Thursday, March 02, 2017

Poaching: shoot to kill policy

Michael David MacBride    3/02/2017 03:32:00 PM    No comments
On our first day at a game reserve in South Africa, our guide offered to take us on a walking game drive. So we followed her through the bush. She carried a large caliber rifle (to me, it looked a comically large elephant gun). At one point, someone asked something about the rifle. Our guide responded, "oh, that's not for the animals. It's for poachers." What? "If I see someone who isn't authorized to be here, I'll ask you to turn your head and pretend you don't hear anything." She seemed serious, but I wasn't sure if she was just acting tough or what. So, when I got home, I did some research. It turns out she wasn't kidding at all.
First, a quick disclaimer: the numbers are difficult to come by. First, sometimes "South Africa" is used as a way to describing the regional area of the south portion of the continent of Africa, and other times it's to refer to the country of South Africa. So, while several sources reported data about "South Africa," it was frequently hard to know if they meant the country, or simply that portion of the continent (which would usually include: Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa, but sometimes also includes Kenya). I'll be as careful as I can to sort it out. With that out of the way...
Understatement: poaching is a problem in Africa. The various countries (54 at last count) have attempted any number of approaches to solve it, or at least slow it, and yet poachers continue to kill one of the biggest tourist attractions the continent has to offer. RadioLab did a wonderful story to parse out the very difficult balance of allowing big money, big game hunts (http://bit.ly/1Lieika); they also touch briefly on poaching, but their focus is really on legal hunts. As for illegal hunting, the most common punishment was a fine, then imprisonment, and most recently death. That's right, see a poacher? Kill him or her (usually him, though).
All legal, licensed hunting of big game was banned in Kenya in May 1977. Prior to the ban, "some white hunters began shooting at the poachers themselves, not because they wanted to protect the animals, but because the black poachers had killed the animals that the whites were hunting" (Steinhart, 2006, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya). It's unknown how many poachers (black or white) were killed during this period, but the approach seemed to be a significant deterrent. In 1984, Zimbabwe officially adopted a shoot to kill policy, and other African countries followed.
From 1984-1993, more than 170 poachers were killed. These numbers represent the killings that were reported, so they are only estimates. The Protection of Wildlife Act (1989) was passed to prevent rangers from being charged with murder if they shot poachers. The intention of the act was for rangers only to act in self-defense, but in 1990 more poachers were killed than rhinos. The act was quickly dialed back as a result of UN human rights violations.
I couldn't find figures between 1993 and 2009, but the following are the best numbers that I could verify from reliable source:
2009--15
2010--17
2011--35 (232 arrested)
2012--42
2013--57
2014--106
2015--127
Other articles estimate 500 poachers were killed between 2010 and 2015. It should also be noted, that since 2004, more than 1,000 rangers have been killed worldwide. I tried to narrow that scope to just South Africa, but failed to find anything that was very reliable. Suffice it to say, there is a war going on between rangers and poachers. Unfortunately, this has also become a race-based war, because most of the poachers are poor black Africans who poach to sell ivory or horns to dramatically increase their livelihood. So great is the reward, that they're willing to risk their lives to attempt it.

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