To the Secretary

by Mary Thompson-Jones

  Zimbabwe, a southern African country slightly larger than the state of Montana, offers a case study in how inseparable wildlife problems are from a country’s political, economic, and social problems. U.S. embassy officers, in cable after cable, pounded home the point that the country’s chaotic policies governing land usage have so damaged its ecology that Zimbabwe might never again sustain large numbers of wild animals.

  Land use policies had over time displaced both people and wildlife. Until 1979, about 70 percent of the country’s most fertile land had been owned by fewer than 5 percent of the population—farmers of European origin. Aside from the obvious social inequities, the large plantation-style farms produced foreign exchange–earning export crops and also allowed wild animals to roam on land lying fallow.

  Robert Mugabe, who came to power in 1987, made land reform a hallmark of his three-decade tenure. What started as a reasonable land redistribution scheme founded on the premise of willing sellers and buyers changed in 2000 to an aggressive fast-track land reform. With government sanction, war veterans and the rural poor invaded and occupied farms, resulting in the displacement of landowners (some of whom were American) and a full-scale land management disaster. By 2002, the embassy was reporting that Zimbabwe had gone from being the breadbasket of Africa to a country in which nearly half the population was malnourished.8

  Year by year, the embassy determinedly chronicled an unintended consequence of the land invasions: rampant poaching by both commercial and subsistence hunters who took game illegally from occupied private reserves, conservancies, national parks, and occupied farms that bordered protected game areas. The results were devastating. Some conservancies lost 60 percent of their animals. One source reported six to ten elephants were being killed every month; the rhino death toll in a nine-month period stood at thirty-eight. A major wildlife conservancy reported that 718 animals of a wide variety of species had been killed by land occupiers and poachers. Apart from its irreplaceable wildlife, Zimbabwe was also losing legal hunting revenue of more than $40 million a year.9

  The embassy reported that poachers, if caught, were rarely convicted, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. They sold smaller animals as bush meat but also were part of well-organized networks smuggling high-value ivory, tusks, horns, and hides to export markets in China and Europe. Zebra hides, for example, were destined for German furniture markets. And once poaching networks forced open the gates to national parks, rural villagers soon followed.

  National park boundaries are no longer respected by rural dwellers, be it for grazing, firewood collection or hunting. Poaching has led to widespread destruction of habitat, mainly deforestation, but also riparian damage caused by illegal gold mining and unmanaged poor farming practices. Ongoing power cuts have led more families to rely on burning wood for heating and cooking. Deforestation is evident in satellite photos and increases vulnerability to erosion and flooding.10

  Calling Zimbabwe a dystopia, one diplomat described land occupations in which chaos reigned and productivity had fallen to zero. In one field, an estimated $80,000 in crops rotted in full sight of people claiming to be land-hungry farmers. “Two giraffe calves, fit for neither sport nor table, were killed—one left to rot next to the farmer’s driveway, the other cut up for meat to feed the poacher’s hunting dogs.” 11

  Rhinos and the Big Game Hunters

  With the triple threat of habitat loss, Asian demand for its horn, and big game hunters seeking a Big Five trophy, it’s a miracle that there are any rhinos left. The rare African black rhino’s numbers, estimated by the Rhino Resource Center at 70,000 in the late 1960s, had fallen to 2,300 by 1992, despite having been listed on CITES “critically endangered” Appendix 1 since 1977. Ensuring the survival of those rhinos that remain illustrates the dilemma posed by sport hunting. The conflicting positions of CITES, the Namibian government, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NGOs dedicated to wildlife protection, and wealthy U.S. and European hunters beautifully captures the perverse notion that it makes sense to kill animals in order to save them.

  Big game hunting was once the sport of kings, and today it takes a king’s ransom to hunt large game. Both South Africa and Namibia were able to convince CITES to allow small quotas of five rhinos per country for sport hunters. But the quotas are of little value unless the hunters can claim and export their trophies. Namibia had long wanted to expand its hunting tourism industry, and the minister of environment and tourism complained to the ambassador that a U.S. ban on imports of black rhino trophies was hampering revenue.12

  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has the authority to issue import permits for sport-hunted trophies, but since the black rhino is also protected by the U.S. Endangered Species Act, Americans cannot bring their trophies home. Ironically, the meeting between the Namibian minister and ambassador occurred because the embassy was pushing for long-awaited export permits for fourteen cheetahs destined for the Smithsonian National Zoo, Cheetah Conservation Fund, and White Oak Conservation Center. The minister introduced a not-too-subtle quid pro quo: lift the ban on black rhino trophies and then we can talk about cheetahs.

  The invisible figure behind this conversation was Colorado-based David K. Reinke, who paid $215,000 to hunt a black rhino in Namibia in 2009, a sum that included a $175,000 fee to the Namibian Game Product Trust Fund.13 His lawyer argued that he had the right to bring his rhino trophy home, and for the first time in more than thirty years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally relented, issuing him a one-time permit for the import of his black rhino trophy in March 2013. Having allowed the unthinkable, Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe then appeared weeks later on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow to warn about buying and selling antique rhino horns.

  “We want to get the message out on protections for wildlife,” he said. “Anything that creates a demand for products made from endangered species can be bad news for survival of the animal in the wild, and that’s exactly what’s happening to rhinos.” 14

  If Ashe missed this apparent double standard, there were plenty of conservationists who did not. The president of the U.S. Humane Society called the decision to allow Reinke to bring home his hunting trophy “more than ridiculous,” and the regional director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare called it “perverse, to say the least.” The outrage continued as Namibia, working with the Dallas Safari Club, an American outlet whose website bills itself as “the greatest hunter’s convention on the planet,” auctioned off permits for big game hunts from which it said the proceeds would be used for wildlife preservation.15 The winning bid for the black rhino permit was $350,000 at a January 2014 auction. According to the Dallas Morning News, the Texan who posted the winning bid shot the black rhino in Namibia in May 2015. The 2015 auction featured a chance to kill an African elephant, which the group canceled in the face of protests from numerous wildlife welfare organizations. However, it still included a hunt in Mozambique for a male leopard.

  Zimbabwe is also home to a few rhinos—emphasis on few. On the theory that eliminating the horns would deter poachers, in the mid 1990s conservationists had implemented a massive dehorning campaign, but the animals’ horns grew back over three years’ time. Small-scale farmers also killed rhinos to defend their crops, using pesticide-laced melons. By 2008, nearly a quarter of all rhinos in Zimbabwe had been killed off, according to a CITES-funded study cited by the embassy, which estimated that 235 rhinos (both black and white) were killed in Zimbabwe between 2006 and 2009.16 Conservationists told the embassy that Zimbabwe’s rhinos were on a path to extinction.

  As in Namibia, the greatest hope for Zimbabwe’s rhinos seemed to be from organized big game hunting with revenue from hunters—including Americans—funding a substantial part of the park service budget. That kind of hunting requires sophisticated operations, and the embassy intensively followed the fortunes of Save Valley Conservancy (SVC), Africa’s largest private wildlife sanctuary, which also held the largest population of black rhinos in Zimbabwe.
This unique consortium of two dozen landowners (including Americans and Europeans) pooled their resources to stock the conservancy with elephants, giraffes, black and white rhinos, and other big game. While SVC began as a photographic-only safari, the conservancy found it needed the income from big game hunting to survive.

  The embassy had written admiringly of SVC’s model of sustainable conservation tourism but by 2009 was warning of SVC’s imminent demise.17 Despite generating revenue for the government, employing forty people full time, and setting up community programs to channel earnings into five neighboring rural districts, SVC endured politically forced partnerships with Mugabe cronies, part of a pattern of dispossessing longtime landowners and rewarding Mugabe supporters. Reports told of unrestrained and irresponsible hunting by the Mugabe set, and the embassy warned, “Wildlife stands to lose.” 18

  A continent away, Indian rhinos were at the center of a bizarre example of human-animal interaction when they got caught in a shoot-out between the Nepalese army and a Maoist insurgency. The embassy described a dramatic skirmish near Chitwan National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in south-central Nepal, that broke out as ten rhinos were being relocated under the watchful eyes of the diplomatic corps, which had been invited to this unusual nature outing. The relocation, sponsored by the Nepalese government, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), was proceeding according to plan when shooting broke out. The insurgents killed two soldiers and forced four trucks carrying rhinos off the road.19

  Although no rhinos died in the incident, the embassy noted that the insurgents’ violent takeover of wildlife preserves was imperiling Nepal’s wildlife. As park rangers fled their posts to avoid the fighting, rampant poaching resulted. Officers wrote that the Maoist insurgent activities placed wildlife “under siege,” and that poachers had earlier killed thirty-eight rhinos, along with countless endangered species such as musk deer, snow leopards, and Bengal tigers.20

  Elephants

  Perhaps no animal is more beloved and more controversial than the elephant, targeted by poachers and hunters for its ivory; targeted by farmers and villagers for its tendency to trample crops and farmland; and seemingly capable of rebounding from worrisome low numbers to gigantic herds in need of ever-vaster acreage. Embassies ranging from Zimbabwe to Burma chronicled the struggle over elephants among countries, conservationists, and poachers.

  CITES has banned the sale of ivory since 1989, but under pressure from conservationists, African nations, and China, it allowed a one-time sale in 2008 of stockpiled African ivory, with proceeds to be earmarked for wildlife conservation. According to conservationists, the sale of some one hundred tons of ivory proved disastrous because such a limited offering merely stoked Chinese demand and opened the floodgates of illegal ivory from African nations.21

  Ivory is only one aspect of the problem. In Asia, where wild elephants number 25,000 to 35,000, they are also seen as traditional and ideal beasts of burden. India has 20,000, followed by Burma, where the embassy reported that their numbers in the wild dwindled from 5,500 in 1996 to 4,000 in 2009. Elephants in Burma are used in the timber industry as draft animals, and conservationists complain that abuse and overwork result in high mortality, while the logging also destroys elephant habitat.22

  The Burma state timber company owns 2,500 elephants, and an additional 2,000 are privately owned and rented out to the timber industry. A Burmese wildlife NGO official told the embassy that as the regime uses the timber industry to meet the increasing demand for hard currency—essential for its economic integration and development—there is constant pressure to capture additional wild elephants and use them to fell more trees. Burmese officials defend the practice, saying elephants are more environmentally friendly than heavy machinery. That’s one view, but if the combined elephant abuse and loss of trees does not dismay conservationists, there is also the proximity of Burma’s border to China with its high demand for ivory.

  Sometimes the greatest threat to elephants comes from climate change. Mali’s Gourma region, straddling the area between the country’s fertile southern savannah and the semi-arid Sahel, somehow supports the northernmost herd of elephants in West Africa and the only elephant group in the Sahel. The survival of the 550 to 700 Gourma elephants hinges on a nomadic migration circuit of six hundred kilometers—the longest annual migration of elephants ever recorded, according to embassy reports.23 The elephants follow a vast, counterclockwise route punctuated with watering holes and seasonal grasslands, but after centuries of elephant-human harmony, recent trends of reduced rainfall alongside more farms, livestock, and settlements have meant heavier competition for scarce water. Embassy officers reported that NGO groups had used satellite technology and radio collars to identify choke points on the migration corridors, reasoning that any negative human-elephant interaction could increase the already high mortality rate. The NGOs worked alongside the World Bank on a $10 million biodiversity project that relied on local knowledge, leadership, and commitment of the Gourma population, working with tribal chiefs from eighteen communes.

  The officers described the difficulties of the collaring expeditions. One older and weaker elephant died from the anesthesia. Three baby elephants died while trapped in a mud hole, despite efforts by rescuers who were only able to help an adult female accompanying the babies. The adult became enraged and injured a worker. Another NGO team barely avoided disaster when the engine of their spotting plane failed, forcing the pilot to glide to safety on a donkey path.24

  Great Apes

  Fewer than three hundred gorillas survive in the border region between the West African countries Nigeria and Cameroon. Ensuring their survival and protecting this important wildlife corridor has involved at least four U.S. government agencies and several wildlife NGOs—and notably not the Nigerian government.

  On a visit to assess local conservation projects to help the critically endangered Cross River gorilla, diplomats and NGO officials learned that a USAID-funded program employing nine “eco-guards” to conduct patrols and collect data on the gorillas was not working. They immediately decided to help the local group seek more funds from a variety of U.S. sources ranging from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Africa Command Biodiversity Fund to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the U.S. Great Apes Conservation Fund, which dispensed more than $17 million in U.S. government grants in 2011.25

  The gorillas’ habitat in Cross River State lies in the southeasternmost corner of Nigeria, abutting Cameroon. Cross River governor Donald Duke sadly admitted that his countrymen “do not consider the Cross River Gorilla a national treasure,” a fact born out when locals killed three gorillas for raiding crops after severe storms wiped out the animals’ usual vegetation source.26 The governor’s solution was to habituate gorillas to humans’ presence as a means of boosting tourism, an idea that embassy reporters said alarmed conservationists. Another embassy report underscored this divide. “Most (Nigerian) states see the wildlife reserves primarily as a source of income and do very little to advance conservation,” with the predictable result being deteriorating wildlife habitat, increased poaching, and illegal trafficking.27

  Across the river in Cameroon, the gorillas are losing their habitat to the Lom Pangur dam project. The embassy warned that the need for electrical capacity so far outscaled the need for conservation that the Cameroon government pushed aside environmentally stringent World Bank funding to pursue alternative assistance from European, French, and Chinese sources, all of which would impose looser environmental conditions, and none of which stipulated conservation measures for the gorillas’ habitat.28

  The Big Cats

  U.S. diplomats in India give Gujarat, India’s westernmost state, high marks for wildlife conservation. The grade may stem in part from the fact that 80 percent of the population is vegetarian. The officers wrote approvingly that “a combination of strong political will, education, and culture has put Gujarat at the forefront of cutting edge wildlife
conservation in India.” 29 Gujarat’s Gir National Park shelters three hundred and fifty of the world’s last remaining wild Asiatic lions. But even in this enlightened spot, lions come under threat from poachers, who killed eight in an attempt to pass off lion bone, for which there is no market, as highly prized tiger bone, an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine. But unlike the lax enforcement seen elsewhere, the perpetrators were prosecuted and given three-year sentences. The state also hired one hundred new forest guards and an additional fifty supervisors, while installing high-tech monitoring equipment and a centralized control room.

  Gujarat lies nearly seven hundred kilometers northwest of Mumbai, where the United States maintains a consulate headed by the consul general, who made a visit to Gir National Park to learn firsthand about how well conservation measures were working. The Gujarat park director proudly spoke about what he called a culture of conservation. Officials conduct more than a hundred public awareness workshops each year, and local NGOs promote greater understanding of the lion’s role in India’s ecosystem. Should a lion kill a villager’s livestock, the park director said, “he considers it an offering.” Consular officials noted that the forestry department quickly pays compensation to reduce the chance of villager retribution. Although the lions live in close proximity to villages and settlements along the park’s perimeter, the director said violent incidents are rare, with a human death occurring once every three to four years.30