Donate NowBrendan Borrell, for the Pulitzer Center
Earlier this month, I met Colin Bristow, a bush pilot based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe who has spent 29 years running charters in countries ranging from Mozambique to Angola. He often flies tourists over the Lower Zambezi National Park in Zambia and sometimes visits the park on foot after most of the tourist lodges have shut down for the season. On a recent trip, he was shocked to count over 60 elephant corpses: their ivory tusks shorn from their heads.
It's become a yearly cycle, he says, when the lodges close, the poachers move in. Some lodge owners may even be aware of the phenomenon, he alleges, but have so far have failed to raise a stink because the poachers have political ties. It would have been just another unsavory rumor for me to file away from this eye-opening trip to southern Africa, but Bristow offered to email proof in the form of gruesome photos. Here's the first one I have received, and I will hopefully post more later.
When I told Chris Weaver, the director of WWF-Namibia about the poaching, he shook his head and said, "That's nothing new. Zambia has yet to submit an elephant management plan to CITES." In other words, without economic benefits trickling into local communities through foreign trophy hunters, elephants had no value. Or let's just say their value was determined by the paltry price of their tusks on the black market.
For those of us enamored with Africa's big mammals (and who isn't?), sustainable use is not an easy pill to swallow. But Africa is not our zoo. It's a continent where millions of people are struggling to get by, and wildlife – properly managed -- could well be their most profitable natural resource.
In fact, Namibia does have an elephant management plan in place. And thanks in no small part to Weaver's work at the WWF over the last 15 years, locally run conservancies, particularly in Damaraland, are now blessed with a significant income (and precious meat) coming from trophy hunting. Populations of black rhino and elephant are booming there and in Etosha National Park, which has had hardly any poaching over the last decade. A nearby conservancy boasts some of the largest "tuskers" on the continent through rigorous management: a quota of 5 elephant hunts per year in a population of 3000 animals. Last week, the Ministry of the Environment hosted a landmark public auction for hunting rights to 3 black rhinos over the next 3 years.
And so I'll end this entry on a positive note. On Sunday evening, I sat by the Okakeujo water hole in Etosha and watched a big male elephant slurp up the drink. Later, nine black rhino came to lap at the water's edge – a remarkable number even by Etosha's standards.