Category: Africa

A video vision for Africa

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

NAIROBI––Simon Trevor, 60, “flew to Africa in a light aircraft with his family in 1946,” his curriculum vitae begins. “He was educated in Zimbabwe and South Africa.”

After working on some of the major dam projects along the Zambesi River as a teenager, beginning at Kariba in 1955, Trevor joined the Kenya Wildlife Service at age 20, serving for four years as a game warden at Amboseli and Tsavo National Parks.

What Trevor really wanted to do, though, was make films about animals––especially films that would persuade people to save animals and their habitat. In 1963, therefore, just as kenya was becoming an independent nation, Trevor left KWS to film the international effort to rescue wildlife from the rising water behind the Kariba dam.

Trevor’s first full-length feature film was The African Elephant (1970); he was nominated for an Academy Award.

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A matriarch remembers– by Daphne Sheldrick, M.B.E.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

People often ask me, “When did you first start fostering orphaned animals?”

The answer is that I started young. I was born in Kenya, and grew up on a highland farm. Throughout my childhood, farmhands brought young animals to our home. The first orphan I cared for on my own was a little duiker antelope called Bushy. I was only three, but I spent all my waking hours with him. Eventually he answered the call of the wild, as all wild creatures must. I wept my first tears for a loved one.

My husband, David Sheldrick, was first warden of Tsavo East National Park, an untamed wilderness which is a haven for wildlife. We lived there from the time the park was created in 1948.

Tsavo was established not for its wealth of wildlife, however, but simply because it was a large chunk of country not suitable for either plowing or grazing. Then, the habitat favored the browsing species, such as elephants and black rhinos, both present in large numbers, as were dik-dik, lesser kuku, and gerenuk. Grazers were few. You couldn’t see anything. An impenetrable wall of bush was broken only by elephant trails.

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Hunting for the truth of animal and land deals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

BEIJING, NAIROBI––A pending application to sell tigers and a black leopard to a Chinese zoo which has fed live animals to carnivores, filed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by International Animal Exchange Inc., has in common with a dubious land deal involving the William Holden Wildlife Foundation in Kenya that in each case a Hunt brother, from Ferndale, Michigan, allegedly signed key documents.

And the brothers, longtime business partners, have often before been accused of sleazy dealings.

R. Brian Hunt applied on behalf of IAE to send the tigers and leopard to the Beijing Badaling Wild Animal Park, one of several major Chinese zoos named in ongoing international campaigns against live feeding.

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Moi: “Shoot to kill cattle rustlers.”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

Nairobi––Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi on December 23 ordered police to shoot armed cattle rustlers on sight. Moi spoke at the Shadrack Kimalel Primary School in Baringo, while attending a goat auction held to fund education throughout the district. The sale of 3,029 donated goats fetched nearly $40,000.

Rustling and related massacres among members of the Pokot, Marakwet, Kalenjin, and Jemp tribes of the North Rift district have produced civil unrest which has in turn hurt the development of tourism and oil fields.

Moi issued a similar shootto-kill order pertaining to armed elephant and rhino poachers in 1984. It was invoked as recently as January 2, when Kenya Wildlife Service rangers killed four poachers––three of whom shot back with automatic rifles––just after the poachers killed four elephants in Kora National Park near Garissa.

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Chimp refuge in Ghana hits bumps

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

 

Friends of Animals literature describing disease experiments to which ex-laboratory chimpanzees may have been subjected apparently backfired in December 1999 against FoA plans to relocate chimps from U.S. labs to a newly created sanctuary in Ghana.

 

FoA has been developing the sanctuary on Konklobi, a 163-acre island in Lake Volta, for approximately three years, in cooperation with the Ghana Department of Wildlife and with advisory supervision from Primarily Primates president Wally Swett. The Konklobi project director, Gerald A. Punguse, retired from his former post as chief wildlife officer in Ghana in November 1998.

 

The next step was to be actually obtaining chimps and delivering them to Ghana, to live out the rest of their lives in semi-wild habitat.

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Blazing guns and huts as Zimbabwe ignores Kenyan lesson

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

VOI, Kenya ––The six-hour drive from Nairobi to Tsavo East National Park would be worth the bumps for Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species delegates, for the challenge the Tsavo vista pre- sents to conventional beliefs about elephants and ecology.

Hundreds of delegates and observers will soon arrive in Nairobi for workshops leading up to the April 2000 CITES triennial meeting. Whether to permit more auctions of culled elephant ivory and rhino horn will–– again––be the most contentious agenda item.

In 1997 CITES allowed Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe to auction elephant ivory and hides, and to sell live elephants. These were the first cracks in the trade bans imposed by CITES in 1989 to protect elephants and rhinos from slaughter to extinction.

Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe now want to sell more elephants and elephant parts. South Africa announced on December 9 that it wants to join the market, having 30 tons of ivory stockpiled at Kruger National Park alone. South Africa will also try again to resume selling rhino horn. Previous South African efforts to sell rhino horn were narrowly defeated in 1994 and 1997.

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Editorial: Flight from our origins

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1999:

Crossing Kenya in a low-flying Twin Otter, we recently felt transported in time as
well as space. Behind was the Eden-like Masai Mara National Park, spreading into the
Serengeti Plain of Tanzania with only an occasional cement obelisk to mark the boundary.
Hunting has been banned in the Mara, as in all of Kenya, since 1967. Though
there is some poaching, mostly by non-Kenyan marauders, most of the wildlife has little
fear of human observation. Within just 48 hours we watched a mother cheetah chirping
occasional admonitions about rough play and wandering out of sight to her five cubs, who
treated a parked cluster of tourist vehicles as if they were a playground; saw lions mating
almost as if in performance for us; stopped for a hyena who seemed as complacent in his
mud puddle as any person in a bathtub; gaped at nonchallant herds of elephants, hippos,
and Cape buffalo; and exchanged curious stares with any number of zebras, wildebeests,
Thomson’s gazelles, giraffes, vervet monkeys, baboons, etc.

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Poachers close in on Tsavo elephants

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1999:

VOI, Kenya––Alone but brave,
the half-grown bull elephant held off five
Cape buffalo all afternoon at the smaller of
two water holes below the Voi Safari Lodge.
Refusing invitations to retreat with visiting
matriarchs, the young bull left the water hole
only long enough to break up a fight among
squabbling baboons with two quick swings of
his trunk. The gesture conveyed the message.
“He acts tough now,” said Care
For The Wild managing director Chris
Jordan, “but we’ll see how tough he really is
if a pride of lions comes around tonight.”
Around nine p.m. that evening
Jordan joined soft-spoken Tsavo East
National Park warden Naphtali Kio in
responding to aggressive questioning by CNN
reporter Anthony Van Marsh. Insisting that
elephants were leaving Tsavo to find water,
running amok and killing villagers, though
all the most accessible water holes are inside
the park, Van Marsh didn’t seem to want to
hear about villagers who cut park fences as
almost a daily routine in order to graze cattle,
sheep, and goats on park land––thereby
allowing elephants to wander out at night.

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Young humane societies abroad strive to avoid old traps

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1999:

NAIROBI, SOFIA––Kenya SPCA
animal welfare director Jean Gilchrist greets
Americans with a blunt admission that she is
not impressed with how most U.S. humane
societies operate.
A well-meaning donor sent Gilchrist
to the Humane Society of the United States’
Animal Care Expo in February 1998.
“All morning people taught us how
to do euthanasia,” Gilchrist remembers.
“Then in the afternoon they taught us how to
get counseling and cope with grief, because
you feel so bad about killing animals. I said to
myself, ‘That’s not going to be us.’ We do
euthanize,” Gilchrist explains, leading her
guests through a bevy of tail-wagging threelegged
dogs, “because some animals come to
us too sick or too badly injured to patch up,
and some animals don’t take well to being
here, but if an animal gets along, we’re going
to give that animal a chance.”

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