Meat Poachers

Our most widespread poaching problem here is South Africa is the poaching of ‘bush meat’, which is not for subsistence as you may think but commercially for a thriving black market.  If it was just people doing it for food to survive then it would probably be much more acceptable, however the bush meat poachers are totally unscrupulous and have no problem decimating an area of wildlife for commercial gain.  There is nothing environmentally sustainable about this practice unlike most traditional hunting patterns and these poachers do not respect anybody’s property, including wildlife sanctuaries, national parks and reserves.  They think nothing of the longer term benefits that eco tourism may bring to an area and are only interested in short term money in their pockets.

The ‘bush meat’ poachers tend to operate in two main ways, using snares or hunting with dogs. The snares are made of wire and are totally indiscriminate and cruel, not only do they trap and strangle their desired prey, they also trap any other animal using that game path, often causing incredible suffering.  In my short time here I have seen one of our elephants (Umfumu) who is missing the end of his trunk from a snare, a zebra foal whose leg was cut to the bone and irreparable and a hippo in extreme agony because of a snare around its leg.

The dog poachers are no better in that they hunt with very highly trained dogs and either run their prey to ground until the poacher can reach it and kill it, or draw the prey out of their burrows where it can be killed.  Not even the dogs are treated well, in that they are starved until they catch prey and then are fed only the internal organs.  Below are some photos giving a bit of an idea of how these poachers operate.

The repaired cut where the poacher came onto our property.  If you look closely you can see the bottom wire has been cut to allow the dogs in, and the third and fourth wres from the bottom cut to allow the poacher access.

AJay demonstrating how the poacher can access through a single cut wire.  This cut was on a neighbour's property across a road and it was the same poacher who exited here that entered our property in the photo above.

Trying to persuade Oertjies (the dog) to demonstrate (unsuccessfully) how a poacher's dog goes through the fence once the bottom wire has been cut.

Two typical types of snares, normal wire on the left and a cable snare (probably the most dangerous) on the right.

A colection of old snares, a snare wire cache and 'loose wire'  found in one sweep on the Farm.

The damage a snare can do to a zebra (or any other animal's) leg.  Unfortunately this zebra had to be put down as the damage was too great.