Rhino Poaching Update

There has been quite a lot of interest in the rhino poaching situation in the last three weeks. There was a recent NBC TV news report that I have linked to lowder down, and then the report in National Geographic magazine that really caught my eye for two reasons.

You can find the article, by staff writer Peter Gwin, on line here. If you only have access through the web you will miss some of Brent Stirton's remrakable photos. A double spread of a rhino suspended upside down under a helicopter is very striking, especially as the helicopter is out of shot. All you can see is the cable and a wide swatch of Africa. If you do not subscribe to the magazine, take a trip to your local library.

The first nice surprise was to see, on the editorial page, Peter Beard’s iconic 1968 photo of a black rhino coming straight for the camera. There are four men who seem to be standing on something behind the rhino. The man at the extreme left of the picture looks so much like me, with his bald head and face shape, that many folks are convinced it is me.

This is because Peter Beard was kind enough to allow me to use the picture on the front cover of my first book Wrestling with Rhinos: The Adventures of a Glasgow Vet in Kenya. (ECW Press 2002) Peter’s wife, and agent, Nejma has just told me that the man is Ken Randall, a friend of theirs.

The second excellent element was that the article not only told how modern poaching is done, but also gave an excellent update on the HOW of the use of rhino horn in Vietnam, not to mention the extraordinary prices now being paid. Not only is there a remarkable photo by Brent Stirton of a woman pseudo-named “Ms Thien” preparing a dose of “medication” but there is a link to a short video of that process.

I did write to the magazine’s editors. Of course there is not much chance of the letter being published, but I thought I’d share part of it with you.

"I write to congratulate writer Peter Gwin and photographer Brent Stirton on the excellent article about the resurgence of rhino wars in Africa. I have been involved with rhino since the late 1960s and treated my first two cases in Kenya’s Meru National Park during the late Peter Jenkins’s tenure as chief warden.

Although Gwin refers to the 2000-year history of rhino horn in TCM it might be interesting to give your readers some other elements of that history, which goes back quite a way. One of the most interesting comes from a 4^th century Chinese pharmacist who wrote: “The horn is a safe guide to the presence of poison; when poisonous medicines of liquid form are stirred with the horn, a white foam will bubble up and no further test is necessary.”  This effervescing property may have saved the lives of many potentates. Among those who are known to have use cups made from rhino horn were England’s Queen Elizabeth I, France’s Louis XIV, and Rudolph II of Germany, who was the Holy Roman Emperor from 1552 to 1612.  All of these people lived in an age when poisoning was a popular way of getting rid of unwanted rivals and enemies.

In was glad to note that Gwin did not perpetuate one urban myth. Many print media have played upon the fact that sex sells papers, and have claimed that rhino horn is used as an aphrodisiac. I quote from the text of The Trouble With Lions: A Glasgow Vet in Africa:

“There are two small tribal groups who believe that horn has this property. In India’s state of Gujarat, men use it by applying some ground powder to the penis just before intercourse, and in the Nakasongola region of Uganda, just south of Murchison Falls National Park, it is believed by some that rhino horn ash helps stimulate sexual desire.  Perhaps the shape of the horn, and the prolonged courtship and copulation (up to an hour has been recorded) engaged in by rhinos, are what leads to the misconception (to coin a pun).  Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide fame, with typical throwaway humour, suggested that the aphrodisiac myth might be simply related to the fact that rhino horn is a “big sticky-up hard thing.”

One other note of interest is that Peter Beard allowed me the use of his iconic rhino photo, the one you used alongside your editorial, for the cover of Wrestling With Rhinos. It was fun to see it again in the original."

That disturbing NBC TV report can be found here.

Talking books on TV

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For a change I'm uploading a video of a TV show I did with Saskatoon author and host Wes Funk who hosts a show about books and writing. It is called Lit Happens and is shown on the local Shaw TV station. Wes and I talk about two of my books. Mainly about The Trouble With Lions, but also about Of Moose and Men. I'm stil struggling with a possible subtitle of the latter. Right now I favour A Glasgow Vet's Journey With The Moose, The Whole Moose and Nearly Nothing but The Moose. Hope you enjoy the video. You can find it here on Youtube.

Moose wrestling

Linkhttp://www.google.com/calendar/render?pli=1&gsessionid=E6jb7pzRVH6TCU-ICnQJzA

If you have returned to this blog you will now have an inkling of what my new website will look like. I hope it will be up within a week or ten days, certainly by the end of the month.

Yesterday I posted a 3 minute video to Youtube. It tells, without the benefit of a continuity staff member, how we used to capture moose for research purposes in the 1970s and 1980s. Nowadays almost all moose excpet the huge Alaskan moose, appropriately called Alces alces gigas are captured using net guns. I'll let you have a look at it at the end of this post, but here are a couple of is a teaser photos.

I developed this walking with moose technique after learning something about wildlife capture and darting in Africa and applied it to moose when we needed to weigh them and would often be working in fairly heavy bush where we could not get the helicopter near them.

Here I have put a small piece of the video because the blog cannot handle too much band width. The whole thing is on Youtube.

Of course the method will also get a description in the new book I am working on. It looks as if my title will be Of Moose And Men.

Nanyuki Sports Club, Kenya

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Nanyuki Sports Club

The other day an email came in that I might easily have consigned to the trash heap as the sender’s name (Maggie) meant nothing to me. The subject line was the kicker. It simply said Nanyuki Sports Club. This was the social centre of European life for the best part of forty years before Kenyan independence in 1963. My mother managed the club during WWII when the men were away at war and twenty-five years later my new wife and I held our wedding reception there.

There is another link and this is where my email correspondent came in. She was searching, from her computer in Plymouth, England for information about a painting of the club made by her partner’s late brother. Somehow she navigated her way to my web site and the Amazon site about my first book Wrestling With Rhinos: The Adventures of a Glasgow Vet in Kenya.

She ended up there because one of the illustrations in the book shows a painting done by one Ronald Snoaden, about whom I knew nothing, that was done in 1944 and shows a view from one of the lawns around the main club building. Snoaden gave it to my mother at some point. The painting now sits on the wall of our home in Saskatoon, Canada.

The club remains the social centre of the business and professional people of Nanyuki, but these days has a real rainbow mix of races and people as members. We have retained our overseas membership and stayed there in March of this year. We not only stayed there, but also were assigned the very cottage (banda in KiSwahili), where Jo changed out of her wedding dress into beautiful cream-coloured Benares silk sari that she had chosen as a going-way dress. The champagne was also stored there before the event, but by the time Jo changed it was almost all gone!

A small part of the banda is visible at the very edge of Snoaden’s painting. What is less obvious is that Snoaden was standing with his back to one of Kenya’s most spectacular views, that of Mount Kenya. Here is a wide-angle shot of the mountain taken from just outside the clubhouse in front of the children’s playground.

Storytelling at Sacred Heart School in Estevan

Good fun with a storytelling gig for the Sacred Hearts School in Estevan, which is a but a few short miles from the US border in the southeastern part of Saskatchewan.
Librarian Laurie Sokel had organized the whole thing and some 55 kids in grade 5 & 6 were there with a few teachers in the Estevan Public Library and we posed afterwards for this picture, taken by teacher Hanna Keating.

Told stories of personal experiences with rhino, mixed in with a rhino folk tale that you can find on my web site here but of course as a told story it has many more embellishments than when written for reading. After that I switched to stories about Uganda and used the account of the importance of hippos as the major food source for herbivorous fish in lakes, and the disastrous effects of poaching on the entire chain. Finished up with a few brief accounts of the two schools at Kasenyi and Equator Highway and the privations and successes that the children there deal with on a day-to-day basis. I have never had a reception quite like this one, as the kids cheered and clapped afterwards, which made the 5-hour trip worth every minute.

Rhino Conservation and the probable disappearance of one race

It looks as if the planet’s last four wild Northern White Rhinos, which lived in the Garamba National park in the DRC have gone. As reported by Reuters in an article of June 16th Martin Brooks, head of the African Rhino Specialist Group, has stated that recent fieldwork has failed to find the animals. A new, and intensive, survey is planned under the direction of the African Parks Foundation, but it would seem to me that they have little chance of finding anything.

Northern White Rhinos do not look any different than their cousins of the Southern race, and it is now these that have been translocated to Uganda, to the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary, where I have taken students,and in 1966 were taken to Meru National Park, in Kenya, where I later had to do some medical interventions.

which I have documented in Wrestling With Rhinos and in The Trouble With Lions.

If the colours and picture quality of the animal with the big sore on its side look a bit dodgy, you may be interested to know that the photo comes from an old Super8 movie taken in the early 1970s. Super8 is incredibly small (8mm) and only technical wizardry has allowed us to use this picture.

As those who follow rhino issues closely know only too well, the pressure on them is unrelenting. If their horns are not being sold into Yemen to make dagger handles, they go to the Far East for use in traditional medicine.

It hardly matters who did the killing. In a country where war has been the norm for years and years it could be remnant armed militias like the ones who killed hundreds of hippo and have now started to take out elephants, (the war is supposed to be over) or even heavily-armed guerrillas from northern Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony , he of the bestial child abduction and slavery group who operate in the region. Either type of group would be hungry for the money that they could raise through the sales of rhino horn.

When I was in Kenya in 2006 there was a strong feeling that those four rhinos might find a home at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where they would have been relatively safe, as the place is heavily guarded. As there are no white rhino of the southern race inside the fence there would have been no risk of cross-breeding. The scheme seemed to be well ahead, and some of the logistics were being worked out. Then it all came to a halt. I am not sure why, but one reason given us was that locals in the DRC had objected. A sad end.

Wildlife blogs, wildlife poisoning, wildlife pictures

Been thinking about blogs, wildlife poisons and attempts to forestall or even reverse some of the trends that seem to be going on.

A major blog collector lies at a site called Saving Endangered Animals. Within the main home page are a large number of blog images, each one a mini-portrait of someone or something of relevance to the subject.

There are Quick Links and blogs galore – too many for me to count. Some that are relevant to my own books The Trouble With Lions and Wrestling With Rhinos are of course about those species, but also about the bigger problem of wildlife poisoning.

Two lion specific ones that tell how things have changed in Kenyan Maasailand, and give a glimmer of hope for the bigger picture in Africa are from the Kilimanjaro Lion Conservation Project - and its close relative the Lion Guardians.

The Furadan issue -a subject to which I have referred in previous blogs (see May 5th) comes up in several places. Furadan is the trade name of a carbamate poison developed as a crop insecticide, but happens to kill mammals and birds with seeming impunity - is a given plenty of coverage in a blog called Stop Wildlife Poisoning.
The authors are seeking as much information and input about poisoning incidents as they can possibly get. If I have a quibble with their opening statement of May 15th it is that they seem to restrict their search to Kenya. From my own experience, related in the opening sentence of The Trouble With Lions and in other stories in the text, I know that the stuff has been used in Uganda, and it would not surprise me at all if reports of its use turn up elsewhere.

Another general blog, which also refers to an upcoming article on poisoning with Furadan, is the East African Wildlife Society’s blog; neatly named The Water Hole. For those who don’t know it, the EAWLS publishes an enjoyable magazine called Swara (Kiswahili for antelope). It carries a wide variety of articles on wildlife subjects and does not shy away from appropriate commentary on controversies or comment on the behaviour of politicians when they ignore or actively try to damage wildlife initiatives.

From the Wildlife Conservation Society comes their “State of the Wild 2008-2009” announcement, which you can find here. This is a notice about their latest book on the subject. It consists of a series of important essays by well-known scientists and, right at the start of the web site, a marvelous series of photos of rare and critically endangered animals. All you have to do is click on the first image, a Sumatran rhinoceros, and up they come. If you think African rhinos look primitive, wait until you see this one.

Another taste of what if in store for me, when my copy arrives, and for those who care to get the book for themselves, lies in the advance praise written by natural history writer Carl Safina. He states

"This book delivers much more than the 'state of the wild.' It identifies the trends, trajectories, and principles that must organize our thinking. Think of it as an information handbook for the coming rumble over life on Earth. It's much less about what is—and much more about what's coming at us".

I have ordered a second copy for the library at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine and will ask for it to be put on reserve so that students who are to join me in Uganda in February next year will have some reading material.

A final fascinating titbit that came up on the BBC website this morning was also about rhinos, but not in Africa. Take a look at this film clip captured on an automatic infrared camera that is aptly titled Rarest rhinoceros wrecks camera. Six "R" sounds in four words. The headline writer must have enjoyed the alliteration in that one – virtually a no-brainer!

Uganda 2009, elephant kills

Preparations for next year’s trip to Uganda with students from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine are going ahead more or less as usual. The students have taken on the responsibility for much of the detailed organization, and in particular have already purchased their tickets. They will leave Saskatoon on the morning of Saturday the 31st of January and arrive, no doubt exhausted, but probably also exhiliarated, in Entebbe late on the Sunday evening. They have begun the process of getting al the vaccinations they will need, and are no doubt making sure that the clothing and supplies list that they have been given is more or less ready. However, they do have a full summer of work to complete al lover the country, so I do not expect to hear much from them over the next 4 months. When they get back to Saskatoon in September it will be time to really get going.

Meanwhile there is another group of students from the WCVM already in Africa. This year seven students who have just finished their second year courses have made Uganda and Tanzania their destination. The run under the “flag” of Global Vets which is an entirely student-run organization that has seen small groups go to a wide variety of places, including Peru, India and now Africa. You can follow their progress through their blog, accessible here, but just like the blogs that we develop in Uganda in February, they are likely to be intermittent. This is because Internet access is variable, and very much subject to the vagaries of electrical supply. The demand f or power all over the continent far outstrips the ability of the local suppliers to meet it. This leads to one of two scenarios. Either one is subject to sudden power cuts, which can be sudden and unexpected, or more or less predictable, when so-called “load-sharing” takes place. The other possibility, which is in some ways more annoying, is the phenomenon known as a brown-out. In this situation the power is reduced, and the bulbs just burn, but without much conviction. While this may not seem to be much of a problem, it is in fact the worst possible insult to one’s laptop or other electronic device. It is best to run any such equipment through a charge protector.

Recent reports from the Wildlife Disease News Digest, which is provided by the Wildlife Disease Information Node (WDIN), accessible here, have covered the slaughter of elephants in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The reports have suggested that the slaughters were largely related to the acquisition of ivory, and linked to the recent reports of the return of sanctioned elephant culls in South Africa. The elephant culls are highly controversial, with distinctly polarized opinions on both sides. The slaughter in the DRC is likely to have another element that has gone somewhat unnoticed. This is the bushmeat issue. Freshly dead elephants provide a mountain of meat. In 1975 in Rwanda, when I was involved in the capture of young elephants and their translocation to the Akagera National Park we were faced with an impossible problem. The elephants had taken to killing people and destroying crops. Fields of maize or beans would vanish in a single night. These are not crops as Westerners would think of them, but small fields that held a family’s entire food supply for a year. At the time the techniques develop by Clem Coetzee and others in Zimbabwe and South Africa had not been developed, and family groups were not captured and moved. The captured juveniles were the remnant of groups that had been shot. Within a day or two of the shootings entire carcasses were stripped of everything edible by local villagers. They had no readily available sources of protein. Their beans (if they had not been trampled), and sometimes fish from the lakes, were it. Meat was a luxury. For a fuller account of these events you can go to one of two sources. There is the dry scientific article that I wrote with my co-workers (Haigh, J.C., Parker, I.S.C., Parkinson, D.D. and Archer, A.L., 1979. An Elephant Extermination. Environmental Conservation, 6(4), 305 310) or the more personal material that appears in chapters 29 and 30 of my book Wrestling With Rhinos: The Adventures of a Glasgow Vet in Kenya. Here are a couple of pictures to give some idea of the scale of the project.

There is an extra layer. Take a look at the lower picture and note that there is one adult cow whose trunk is virtually severed. She had been caught in a snare, and her trunk has become a useless lump of grey sausage. When we fist saw her it was hanging down to the ground. As she ran with the herd to get away from the helicopter she was in real danger of stepping on it as it dragged along between her legs. The snares had been set by hungry villagers to try and catch whatever they could – they were engaged in bushmeat hunting. The elephants had had the misfortune to find the snares and, full of curiosity, pick them up and play with them. Over a quarter of the elephants we dealt with had damaged trunks.

Of course snares are indiscriminate, and do not always kill, but their use is widespread, and as ancient as hunting itself. In my latest book The Trouble With Lions: A Glasgow Vet in Africa I have discussed this fact in several places. The most dramatic example was witnessed by Dr. Patrick Garcia, who had been with me in Uganda in 2005. A few months later, on a working trip to Tanzania, he witnessed the dying moments of a lion that had a snare around its belly. This is one of his photos from the book.

The Trouble With Lions - launch

Launch activities - 1

It all started with a trip to Edmonton on the 9th of April, where I finally met with the crew at the University of Alberta press. It was great to be able to put faces to names after over a year of email and letter exchanges, not to mention tens of thousands of manuscript words & masses of pictures. They had had a chance to take a look at my mug shot, but all I had was guess work, and a low res picture of the entire group, with names attached, but not from “left to right” or anything logical that I could figure out.

The gig was an event called Literary Cocktails, and two of us who have recently published with the press had a chance to tell stories and/or read from our work. Ken Hoeppner, of Calgary told us about the development of his biography of an important Alberta figure that he has chronicled in The Ordinary Genius: A Life of Arnold Platt.

The MC of the event was Ted Bishop of the U of A’s Department of English, and he introduced me by reading two very brief passages from my preface to The Trouble With Lions. He chose

“The Trouble With Lions might also read The Trouble With Rhinos, or Marmosets, or possibly even the improbably named Dromedary Jumping Slug (threatened in Canada’s British Columbia), not to mention the names of a host of other species. Of course a title such as The Trouble with Jumping Slugs or Codfish might not catch the potential reader’s eye in quite the same way, and it would certainly not have excited a publisher.”
-and-
“…there are four chapters about my experiences with rhinos (perhaps appropriately enough, as one of my earliest medical cases required me to spend an hour evacuating a constipated rhino and then administering a four-gallon enema, with spectacular results).”
This picture appears at the start of chapter 14 on page 153 of my first book Wrestling With Rhinos


Ted ended up with the last two sentences from Jane Goodall’s foreword. “In writing The Trouble With Lions as in choosing a career as a veterinarian and teacher, Dr. Haigh made a decision to make a difference. His book will make you want to do the same”

Then I had a chance to tell some stories about my own efforts. I gave the room full of folks at the faculty club a brief background about my own history, and mentioned that as a kindergarten kid I had wanted to be a zoo keeper when all the other boys wanted to be train drivers. Then ambition morphed into a wish to be a farmer, thence from about the age of ten the only goal was veterinary medicine. Considering where I ended up I seem to have melded all three.

Trying to condense a 488-page book into a fifteen-minute time slot is a bit like cramming a field of wheat into a box of cereal. It contains kernels of the original, and some of the flavour, but lacks breadth and depth. I tried to go for the flavour.

First I introduced my thought that the title The Trouble With Lions is a metaphor for wildlife in general, and that lions are in trouble from human activity, as well as causing humans all kinds of trouble, not least as a predator of livestock, and from time to time people themselves.

I then talked briefly about the symbolic place of lions in human society before reading two brief stories quotes direct from the text that illustrate the extreme poles of human attitudes to wildlife. They were both about cape hunting dogs, a.k.a. wild dogs. In 1914 one R. Maugham wrote, "Let us consider for a moment that abomination - that blot upon the many interesting wild things - the murderous Wild Dog. It will be an excellent day for African game and its preservation when means can be devised for its complete extermination.” In 1997 Oxford University researcher wrote "To nominate one sight as the most beautiful I have seen might, in a world filled with natural marvels, might be considered disingenuous. Yet, of images jostling for supremacy in my memory, it is hard to better the bounding forms of African wild dogs, skiffing like golden pebbles across a sea of sunburnt grass at dusk.”

Then I talked of hippos. Their keystone role in the fisheries of Africa’s waterways, the wonderful old folktale of their long-held desire to be allowed by Ngai, the god who lives in the mountains, to live in the water, and finally, back to today’s reality, the causes and effect of poaching on their populations. The obvious cause is to get meat, masses of it. A less well-known one is the belief among the Banyaguru people who live on the borders of Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National park, that a bride needs a feast of hippo meat on her wedding night.

A careful look at this picture will show that the hide has been cut with a sharp instrument, and that virtually no meat remains on the skeleton.

I ended up with a note of hope as I told the audience about the sea-change in attitudes to lion conservation among the Maasai who live on the Mbrikani Group Ranch at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya. They have, after a long history of lion killing, turned to preservation, and Leelah Hazzah’s inspiring picture of a moran holding up a radio antenna as he tracks a collared lion is the last photo in the book.

The evening ended with a great get-together for curry, and wonder-of-wonders, a bottle of Tusker, my favourite among Kenya’s beers.