Man Friday, August 7, 2015: Cecil the Lion
IT WILL go down in history as the first global act of mass mob justice, of cyber-bullying on an unprecedented scale. “It” is, of course, the mass hysteria around the hunting to death of Cecil the lion by American dentist, Dr Walter Palmer.
It really has been a truly bizarre three weeks since the lion’s death was first reported: I won’t make the obvious comparisons between there being no similar mass outpouring of grief over the hundreds of thousands dead in Syria, Iraq, Libya. Or mention the lack of global outrage at the ongoing abuse of human rights by the Mugabe regime in Zimabwe. Or, or, or….
And I also have to add the ritual disclaimer here that although I used to hunt as a teenager, I now intensely dislike hunting, but I do support sustainable, ethical hunting as a valuable conservation tool. Sadly, it does seem as though Dr Palmer was perhaps as much a victim as the late Cecil – the victim of what on the surface would appear to be an illegal hunt conducted in dubious circumstances.
Objectively Cecil has achieved far more in death than he ever achieved in life (and it is important to point out that at the age of 13, he was very close to the end of his natural life, 14 at the outside in the wild, and perhaps 20 in captivity).
His death has brought into sharp profile the declining numbers of lions in the wild in Africa; it has shone a bright light on the hunting industry and the divide between ethical and unethical players; it has (once all the emotion, hubris and rhetoric is ignored) got a good debate going on whether or not conservation and hunting are compatible; and as of Wednesday this week, had raised nearly R11-million in donations for Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit. The unit, which had Cecil as one of its objects of study, says it will now be able to expand its research on Kalahari lions beyond the small study area in Hwange.
It’s the debate about hunting versus conservation that has intrigued me for years. Animal rights activists refuse to entertain any notion that the two are compatible, with extremists saying they would rather see species going extinct than allowing hunting. Frankly, they are the real enemies of wildlife conservation.
The numbers tell the story. Let’s look at the relatively short history of wildlife conservation in South Africa as an object lesson. By the end of the 19th Century, South Africa’s large wildlife had been all but hunted out. By 1905, Major James Stevenson Hamilton, first warden of the Sabi Game Reserve, the forerunner of the Kruger National Park, estimated that there were just 10 elephants in the reserve. By 1925, when Kruger was officially proclaimed, there were estimated to be 100. By 1967, when the first helicopter census was conducted, there were 6 586. Today there are over 13 000, and park authorities have started closing down man-made water points in an attempt to control their numbers.
SANParks, the authority in charge of Kruger, has under its control 3.7 million hectares of land. Private owners control 14.7m hectares dedicated to wildlife conservation, 17.9 percent of the total agricultural land in South Africa. Wildlife numbers on private land have gone from an estimated 575 000 in 1966, to over 19 million in 2013. Most of that privately owned land is conserved for hunting.
Foreign trophy hunters on average bring in R1 billion a year. But more importantly, domestic “biltong hunters” contribute up to R6 billion a year to the economy, according to a 2011 study by three academics at North West University. As the old conservation saying goes, “if it pays, it stays”.
Perhaps the cyber-bullies who have forced Dr Walter Palmer into hiding and closed down his dental practice should do some research before whipping up mass hysteria. But that wouldn’t suit the animal rights, preservationist agenda, would it?
