"" SANKUYO, Botswana — Lions have
been coming out of the surrounding
bush, prowling around homes and a
small health clinic, to snatch goats
and donkeys from the heart of this
village on the edge of one of
Africa’s great inland deltas.
Elephants, too, are becoming
frequent, unwelcome visitors,
gobbling up the beans, maize and
watermelons that took farmers
months to grow.
Since Botswana banned trophy
hunting two years ago, remote
communities like Sankuyo have
been at the mercy of growing
numbers of wild animals that are
hurting livelihoods and driving
terrified villagers into their homes
at dusk.
The hunting ban has also meant a
precipitous drop in income. Over
the years, villagers had used money
from trophy hunters, mostly
Americans, to install toilets and
water pipes, build houses for the
poorest, and give scholarships to the
young and pensions to the old.
Calls to curb trophy hunting across
Africa have risen since a lion in
Zimbabwe, named Cecil by
researchers tracking it, was killed in
July by an American dentist. Several
airlines have stopped transporting
trophies from hunts, and lawmakers
in New Jersey have introduced
legislation that would further
restrict their import into the United
States.
But in Sankuyo and other rural
communities living near the wild
animals, many are calling for a
return to hunting. African
governments have also condemned,
some with increasing anger,
Western moves to ban trophy
hunting.
“Before, when there was hunting,
we wanted to protect those animals
because we knew we earned
something out of them,” said Jimmy
Baitsholedi Ntema, a villager in his
60s. “Now we don’t benefit at all
from the animals. The elephants
and buffaloes leave after destroying
our plowing fields during the day.
Then, at night, the lions come into
our kraals.”
In early 2014, this sparsely
populated nation became one of a
few African countries with abundant
wildlife to put an end to trophy
hunting, the practice at the core of
conservation efforts in southern
Africa. President Seretse Khama Ian
Khama of Botswana, a staunch
defender of animal rights, stated
that hunting was no longer
compatible with wildlife
conservation and urged
communities like Sankuyo to switch
to photographic tourism. The
decision was cheered by animal
welfare groups in the West.
But Botswana is an outlier.
Government officials and
conservationists in most African
countries staunchly support trophy
hunting, including Zambia, which is
going back to hunting after a short-
lived suspension.
“Zambia has always hunted from
time immemorial,” Jean Kapata,
Zambia’s minister of tourism, said
in a phone interview. “Zambia is a
sovereign nation, and therefore
people should respect the rules we
have in our country.”
Zambia recently lifted a two-year-
old ban on hunting leopards, and
lion hunting is likely to resume
next year. In 2013, Zambia curbed
trophy hunting and imposed a
blanket ban on hunting the big cats,
also in an effort to replace trophy
hunting with photographic tourism.
But that brought little income
compared to hunting, Ms. Kapata
said, while lions increasingly stalked
villages for livestock. During the
hunting ban, a local councilor was
killed by a lion, she said.
“We had a lot of complaints from
local communities,” Ms. Kapata said.
“In Africa, a human being is more
important than an animal. I don’t
know about the Western world,” she
added, echoing a complaint in
affected parts of Africa that the
West seemed more concerned with
the welfare of a lion in Zimbabwe
than of Africans themselves.
Zambia’s quick reversal points to
the central role that trophy hunting
has played in managing wildlife in
southern Africa , where the
industry’s emergence in the 1960s
helped restore degraded habitats
and revive certain species.
In South Africa, the biggest market,
hunting occurs on private game
ranches. But in the rest of the
region, it takes place mostly on
communal lands where villages like
Sankuyo are supposed to receive a
cut of the fees paid by trophy
hunters.
Sankuyo, a village of around 700
people, sits just east of the
Okavango Delta in northern
Botswana, which has one of the
richest concentrations of wildlife in
Africa. In 1996, Sankuyo signed on
to a community-based natural
resources program that focused on
hunting and was supported by the
United States government.
In 2010, Sankuyo earned nearly
$600,000 from the 120 animals —
including 22 elephants, 55 impalas
and nine buffaloes — that it was
allowed to offer to trophy hunters
that year, said Brian Child, an
associate professor at the University
of Florida, who is leading a study on
the impact of the ban. Botswana’s
wildlife officials, who set the annual
quotas, last allowed a lion to be
hunted in Sankuyo in 2006.
Among the benefits to the
community, 20 households chosen
by lottery received outdoor toilets,
all painted in pastel colors that
stand out in a village turned brown
in the dry season. Standpipes were
installed in courtyards, connecting
40 families to running water.
“That’s what made people appreciate
conservation,” said Gokgathang
Timex Moalosi, 55, Sankuyo’s chief.
“We told them, ‘That lion or
elephant has paid for your toilet or
your standpipe.’ ”
Where trophy hunting benefits
communities, locals are more
motivated to protect wild animals as
a source of revenue, experts say.
But in most places without trophy
hunting, they are simply considered
a nuisance or danger, and locals are
more likely to hunt them for food
or to kill them to defend their
homes and crops.
Dr. Child, an expert on wildlife
management in Africa, said trophy
hunting had failed to benefit many
communities because of
mismanagement and corruption.
But in the countries where trophy
hunting had worked well —
Botswana, until the ban; Namibia;
and Zimbabwe, until its economy
collapsed in the past decade — it
had accomplished the twin goals of
generating income and protecting
wild animals.
“When hunting was introduced, we
actually ended up killing less
animals,” Dr. Child said. “That’s the
irony.”
With hunting now banned, there
are growing signs that more wild
animals could be killed, experts say.
Lions, which used to feast on the
meat of elephants left behind by
hunters, are increasingly entering
villages looking for livestock. In the
past two years here in Sankuyo,
villagers have killed two lions that
wandered into residential areas.
Botswana’s swelling population of
elephants, accounting for a third of
the total in Africa, is clashing
increasingly with a growing human
population. Poaching rings
trafficking in ivory to East Asia
have targeted elephants elsewhere
on the continent. According to the
International Union for
Conservation of Nature’s Red List of
Threatened Species, African
elephants are classified as
“vulnerable,” below “endangered”
and “critically endangered,” and
their population is increasing.
“We’re experiencing an exponential
increase in conflicts between
animals and human beings,” said
Israel Khura Nato, the head of the
Botswana Department of Wildlife’s
problem animal control unit in
Maun, a town two hours from here.
According to the department, such
conflicts recorded nationwide rose
to 6,770 in 2014 from 4,361 in 2012.
Poaching incidents increased to 323
in 2014 from 309 in 2012.
More poisoned vultures have been
found in this area, possibly killed by
poachers seeking to conceal their
hunts, said Lucas Rutina, an
ecologist at the University of
Botswana’s Okavango Research
Institute near Maun. Residents of
communities that used to derive an
income from trophy hunting no
longer attend conservation
workshops at the institute, he said.
“Now they are going back to hating
animals,” Dr. Rutina said.
Galeyo Kobamelo, 37, said he had
lost all 30 goats in the kraal just
outside his family compound to
lions and hyenas since the hunting
ban. Elephants had destroyed his
fields of sorghum and maize.
With the hunting ban, his family no
longer receives the free meat that
hunters left behind. His mother,
Gomolemo Semalomba, 58, no
longer receives a pension, about
$100 twice a year.
“Now we don’t eat meat anymore,”
she said, pointing to a table with
plates of cabbage, beans and maize
meal.
Mr. Moalosi, Sankuyo’s chief, said
he hoped to bring back some of the
benefits after his village made a
successful transition to
photographic tourism.
But experts say that sightseeing
tourists gravitate to prime areas
with dense concentrations of
wildlife, like the Okavango Delta’s
Moremi Game Reserve west of here.
They rarely venture to peripheral
areas like Sankuyo, or even more
remote corners, which do, however,
draw hunters.
“Photographic tourism is not that
viable in those areas,” said Joseph
Mbaiwa, the Okavango Research
Institute’s acting director.
In Sankuyo, William Moalosi is one
of dozens of people that the hunting
ban has left jobless. Many have left
Sankuyo to seek work in Maun.
Mr. Moalosi, 40, worked for eight
years as a tracker and driver,
earning about $100 a month. He
used some of the money to replace
his old house, made of branches and
the mud from a termite mound,
with a modern structure. He lost his
crops of maize and watermelons to
marauding elephants a few months
ago.
Villagers, including the chief,
identified Mr. Moalosi as the man
who had shot and killed a lioness
last month. The animal had climbed
a tree to jump down into a kraal
with goats; unable to get out of the
enclosure, the lioness posed a
danger to the village, which gave
the community the right to kill the
animal.
But sitting outside his house,
flanked by neighbors, Mr. Moalosi
denied he was the shooter. He said
he knew nothing about the
circumstances of the animal’s death,
a statement that drew knowing
smiles from his neighbors.
“We are living in fear since lions
and leopards now come into our
village,” he said. “Elephants cross
the village to go to the other side of
the bush. The dogs bark at them.
We just run into our houses and
hide.”"
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/world/a-hunting-ban-saps-a-villages-livelihood.html?referer=&_r=0
But Westerners, in their cities and suburbs, will continue to think emotionally...with visions of Disney movies dancing in their heads.
October 15, 2015
Photos on link
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