Man-wildlife conflict good for tourism management

From The Herald
June 11, 2010



THE fierce sun sucks the moisture from the landscape, baking the soil a dusty grey and turning the withered grass as brittle as straw.

The Mwanzamutanda River has shrivelled to a shadow of its own wet season self but it is choked with wildlife.

After drinking, the huge grey mounds of flesh head towards a cotton field on the foot of rolling hillocks that overlook the confluence of Zambezi and Mwanzamutanda rivers in Kanyemba communal lands, Mbire District.

An elderly man and his family are harvesting cotton from the field, their only money spinner for the year.

There they hum and sing melodiously as they pick the white gold but suddenly, they are attracted by a herd of elephants that starts feeding on the cotton balls.

The jumbos stubbornly munch at their delicacy, dashing the family’s hope of ever harvesting anything.

While panic-stricken family members scamper for cover, the elderly man runs to the edge of the field and picks up a huge grayish ball, a concoction of elephant dung and chilli and sets it afire.

The resultant spewing smoke proves unpleasant to the elephants and they slowly, tentatively but grudgingly leave the fields and head back to Mwanazamutanda Mountains in Chewore National Park.

A spitting distance away, a herd of buffalo is chased away by villagers beating tins and singing loudly while in the worse scenario, someone has ring-fenced his field with wire snares to catch and kill the wildlife that is a menace to the crops.

Zimbabwe this week launched a man-wildlife conflict management strategy.

Man-wildlife conflict has been in existence for as long as humans and wild animals have shared the same landscapes and resources.

Human-wildlife conflict does not occur only in Africa. Nowadays human-wildlife conflict exists in one form or another all over the world.

Conflict between humans and crocodiles, for example, has been reported in 33 countries spanning the tropics, subtropics, and the problem probably exists in many more.

All continents and countries, whether developed or not, are affected by human-wildlife conflict.

However, there is an important distinction to be made between the level of vulnerability of agro-pastoralists in developing countries and that of well-off inhabitants of developed nations.

This review focuses on Africa, where human-wildlife conflict is particularly prevalent, even in countries with a higher average annual income.

Crocodiles still kill people in the Lake Nasser area in Egypt and within towns in Mozambique; leopards still kill sheep within 100km of Cape Town, South Africa, and lions kill cattle around the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.

In terms of the scale of their impact on humans, it is the smaller animals, occurring in vast numbers, that have the greatest impact.

The red locust has been responsible for famines across vast swathes of Africa for centuries.

Annual losses of cereals caused by the red-billed quelea have been estimated at US$22 million.

In Gabon, the number of overall complaints about grasscutters far surpasses those relating to any other animal species, including the elephant.

However, the larger herbivores (elephants, buffalo and hippopotamus), large mammalian carnivores (lions, leopards cheetahs, spotted hyenas and wild dogs), and crocodiles are traditionally seen as the animals representing the greatest threat to humans and responsible for the majority of human-wildlife conflicts.

This may be due to the fact that local communities often regard the large wild animals as government property, as was the case under previous colonial legislation, and, therefore, feel prohibited from dealing with the problem themselves (WWF SARPO 2005).

The impact of the activities of large mammals on farmers and their livelihoods is enormous and even traumatic when people are killed.

These incidents are often newsworthy, and generally attract the attention of political representatives who demand action from governments.

l isadore.guvamombe@zimpapers.co.zw