a crocodile: “Who can strip off its outer coat? Who can penetrate its double coat of armor? Who dares open the doors of its mouth, ringed about with fearsome teeth? Its back has rows of shields tightly sealed together; each is so close to the next that no air can pass between. . . . Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. . . . When it rises up, the mighty are terrified; they retreat before its thrashing.”12
Historically, the range of Nile crocodiles extended nearly throughout Africa, from Egypt and Mali to South Africa, Angola, and Uganda. Colonial governments hunted them indiscriminately: H.L. Duff, a British official stationed in Malawi (then Nyasaland) at the turn of the twentieth century, thought that crocodiles were “to be shot whenever and wherever they were seen.”13 A contemporary of his, the South African hunter R.C. Maugham, observed that there was “probably no more dangerous, more stealthy or more universally hated and feared branch of creation than the [crocodile].”14 Maugham referred to crocodiles as “pest” and “vermin” and called them the “veritable curse . . . of the African waterways.” This view was reflected in colonial policies offering bounties for crocodile heads and eggs. Motivated by the misguided impression that killing crocs would promote the fishing industry, the government of the Belgian Congo was the first to declare an all-out war on crocodiles and advocate their total extermination. Other governments followed suit. In the midtwentieth century, crocodile belly skins—used for handbags, belts, shoes, and luggage—became an important export for many African countries, including Mozambique. Total exports reached well into the millions of skins.15
Go Tell the Crocodiles Page 21