I recently
corresponded with a former member of the NGO Defenders of Wildlife who lives
out in Montana, part of the “American Serengeti”. He expressed grave concern
over the recent boom in demand for African elephant ivory in East Asia, and the
concurrent loss of elephants to poachers across Africa. His subject line read “Saving
elephants in Africa”. He wanted to know which conservation NGOs could be helped
to “stop the killing of thousands of elephants”.
The threats
currently facing elephants have drawn much attention from the American public
and media, as well as the U.S. government given that the wider issue of
wildlife trafficking is big business, and linked to other forms of trafficking. Wildlife trafficking endangers global health and
security, people’s livelihoods, and environmental sustainability. Over the last
one year in the United States, a senate hearing under the heading “Ivory and
Insecurity” was held and moderated by John Kerry, a Memorandum of Understanding
aimed at combating poaching signed between the U.S. and Tanzania (which
holds the world’s second largest elephant population after Botswana), and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton delivered a formal
Call to Action
to tackle illegal trade in wildlife.
What has gone mostly unmentioned in these discussions of
where to direct funding and action is this: how living with elephants figures
in, and how to incentivize peaceful non-use coexistence between elephants and
people in elephant Range States. Moreover, in what ways is such human-wildlife co-existence
linked to what is happening on our backstep in the United States?
Montanans and organizations like Defenders of Wildlife know
more about the conflict dimension of saving wild species than most Americans,
or Europeans for that matter. After
exchanging several e-mails with the Montana-based “free market environmentalist”
(who likes to give his money to the NGO African Parks as theirs is “a business
approach to conservation”), I was tempted to raise the issue of American hypocrisy
in our discussion of African wildlife.
Hypocrisy, while nothing new in conservation debates, is
topical given some recent news headlines. Among these (from The New York Times, December 2012): ‘Famous’ Wolf is Killed Outside Yellowstone and
Wild Horses are Running out of Room, On
and Off Range. It seems to me that the
hunting of gray wolves and rounding up of wild horses in the American West
warrants discussion of what we do at home, and that such a discussion seems
timely given our recent, and apposite, focus on African elephants. Like
elephant populations in Eastern and Southern Africa, the populations of iconic
North American species have grown; however, this recent growth, in the cases of
wolves and bison (and elephants) is recovery following massive decline – local extinction
in the case of wolves and near-extinction in the case of bison.
In the “who pays and who gains” debate over wildlife, the
laments of African farmers are strikingly similar to those of American
ranchers. For Americans, gray wolves, bison, and wild horses are among
“conflict” species. Gray wolves kill livestock so there’s desire to hunt them, which recently culminated in the killing of two iconic individuals, including a radio-collared
alpha female of the Lamar Canyon pack in December 2012. Gray wolves are a
re-introduction success story, and most conservationists are aware of the high
costs of such re-introduction programs. Gray wolves were re-introduced in the
1990s, roughly 60 years after they had been trapped and hunted out in the
western U.S. So today’s wolf hunts are
aimed at the progeny of a successful reintroduction program. Bison, like
elephants, range far and wide and consume a lot of vegetation; ranchers don’t
want them on their land as they compete with stock for graze and are carriers
of brucellosis. This means that Yellowstone’s estimated 4000 bison cannot roam
– they are hazed, captured, quarantined, and killed; they too are a survival
story (like African elephants) in that their numbers dwindled in the second
half of the 19th century from tens of millions. Wild horses,
meanwhile, called “a totem of the American frontier” - are now a nuisance and,
like bison, are running out of room. Wild horse herds are growing (currently estimated
at 37,000 individuals), and grazing associations want them out. The outcome is
round-ups, in which animals die.
Whether it’s living with large apex predators or large herbivores
which need a lot of space and food, we need to figure out how in our psyche we
can become more tolerant and sway opinion on behalf of the animals while
reducing conflict between wild animals, farmers and ranchers. For example, ranchers
are compensated for losses and asked to tolerate non-killers while predator
control (the moving, relocation or killing of “livestock killers”) is
spearheaded (Hank Fischer, PERC, 2001). Fischer (Defenders of Wildlife) talks
about situations where compensation to ranchers has been paid, and creative
measures taken to avoid predation on livestock, yet conflict still remains. This
may indicate the existence of especially attractive areas for large carnivores.
The only viable solution, Fischer argues, may be for people to avoid such areas.
The same rule should apply to farming directly adjacent to protected areas.
Ever-more creative solutions in other parts of the world
include the manufacture of urine to mark the territory boundaries of wild dogs.
These “urine bio-fences” keep wild dogs out of ranches and away from domestic stock.
One of the people on this Southern African bio-fence project is a doctoral
student from – the University of Montana.
The issue of who pays remains. Should taxpayers’ money go to
protecting someone’s cattle out west? Should African governments offer consolation
for farm losses? Or is it the individual rancher / farmer who should protect
what he has? Should ranchers and farmers join forces with NGOs investing
efforts in conflict mitigation, and who ultimately funds these efforts? What
role does the public have to play in how relationships between people and
wildlife are perceived? And finally, how can scientific research evaluate these
perceptions (e.g. that wolf depredation is less than assumed and elephants are
not the biggest of crop-raiders are examples of findings from systematic field
studies carried out by committed researchers)?
I gave the Montanan the names of two NGOs – International
Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and World Society for the Protection of Animals
(WSPA). Both IFAW and WSPA mitigate conflict between elephants and farming
communities around Africa. They do this through elephant-friendly fence construction
using chili peppers, beehives and other means. This is very important work as HEC
is a central issue, as people continue to encroach on elephant habitats and
elephants move through agricultural landscapes. However, "problem animal
control" (PAC) in the case of elephants may not be an effective way to
mitigate conflict as 1) many crop-raiding bulls are not habitual raiders and 2)
another raider usually moves in after one is removed (akin to urban foxes in
central London). The long-term solution in the case of elephants may be the
restoration of corridors which elephants can use to make long-distance
movements between areas of suitable habitat rather than being forced to move
through – and then linger – in farms. Like livestock for some wolves, human
food crops will probably remain an attractive, high-calorie and easily acquired
source of food for bull elephants – and for non-human primates and other large
mammals as well. But by no means is this a new problem in Africa and Asia where
people have lived alongside large mammals for thousands of years. Conflict has
indisputably escalated in some regions for obvious reasons - ever-increasing human
populations combined with a need for more space for growing human food. And this
conflict now has a name, probably in part because of conservation NGOs.
Is there an explicit link with the ivory trade?
Human-elephant conflict or HEC is increasingly used as a pretext to kill young elephant
bulls ("problem animals") which are the typical crop-raiders. The tusks
of these problem animals constitutes a legal source of ivory, and thus it gets
added to government-owned ivory stocks which governments later try to sell to
the Far East.
Issues of human-wildlife conflict are sure to figure –
mostly indirectly – into decisions made at meetings of the Conference of the Parties (CoPs)
attended by 177 countries which have signed a multilateral agreement known as
the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and
Flora (CITES) to protect species from over-exploitation from international
trade. At the most recent CoP, these parties would have voted on the Tanzanian
government’s controversial petition to downlist its elephants to Appendix II
from Appendix I to allow the sale of stockpiled ivory to trading partners (in
previous such sales, China and Japan had been approved buyers). However, Tanzania
quietly withdrew its proposal amid escalating criticism from environmental
groups and reports of escalating poaching in the country.
Part of the Tanzanian government’s pretext for having
proposed such a sale in the first place was to raise funds for local
communities to incentivize their co-existence with elephants. Such funds, if they
had been raised, would have amounted to a mere 1.5% of Tanzania’s annual
tourism revenue. The risk of stigma associated with such a sale, which could
have further stimulated demand and confused buyers in East Asian markets, did
not seem worthwhile.
I ask North Americans concerned with saving wild species and
thinking about Africa and the ivory trade, to consider the “American Serengeti”
and what it means to live alongside wild animals. If we cannot live with them,
can we ask others to? And if we cannot live with them in conflict hotspots,
then, as Fischer suggests, do we advocate for the avoidance of such
areas – what environmentalists call land sparing
rather than sharing? Would such conflict
prevention or avoidance be a high price to pay for the American and the African
Serengetis and the
mega-herbivores and predators which still dwell there?
“Serengeti” is derived from the Maasai language, Maa, and
means "Endless Plains”.
