Yesterday was International Rhino Day according to WWF and they had a huge campaign in South Africa to help raise awareness and money for the anti-poaching cause. We were meant to blow vuvuzelas and hoot to show that we support the initiative. In the area where I work there was not a sound to be heard besides for my own vuvuzela. People were either not aware or could care but it was someone else’s problem.
I chatted to a friend of mine about poaching in general and remembered the first time I saw the results of poaching. I was working for a company that was then called CCAfrica, now known as &Beyond. They sent me to one of their camps in the Northern border between Kenya and Tanzania, Kleins Camp, to do work on their computers. There was only one computer and I was there for a week so when I got a chance I went on game drives. Needless to say the stay was fantastic; I got to see black eagles that were nesting on a cliff face just above the lodge and mounds of other wildlife. It is one of my favourite places, if not my favourite place in the world.
On one of the days we were sitting looking out from the meal deck when we saw vultures circling not too far from the lodge. There were no guests in the lodge so the lodge manager and his wife took me on a drive to see what had been killed. We came across a huge elephant bull that was lying on the ground dead. The elephant had a huge hole ripped into its belly and the vultures were climbing in and out of it, tearing the elephant apart. Seeing an elephant dead is quite rare so we took a closer look and I hate to admit it we didn’t even notice that the tusks were missing. We had not heard shots over the last couple of days so we didn’t even think that the elephant had been poached.
What alerted us was that we noticed that the stomach looked like it had burst open; a vulture and most other animals cannot tear open a hole in an elephants skin so what had happened was that the elephant had been killed long before hand and the stomach juices and gasses had expanded until the skin ruptured. Only once we saw this we looked for the tusks. Needless to say they were missing. It was a horrible site to see such a magnificent creature that had been killed for nothing. Well what I consider nothing.
Don’t get me wrong, I eat meat and I do understand that hunting safaris bring in a lot of money for conservation but I do believe that it needs to be controlled. To ad to my above story, I was in a lodge where all the guests were out of a game drive. The game drive came back early and instead of seeing happy faces of guests that had an awesome game drive; I saw tears, anger, frustration and shock. I asked what happened and I was told that they were on the drive when a land rover full of hunters stopped next to their land rover opened up its windows and the shot a herd of Wildebeest (gnu) to pieces then they left. The hunting land rover had trespassed onto a game viewing farm and taken hunting to a new level. What kind of hunter gets a kick from blowing an animal to pieces? I thought that the fun in hunting was tracking the animal down and not the killing of the animal.
I am happy to see that a poaching syndicate was caught earlier this week. I hope that more get caught soon.
http://www.eyewitnessnews.co.za/articleprog.aspx?id=49117
http://www.andbeyond.com/
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/rhinoceros/
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