Here is another perspective on the bush meat incident written by the ever-captivating Professor . . .
I was angry, only I didn’t know whom to be angry with. The assailant, the villagers, the rangers, the foreign factory owner, the government, whom? All held and sidestepped responsibility. There was little I could do other than extend a spiritual embrace to a soul hovering between life and death.
The water buck was mired to its belly in mud in a watering hole on the edge of the village. It quivered with exhaustion. Deep lacerations oozing with blood spread across the haunches, neck and face. Snorting in fear and defense, a frothy mix of blood, sweat and hormones cascaded down the broad face from the laceration just below the eyes. The look of fear, pain and exhaustion was unmistakable. With it’s characteristic white ring of fur around the buttocks and a beautiful gray brown coat the muscles of this common water buck likely had shimmered athletically just hours earlier before descending to this lethal watering hole. Here in the night it became entangled in a crudely set snare.
The watering hole was a muddy puddle of water not more than six meters in diameter on the edge of a small village. Nearby was a large tank of water for villagers who cautiously watched while filling their vessels. The water buck, as the name implies, must visit water daily and the end of the dry season had forced this particular animal to venture to the edge of the village in search of water.
Snares do not discriminate. A water buck is a large animal comparable to an American elk. The poacher, machete in hand, likely had approached in the night to harvest this animal as the lacerations attest. Finding a machete no match for the horns of a healthy water buck, the poacher probably retreated in the hopes that the animal would weaken before dawn, enabling harvest and discrete distribution of what then would then be bushmeat.
Many times I had taught about bushmeat in my classes on conservation biology and each time I presented the difficulties of poverty versus conservation. How can westerners cry about animals lost to poaching when abject poverty and hunger fuels desperation? What would my students do I ask and who is to blame? Like many difficult problems there are no simple answers, yet here I stood watching this water buck seeking desperately to find someone to blame.
The villagers watched as the rangers lassoed the water buck and dragged it out of the mud after several hours of trying to scare it out of the watering hole. The animal braced all legs, pulling back against the cable hooked to a truck until it collapsed. The villagers were silent. No one would utter a word, though likely each of them knew who carried the bloodied machete. This was meat lost. The East Indian factory owner indignantly insisted on a doctor for the poor animal. He spoke with denial in English, apparently unable to speak Swahili. I wondered if he felt a twinge (or perhaps a surge) of guilt in this factory town of poorly paid hungry people.
The rangers carefully went about their job of tying the animal and loading it on the truck, still alive. This task clearly pained them and brought great sadness. The water buck could not be left in the waterhole to die or even be shot as this was viewed as incentive to poachers. The government, in an effort to discourage poachers mandates that the animal must be transported and released in the hopes of recovery. Animals taken only a short ways are often stalked by their assailants and butchered, so the journey deep into the bush in the back of a truck was long.
Before leaving the site, the rangers collect the snare and take photographs knowing that is unlikely that anyone will be held accountable, but rather to add the evidence to the growing pile of statistics on bushmeat. They remove another snare in an adjacent tree along with a tethered vervet monkey, long since dead. The young monkey too small to butcher, was left to die and now was no more than a dried carcass.
The rangers unload the water buck deep in the bush where the acacia trees stretch to the horizon. Theirs is not an easy job. I wonder how many silent prayers they have made over similar heaps of blood matted fur. Though of little comfort, the bush is a better place to die and as we departed the soul hovered between the savanna and clouds.
I still have no answers to the questions I pose to students on bushmeat, nor was I able to identify any group or person to blame, but something inside me changed. There is a small piece of sadness that comes from lost hope and I find myself deeply angry. Angry at a world that allows people to be hungry, for corporations who fail to provide a living wage and for governments forced to make difficult choices. The world is big. Big enough for waterbucks, villagers, corporations and westerners, but only when we all take responsibility. We cannot and must not lose hope, for hope is the spirit that guides us from anger to responsibility. Could hope be the strongest conservation tool we have? Maybe, the answer lies in a combination of hope, beauty and dignity for all, including waterbucks.
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