Day 2:
Day two consisted of lectures at the African Wild Life college. Lecture was conducted by Dr. Kevin Robinson. Members, Dr. Kevin Robinson is a joy to watch when conducting his lectures, he keeps it interesting, explaining important concepts like SD of bullets /penetration properties /bullet construction at an understandable level and back up every statement with practical evidence.
The most important aspect of this lecture is the procedure to age a molar tooth of buffalo shot/caught by predators or died naturally. The level of enamel on a buffalo tooth indicates the age of a buffalo including the physical properties of the buffalo on the set age. Working through thousands of these molar tooth Dr. Kevin gained insight and an understanding of what to look for when aging a buffalo to be shot for trophy or biltong.
Most important fact regarding trophy hunting buffalo:
Grave mistakes had been made/still is being made by PH /hunters when trophy hunting buffalo. They are shooting out the wrong buffalo, they are shooting out the eight year to eleven year buffalo, that constitutes the herd bull, the gene pool carrier, the hard boss 42 inch buffalo.
Even when encountered in a old bull/dagha boy group, these are the gene-pool buffalo that took some time off to be alone between the men , just to return later to the breeding herds..This is why most of the buffalo population in Africa `s gene-pool is de-generative , the strong genes are being eliminated by this practice.
What then do we need to shoot ?
The older buffalo , the 11 years of age and older, the scrum cup , we need to revisit our idea of a trophy buffalo for the sake of a regenerative gene-pool.
This scenario can be apply to all species currently being hunt as trophies in Africa.
Since we left the lecture room we all had the correct mindset to age a buffalo in the bush and identify the correct buffalo that constitute a real trophy to preserve the Cape buffalo gene-pool.
In a short time the group was able to identify and age a buffalo that is suitable/or not for trophy hunting.
Yes, yes we did pay attention in the class...
The following important facts emerged from this lecture :
Dr. Kevin pointed out the following regarding trophy hunting done on buffalo herds. He showed us many photo about the Rowland Award/SCI nr 1,2,3,4,5,6, buffalo that was measured and photograph after the hunt of these specimens. All these buffalo shot for trophy was too young, not suitable to be taken out of the herd..they destroyed the gene-pool , some of these buffalo did not even had the chance to breed when they were taken out as "trophies"
Here is a scull of a buffalo bull that charges Dr. Kevin Robinson while conducting training with students on this course..he had to shoot it with his .505 Gibbs at three paces when it attracted them...
Then it was off to spoor and find buffalo to age and identify....
