Tales from Safari (edition IV)

During our stay at Sadani National Park we had a unique experience.  One day, after dropping the students off in the bush with a promise to pick them up five kilometers south of that point in a few hours, we headed back to camp.  Before we got to camp we came upon a watering hole just outside a village.  As Sadani National Park has been recently established, all of the area’s former inhabitants have not been entirely relocated.  (The government is in the midst of buying out a salt company whose workers live in a town within the park boundaries.) 

Reaching the watering hole we realized what the commotion was about.  Being the end of the dry season, this was one of the remaining watering holes in the area and many animals flock to it.  Unfortunately they don’t all leave. In this case, a large male waterbuck had been caught in a snare.  A small group of villagers stood around watching while four park rangers tried to free the animal.  In the previous night, the hunter had tried to kill the snared animal but only succeeded in wounding it.  By the time we had arrived, the waterbuck had lost much blood from deep gashes on its nose and side and was in a weakened, frightened state.  The rangers tried poking and prodding the beast but to little avail.  When waterbuck are scared, their tendency is to water, making it hard to chase this one away from the watering hole.  After several failed attempts, they resorted to a new tactic.  Looping a cord over the waterbuck’s horns, five grown men tried to put the animal out of the mud, moving the creature only meters before the rope broke.  Once armed with a new rope, they tied the waterbuck to a truck and pulled that way.  The poor creature fought its removal to exhaustion and collapsed on the ground.  The waterbuck was then tied up, pilled in the back of a pickup and driven off, deep into the park, where the poachers couldn’t find it.

In a country where over half of the population lives on less than $1 a day (and nearly all of the country on less than $2), illegal hunting is a popular method for food and income.  In National Parks, hunting is strictly prohibited, though laws do little to deter poor villagers.  It’s easy to sit back and think, ‘why would anyone do such a thing?’, but when you consider the circumstances, black and white become gray.  When you have starving children to feed, and bush meat is considerably cheaper than beef, you are not inclined to spend your precious little money for the conservation-friendly beef.  The on looking villagers certainly knew who the culprit was but kept the secret to themselves.  But can you really blame them?  The salt company pays them little to nothing, their children are hungry, and why should the waterbuck get free access to the town’s watering hole?  Until communities have greater ownership and economic benefit from wildlife it is unlikely that the bush meat trade will decrease.A vervet monkey was also caught in a snare, but not being worth the small amount of meat it would provide, was left in the tree where it was snared.