Conservation, chimps and rhinos

I have been a member of the East African Wildlife Society for over forty years. In the early days they published a magazine called Africana. Some time in the early 1970s there was a rift in the organization. For a while both Africana and a new magazine, called Swara  (which is Swahili for antelope) ran side-by-side, but then Africana, of which I still had a few copies until we recently moved house, disappeared.

The latest issue of Swara is a reflection of what is happening to wildlife across Africa. There are eight articles under the general heading of Conservation and four Spotlight pieces. Two of those four are also about conservation.

Two of the conservation articles report in-depth examinations of the trade in wildlife and wildlife products. One of these, by professional photographer, author and long-time conservationist and bushmeat activist Karl Amman covers the latest development in oft-studied SE Asia, particularly as regards rhino horn. The other deals with things that have gone on in Morocco for ages but have not been much reported upon.

All the authors bemoan the massive decline in wildlife numbers, and by wildlife I don't just mean animals. Forest have been under threat for may years, mostly due to the fact that the populations of these countries are expanding at unsustainable rates and people want land to cultivate their crops. The Mau forest, on the western side of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya is but a remnant, and now the Kijabe forest has taken a beating.

Karl Amman also has an opinion piece that follows right on the usual editorial and administration material and gives something of a taste of things to come. He does not mince words. Even the title tells the tale: Conservationists should carry condoms, ‑ not GPSs. I have written similar sentiments in the past, but the meat of Amman’s article was a shock. In it he tells of the illegal and growing trade of live baby chimps into China and to a lesser extent to the Middle East. He reports “some 130 chimps and 10 gorillas were smuggled out of Guinea [West Africa] during the last three years.” As he writes further “That’s a horrific number, considering how many adults were most likely killed to generate the orphans for trade.” It would be at least ten adults per orphan. As there are a reported 95 dollar billionaires in China, and over a million millionaires, money is no barrier.

It is obvious that Amman is not impressed with the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) staff involved. He criticizes them for completely ignoring the China connection and even ignoring the written offer of a Kenya-based chimpanzee sanctuary to house them in new facilities.

In his book What I tell You Three Times is True Ian Parker, who knows more about ivory and elephants than almost anyone considers CITES to have become “a top-heavy bureaucracy that is held up by its own inertia;” he describes it as “an orgy of silliness.” Sad, but based on these and other reports, probably true.

Amman makes an interesting point. He compares the effective campaign to interest the media in the rhino horn trade and the increase in smuggling to SE Asia. I have written about this on a few occasions and the Swara editors have been a part of this effort. In the same July-Sept 2012 issue as Amman’s piece they provide a table showing the increase in poaching of rhino in South Africa. In the year 2000 only 7 rhino were poached, none in the Kruger NP. By 2011 the number had risen to 448, of which 252 went from the Kruger. The 2012 figures to June show a continued increase. As Amman points out, even in the face of these events rhino numbers are on the increase.

To quote him again, Amman states, “the ape conservation community could learn a lot from the rhino community in terms of lobbying, campaigning and activism.”

Try and find a Guinea Ape Traffick story on primate blog sites. Not easy. I found three.

This was the third item on the Google list during my search today. It is by Jeremy Hance but it is headlined Cute Animal Pictures of the Day. I see nothing cute at all. Just desperately sad. 

This picture of a young chimp, that I took in 1997 in Cameroon, is a more realistic reflection, but it won’t win any “cuddly” prizes. He was in the grim cage 24/7 in the forecourt of a hotel near the coastal town of Limbe.

You will find Amman’s story (in a slightly different version) here where you can read about his thesis on the need for condoms.

Amman’s final paragraph, both in the magazine and on-line begins “The fact is that when it comes to wildlife conservation the animals are not the problem. The humans are.”

How true.

Northern White Rhino – a last ditch try.

Linkhttp://www.olpejetaconservancy.org/, http://www.easternarc.org/html/eawl.html
Good news, or a desperate move? That is the question that we can surely ask about the move of four of the world’s rarest mammals to Kenya from the Czech Republic. The answer is both.

The January-March issue of Swara, the Nairobi-published magazine arm of the East African Wildlife Society that bills itself as “The Voice of Conservation in East Africa” has two stories about the Northern White Rhino. One of these is by Kes Hillman, who, with her husband spent 22 years in Garamba National Park in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo working on a variety of conservation issues, with a huge focus on the few remaining white rhino there, the last place on earth where they were known to exist.

I have no pictures of this race of rhino, but they look very much like the Southern race, with which I have had a fair amount of experience. Here is a picture taken in Kenya’s Nakuru National Park.

While the article implies that the poaching of rhino in the region was worst from the 1960s, rhino poaching in Africa has a much longer history than that. In the very early 20th century armed gangs were sent out by colonial Europeans to shoot as many rhino as possible, simply to harvest horns for the dagger handle market in Yemen or the oriental medicine trade. By the1960s there were thought to be about 1300 animals in Garamba. Then came civil wars in Congo and the Amin regime in neighbouring Uganda which wiped out all the rhino, both black and white, in that country. When Douglas Adams, he of the five volumes in the trilogy The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy visited Garamba the 1980s there were 22 northerns left. In 2008 when The Trouble With Lions was published, the number was down to three. In her article, titled “Could Ol Pejeta Be A New Start For the World’s Rarest? Kes Hillman tells of the inevitable end of that remnant.

The other article by Berry White is titled World’s Rarest Mammals Fly To Sanctuary In Kenya. In it she recounts how four white rhino were moved from a wintery, snow covered Dvur Kralove zoo to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy near my old home town under the shadow of Mount Kenya. In a well coordinated move that involved training of the rhino, specially designed crates, trucking, aircraft and a great deal of TLC, four animals, a female named Najin and her nine-year old calf Fatu, together with males Sudan and Suni made the journey. Naturally the Ol Pejeta’s Conservancy’s web site carries the story and gives more details.

This is really the last chance for this species of rhino. From the thousands that ranged across northern Africa in the days when the only records were in cave paintings, to the demise of all wild ones anywhere, we are left with eight captive ones, four of which are either too old or uninterested in breeding and live in two zoos. Will Najin or Fatu be the mothers of a new generation? Let’s hope we see a photo like this one (a Southern) in a forthcoming issue of Swara or on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy web site.