Elephant crushes big-game hunter

A young bull elephant killed professional hunter Ian Gibson early on Wednesday as he tracked a lion for an American client in a rugged part of northeastern Zimbabwe.

Gibson, 55, one of Zimbabwe’s best-known big-game hunters, died scouting

for prey in the Zambezi Valley after a young bull elephant charged, then knelt on him and crushed him.

“We don’t yet know the full details of how ‘Gibbo’, as we called him, died, as the American client and the trackers are still too traumatised to give us full details,” said Paul Smith, MD of Chifuti Safaris, which employed Gibson for the hunt.

The American hunter was on his first trip to Zimbabwe . Gibson was scouting for lions when he encountered the elephant.

Gibson’s trackers said the young bull had been in musth , which means it was producing more testosterone than usual.

“We know Gibbo shot it once, from about 10 yards away, with a .458 [rifle]. He would never have fired unless he had no alternative.

He was a hunter, yes, but he was also a magnificent wildlife photographer and conservationist .

“He was so experienced and this is a most unexpected tragedy.”

Gibson was accompanying his client in an area known as Chiwore North in the southern part of the Zambezi Valley, which Smith said was overpopulated with elephants.

Gibson began his wildlife career in Zimbabwe’s department of national parks, but left to become a hunter about 25 years ago.

He was well known in the US; the Dallas Safari Club is paying his funeral expenses. Gibson lived in Marondera, a small town about 70km southeast of Harare. A son who works in Tanzania and two grown daughters in Harare survive him.

Source: Elephant crushes big-game hunter (19/04/15)

Conservationist axed to death in Hwange, Zimbabwe

A conservationist working with endangered painted dogs near Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park has been found battered to death in his cottage, friends said on Thursday.

Gregory Gibbard, an Australian who had worked for some time as an administrator for Painted Dog Conservation, was axed to death on Tuesday night, a friend told News24.

"He was hit twice in the head apparently, with what sounds to have been an axe," the friend, who asked not to be identified, said in a telephone interview.

"It is assumed that the motive was robbery but this kind of attack is excessively unusual in Zimbabwe," he added.

Gibbard's cottage is located near Hwange airport, just outside Hwange National Park, which is in the west of Zimbabwe.

Police are understood to be investigating but there are no reports of arrests so far.

Painted Dog Conservation said in a brief statement: "It comes with great sadness that we need to inform you that one of our founding PDC Inc members and friend Greg Gibbard... was tragically murdered on Tuesday night at the project headquarters."

‘Tragic’

Friends took to Facebook to express their shock at Gibbard's murder.

"Goodbye my dear friend. So sorry. Wish we had a chance to have spoken one more time," said Colin Yapp.

Sharon Stead wrote: "Absolutely tragic - his death has rocked the Hwange community."

Painted dogs are also known as African wild dogs. They are among the continent's most endangered wildlife species.

In its February newsletter Painted Dog Conservation spoke movingly of the links forged between the NGO and the local community, whose head was only identified as Chief Nelukoba. Fifty members of the community have recently volunteered to be part of anti-poaching and anti-snaring patrols, the newsletter said.

"Painted Dog Conservation has been operating there for a long time," Gibbard's friend confirmed on Thursday.

Source: Conservationist found axed to death in Zimbabwe (09/04/15)

Cecil Rhodes statue pulled down in Cape Town

A statue of  Cecil Rhodes, the British mining magnate and African coloniser, has been pulled down from its plinth at the University of Cape Town after a prolonged protest by students.

The statue, which has occupied a prominent position on the South Africa university’s rugby fields since 1934, had been previously pelted with excrement and paint and wrapped in plastic bags by those who argued that it was offensive to black students and that memories of the brutal heritage Rhodes represented should not be preserved.

The debate sparked similar protests across the country which saw a statue of a bronze British soldier who fought in the Boer War removed from his horse in Port Elizabeth, and the spray-painting of a statue of King George VI at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

The far-left Economic Freedom Fighters political party, led by former ANC rabble rouser Julius Malema, have enthusiastically joined in with the protests, its followers daubing with paint statues of former South African leaders Paul Kruger and Louis Botha, in Pretoria and Cape Town respectively.

The vandalism prompted protests from white minority parties including Freedom Front Plus, and Afrikaans singers Steve Hofmeyr and Sunette Bridges, who sang the former apartheid anthem Die Stem in front of Kruger’s statue in Pretoria, watched by an audience of white people, some dressed in quasi-military uniforms.

AfriForum, a white civil rights group, warned that strong emotions around the debate meant that communities were becoming “dangerously polarised”.

“The Afrikaner is – from a historical perspective – increasingly being portrayed as criminals and land thieves,” the group said in a statement.

“But apartheid freedom fighters are certainly not the untainted heroes government is making them out to be.

This week, the UCT’s governing body, staff and students voted virtually unanimously for the statue to be removed temporarily, pending an application to the government body, Heritage Western Cape, for its permanent removal.

A deadline was set for the statue to be taken down by 5pm on Thursday and by late afternoon a large crowd had gathered to cheer the former coloniser’s dethroning by a hydraulic crane.

As the brooding bronze figure was lifted gently from his plinth, the crowds below erupted in cheers as several students climbed up to dance in the space the statue had cleared.

Nathi Mthethwa, South Africa’s arts and culture minister, said UCT’s students had raised a valid concern.

“For far too long our heritage landscape has been viewed through the prism of our colonisers and we have got to challenge that,” he said.

“But to come up with a blanket ban is not helpful – each statue has to be examined on its own merits because each history is not the same.” He condemned other protests where statues had been vandalised.

“We want to keep them in a museum, not destroy them, because our policy of reconciliation is that we should forgive each other but never forget,” he said.

Mmusi Maimane, the parliamentary leader of the Democratic Alliance, South Africa’s official opposition, said the statue debate was a “distraction” from the ANC’s failure to improve the lives of the majority of South Africans.

“That is the real scandal in our country,” he said. “We cannot erase history, and we cannot escape the fact that our heritage is intertwined as South Africans.”

Dali Tambo, son of the ANC’s liberation leader Oliver Tambo who oversaw the erection of a new statue of Nelson Mandela outside Pretoria’s Union Buildings, said he was dismayed by the protests.

“I would like to live in a country with a varied heritage landscape, but it must be dominated by the heritage of the majority; which requires us to create new heritage of scale that tells the story of our journey to democracy,” he said.

Frans Cronje, the head of South Africa’s Institute of Race Relations, said that while he held no strong views about whether the statue should remain or not, he was concerned by the “intolerable hooliganism” that had characterised the campaign to remove it.

“A university ceases to exist when an open culture of argument and counter argument is replaced by fear, intimidation, and racial nationalism,” he said, citing an attack on a member of staff who questioned the campaign and the singing of the struggle song “One Settler One Bullet” after the student council voted in favour.

He also questioned the vote by the university’s staff “senate” of 189-1 in favour of removing the statue, something he noted brought to mind “North Korea’s election result”.

Source: Cecil Rhodes statue pulled down in Cape Town (09/04/15)

Victoria Falls tourist arrivals tumble

TOURIST arrivals in Victoria Falls declined by 21% in the first quarter of the year after many potential visitors cancelled trips citing the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

BY MTHANDAZO NYONI

Zimbabwe, like other Southern African countries did not record any Ebola cases, but there were a number of false reports about the disease in the media.

Victoria Falls-based Employers’ Association of Tourism and Safari Operators president Clement Mukwasi described the first quarter of 2015 as the worst in terms of tourist arrivals.

“The first quarter was very bad. We were severely affected by Ebola -elated cancellations across all sectors and as such, we closed the quarter at 21,4% below last year during the same period,” he said. However, Mukwasi, who works for Shearwater Adventures group in Victoria Falls, said tourist arrivals had started to improve.

“As we start the second quarter, we are beginning to see improvements in bookings and we believe they would come into fruition,” he said.

“We have seen the American market coming up as a result of the aggressive campaign the industry is undertaking.” “If everything goes well and bookings we are getting come into fruition, we are going to achieve better results in the second quarter compared to last year.”

Mukwasi said the Ebola outbreak that killed thousands of people in West Africa exposed the lack of coordination between the government and private sector in the marketing of Zimbabwe as a tourist destination.

“We need good public relations as a country and we should dispel misconceptions that there is Ebola in Zimbabwe,” he added.

“The cancellations we had in the first quarter were a result of bad publicity we got from foreign media houses.

“We should go out and tell them (Europeans and Americans) that there is no Ebola here.” The decline in Victoria Falls tourist arrivals came after a positive growth in the country’s tourism industry last year. Zimbabwe’s tourist arrivals increased by 2,6% to 1 880 028 in 2014 from 1 832 583 recorded in the previous year, but the figure was still 0,7% below the overall regional growth rate.

The country recorded a marginal 3% decline in total annual earnings to $827 million from $856 million in 2013. While the percentage growth slightly fell below the Sub-Saharan growth rate of 3,3%, the country registered growth in arrivals from all major source regions except Asia.

According to the latest tourism sector performance overview report for 2014, Zimbabwe recorded 85% of tourist arrivals from low value markets. African arrivals dominate the list at an average 1,6 million followed by the lucrative European market at 137 000 and America at 66 000. The Asian market accounted for a paltry 42 000 arrivals with the Middle East settling for 6 000.

Source: Victoria Falls tourist arrivals tumble (10/04/2015)

Work on Batoka Power Stations starts next year

Lusaka- The project is expected to cost about US$4 billion, according to estimates by the Zambian power utility, Zesco.

Zambia’s Mines Energy and Water Development Minister Christopher Yaluma told the media that the construction expected to start in January next year would run up to 2021 or 2022 before commissioning.

He said the feasibility studies for the Batoka Power Stations were progressing well and would be concluded by July this year after which the two countries would approach financial advisors on the way forward.

The Council of Ministers of the Zambia River Authority (ZRA) during their 32nd session in Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe on March 20 approved the ZRA 2015 budget which includes provision for funding the Batoka Hydroelectric Scheme and the rehabilitation of Kariba Dam.

The project has been on the drawing board for some time and the move by the two countries follows demands by the Southern African Power Pool for member countries to begin implementing all pending projects to increase energy supply.

The increased demand for power in Zambia, chiefly by the mining industry, which consume an average 50 percent daily of the 2,300 megawatts, has pushed Lusaka into action hence the country’s desire to build and upgrade power stations across the country for local consumption and exports, Minister Yaluma said.

On the rehabilitation of the Kariba Dam, Yaluma said about US$294.2 million was required for the project, which has since been secured through international lenders including the African Development Bank and European Investment Bank, among others.

“We have secured the funding on paper to rehabilitate Kariba Dam. Grants are almost tripling and we are also supposed to get more loans.

“We should start rehabilitating the dam in the next four to five months particularly around September. We are very much on track as this is a very key project and we will deliver on that project,” he said.

Yaluma has, meanwhile, made assurances that water rafting activities would continue even when the Batoka power schemes come into operation.

Speaking at the Council of Ministers of the Zambia River Authority meeting, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Energy and Power Development Samuel Undenge said there was need for the two countries to boost their power generation capacity.

Currently, ZRA is using a US$6 million grant from the World Bank for reviewing feasibility studies and Environmental Impact Assessment.

According to ZRA estimations, the Batoka Gorge Hydroelectric Power Station is a 1,600MW hydroelectric power station on the Zambezi River and will be located approximately 54 kilometres downstream of Victoria Falls.

According to recent feasibility studies, there will be two power plants, each with an installed capacity of 800 megawatts, one on the Zambian side and another on the Zimbabwean side.

The dam to supply the reservoir with water will be a 181 m tall arch-gravity type. The estimated construction costs are between US$2.5 to US$3 billion, although costs might soar with the cost of securing and procuring spare parts for the long waited project, the statement adds.

Source: Work on Batoka Power Stations starts next year (06/04/15)

Zimbabwe’s tourist arrivals increase 2.6%

ZIMBABWE’S tourist arrivals went up 2,6% in 2014 to 1 880 028 compared to the previous year, buoyed by arrivals from Africa, Europe and America, latest figures show.

According to the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) 2014 tourism overview report, there were 1 600 496 tourist arrivals form African countries, 137 465 arrivals from Europe and 66 826 arrivals from America in the year under review.

The country also recorded 42 798 and 26 031 tourist arrivals from Asia and Oceania respectively.

“This growth is 0, 7 percentage points below the sub-Saharan growth of 3,3%. There was growth in arrivals from all of the country’s major source regions except the Asia. Zimbabwe still receives 85% of tourist arrivals from low value markets,” reads the ZTA report.

In the period under review tourism receipts recorded a marginal 3% decline from US$856 million to US$827 million.

According to the reports, Harare, Bulawayo and Victoria Falls constitute 64% of all the room and bed capacity in the country making them the major regions in accommodation.

The average room occupancy levels for Harare rose to 59% from 52% in 2013. In Bulawayo room occupancy fell to 44% from 52% while in Victoria Falls it also fell to 49% from 53%.

Bed occupancy levels in Harare also rose to 43% from 35%. Bulawayo declined in average bed occupancy levels to 32% from 34% while Victoria Falls declined to 40% in 2014 from 48%.

Overall, the national average hotel room occupancy levels remained inert at 48% while bed occupancy level fell by a percentage point from 37% to 36% in 2014.

Except in Victoria Falls, which had a foreign clientele of 73%, the domestic clientele drove the accommodation sector with 78% of hotel clientele being local. This was however, inhibited by slow economic growth.

Source: Zimbabwe’s tourist arrivals increase 2.6% (02/05/15)

Captive Animal encounters: are they ethical?

Petting a lion might make you feel good, but how ethical are these interactions? By Janine Stephen.

Getaway Magazine, March 30 2015

This tears me apart. I am at an orphaned animal ‘rehab’ centre on a private reserve in KwaZulu-Natal. The teen serval has played with my shoelaces; I’ve gazed at an orange-eyed young cheetah. It is a kind of bliss to be so close to animals which are beyond beautiful; near mythical. But then we enter the leopard cub’s enclosure and despite the teen cat’s slinky grace, it feels wrong.

Whenever his handler is distracted, he keeps hunkering down to stalk people, muscles rippling under his spotted pelt. He is a few short months off being uncontrollable. And then what? Will he be released to live out his days in wilderness, forever free? A leopard with no fear of humans? I can’t see it happening, ‘rehabilitation’ talk or not.

Animal encounters have boomed in South Africa, catering to people who are hungry to touch and love wild animals plus snap a selfie while they’re at it. Tourists can walk with cheetahs all over the place, or give them a good stroking (the Endangered Wildlife Trust has noticed a huge growth in such encounters, particularly in the Free State and Western Cape). They can ride elephants like kings; or sit on their knees, or kick a ball to them.

They can swim with dolphins and whales and whale sharks and sharks (black-tips or tigers, the great whites require cages). Oh, and cage dive with crocs, in Oudtshoorn. The tourist pays for the privilege. Now, there have always been kind-hearted humans lavishing care on orphaned and injured wild animals, but it’s different when healthy animals are bred or sold to spend a life in captivity, to make someone a profit.

The Campaign Against Canned Hunting says lion cub petting and walking with young lions is just a money-spinning offshoot of the hunting industry. The stress cubs face through endless human interaction is bad enough. ‘Wild animals like lions and tigers have inherent natural behaviours, and exposure to unnatural conditions and human crowds and handling exacerbates their stress,’ says manager of the NSPCA Wildlife Protection Unit, Ainsley Hay.

Cubs also require ‘large periods of undisturbed sleep’ a rarity in any public facility where the animals are ‘expected to work every day’. But reintroducing captive-bred lions to the wild is near impossible on any scale. One ‘walk with lions’ outfit north of our borders boasted of a multiple-stage rehabilitation programme. In reality, it had not sent a lion back to real wilderness in eight years, although plenty lived in large fenced areas.

There are no conservation benefits to this, yet these outfits hoover up donations and well-meaning tourist cash. And so petted lion cubs (or tigers), sent out walking with tourists as teenagers, are often sold to hunting outfits as adults. Sounds crazy? In September, the Eastern Cape MEC for Economic Development, Environmental Affairs and Tourism confirmed that from 2008, the Seaview Predator Park in Port Elizabeth, for example, had sent 22 lions to Craddock hunting reserve Tam Safaris.

The Herald reported there had been 86 lion hunts at Tam in six years, although Tam claimed the lions from Seaview were used only for breeding. Tam Safaris exported 738kg of lion bones and teeth to Vietnam in 2012.

Wild animals in captivity

‘Captive-bred large predators in this country become breeding machines to make more cubs for the petting industry, or they become trophies shot by hunters, or a skeleton exported to Asia for traditional medicine use,’ says the NSPCA’s Hay. The cheetah encounter industry is also a problem. EWT cheetah metapopulation co-ordinator Vincent van der Merwe says that in the last seven years, 27 percent of the cheetah moved off wild reserves were sold into captivity.

There are as many as 350 to 550 cheetah in captivity as opposed to 318 on 48 small reserves (excluding the Kruger and Kgalagadi). ‘The industry poses a serious threat to the [wild] cheetah population,’ Van der Merwe says. Many animal encounters can’t be condoned: dolphins and orcas in aquaria, for example, turning tricks for a living. Circuses are out. And I’m opposed to elephant encounters, as they inevitably require training.

With this comes the possibility of abuse (the pictures of wounds on babies belonging to the Knysna Elephant Park, inflicted during training in the Eastern Cape, are horrible reminders. Although the incident allegedly dates back to 2008, the story only broke in 2014). Being close to an elephant should be enough of an experience without subjecting it to human will.

And yet, and yet. Who hasn’t seen a child’s face light up in close proximity to an animal they have never seen? Can we say rehabilitation centres, sanctuaries, zoos or encounters should never exist – even the best of them? That humans have no right to display animals for education or profit? Some agree that people have no right, but do they have a responsibility to aid creatures harmed by human activities, from speeding cars, to pesticides or widespread habitat loss? A choice between conserving habitat with an endangered animal in it and shipping said animal to a captive breeding programme is a no-brainer. But sometimes there is no choice; no safe habitat left. So: a toughie.

There’s a bloke I trust on this stuff, although he’s dead now. He was an ornery part-scientist, part-renegade, and for all that he adored animals, he was never overly sentimental. Gerald Durrell did much to save such under-the-radar creatures as the Madagascan teal (not a flashy bird), the giant jumping rat, and the Mauritian pink pigeon, of which only 10 were left in the wild.

Durrell’s Jersey Zoo (now called the Durrell Wildlife Park) embodied ideals worth carrying over to any outfit offering any kind of animal encounter. Here they are: the primary reason they exist is to act as a reserve for endangered species that need help to survive in the wild. Education is a huge bonus: if animals have to be captured, we are duty-bound to learn more about them. But the end aim is to reintroduce the species to its natural habitat as soon as possible.

Pure entertainment, you’ll notice, is out. And that’s how it should be. It’s when a factory line of cute babies is needed to keep visitors streaming in that abuse can and will happen. This doesn’t mean selling tickets to see a bird with a broken wing or a former pet tiger that would otherwise have been shot is bad. Inviting the public in to help fund good work makes sense.

And I can’t brush off the educational spin-offs. When I was a kid, I went on a bird identification course at the local zoo and it ignited a fascination with birds and beasts that has never deserted me. Some critics say that if zoos and sanctuaries teach children anything, ‘it’s that imprisoning animals for our own entertainment is acceptable’. Not so. It is as likely to result in a commitment to seeing wildlife thrive and survive away from cages and people.

The key lesson underlying every encounter must be this: caring about animals means interacting with them on their terms, not ours. And that lucky, fleeting encounters in the wild are immeasurably more satisfying than a few fake strokes.

But I wanna stroke a cheetah…

Questions worth asking before buying a ticket

1. Are people interacting with the animals to be rehabilitated?

True rehabilitation centres won’t allow visitors, says Chris Mercer of the Campaign Against Canned Hunting, as the animals habituated to people cannot be released into the wild.

Some centres use ‘ambassador’ animals for education (such as a three-legged caracal, to warn against gin traps). But these animals should be unreleasable due to injury or prior habituation. Public access areas should be completely distinct from the rehab area. If not, animals are not being rehabilitated for release.

2. What is the value of any education or breeding programmes the outfit offers?

‘There is absolutely no ethical or conservation-based reason to breed large predators in captivity in South Africa,’ says the NSPCA’s Wildlife Protection Unit.

‘These animals… are imprinted and would never survive in the wild, or they are inbred and their genetics are diluted.’ The NSPCA points to a High Court case between the South African Predator Breeders Association and the Department of Environmental Affairs that confirmed that captive lion breeding ‘has nothing to do with conservation’. The NSPCA also refutes claims that captive breeding can be educational.

‘People can learn far more about wild animals by watching a documentary showing the animal’s natural behaviour in their natural habitats than looking at an animal in a cage, or playing with a baby animal.’

3. Would the animals be there if there were fewer public visitors?

If there is no demand for cub petting, from the public, cubs will not be removed from lionesses unnecessarily, says the NSPCA.

4. What happens to animals born here once they grow up?

‘Captive-bred large predators become breeding machines to make more cubs for the petting industry, or they become trophies shot by hunters, or a skeleton exported to Asia for traditional medicine use,’ says the NSPCA.

5. Are people allowed to touch the animals?

Are such encounters ‘staged’ (the animal has no choice) or by chance (the animal is curious enough to approach)? Many petted animals are required to be available to people paying to do so, and have no seclusion area to retreat to if they’ve had enough, say the NSPCA: completely unethical.

Ethical options for wildlife encounters

Wildlife Act Offers volunteer opportunities with research project in reserves in Zululand; endorsed by the WWF. Projects include monitoring wild dogs and leopard.
wildlifeact.com

SANCCOB Just about all these rescued seabirds really do go back home. Mandated by the South African government and registered with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
sanccob.co.za

Second Chance Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre Animals to be rehabilitated are not on public display. Supported by Mpumalanga’s parks.
scwrc.co.za

Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre Breeds and releases cheetah and is accredited by Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Also a member of WESSA.
hesc.co.za

Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre Has bred and released over 160 serval into the wild.
moholoholo.co.za

 
*Note: certain of these centres may have ‘ambassador’ animals and encounters.

 
For a list of organisations that do not allow cub petting, and discussions on ethics, see the Facebook group Volunteers in Africa Beware.