Mods, move it if it needs to be moved.

SUSTAINABLE UTILIZATION - SU-eNEWS

Editor & Producer - Tim Condon & the “timconwild conservation” network

“Conservation is the wise use of a resource not it’s preservation !!”

The 21st Century African Community Wildlife Management Challenge

“Sustainable Utilization is the critical 21st Century African Community Wildlife Management priority under increasing Arab, Asian & Oriental influence, and dire threat from elements of corruption & collusion (Government, Conservation Authorities & pseudo NGO’s) & Western Anti-Hunting, Animal Rights & Humane Activist ignorant ideological propaganda”



Sustainable Utilization (SU) - Conservation vs Preservation

Proactive - Realism - Vision





Photo UK Guardian



“It will be Africa's hungry rural people who will determine how wildlife will be managed”



Africa 2100 Reality Check !! Wildlife Management at the Crossroads

“Whether you like hunting or not is irrelevant to the SU debate: hunting vs eco-tourism. By the end of this century (2100) it will be Africa's rural people who will determine how wildlife will be managed. U.N. statistics record the following: In the year 1900 there were 95.9 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa; by 2000 that number had increased to 622 million; and the projected population for 2100 is in excess of 2.5 billion. Poverty and unemployment are the two principal drivers of poaching - from guineafowl to rhinos & elephants.”- Ron Thompson

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SU-eNEWS IMPORTANT BOOK REVUES - No. 7 (18/01)



Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife - Glen Martin



Available in hard or soft cover & Kindle from all leading booksellers and @ Amazon.com & www.abebooks.com

Book review by D. H. M. Cumming

(Honorary Professor, Percy FitzPatrick Institute, University of Cape Town and Research Associate, Tropical Resource Ecology Programme, University of Zimbabwe.)

“This book is an important contribution to the debate on wildlife conservation in Africa and needs to be widely read. Above all it provides a timely warning of the likely impacts on Africa’s rich and unique biodiversity of ill-conceived conservation policies and inappropriate ideologies. I fear, however, that those who most need to read this outspoken and hard-hitting book may not have the courage to do so.” - D. H. M. Cumming





Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife. Glen Martin. 2012. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California. ISBN 978-0-520-26626-1, 254pp

“A primary focus is the state of conservation in Kenya where the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), and other animal rights protagonists, have been instrumental in convincing Kenya to maintain and reinforce a 1977 ban on hunting and the consumptive use of wildlife. Despite Kenya’s high profile as a wildlife tourist destination, its conservation record is abysmal and marked by a 70% decline in large mammal populations since the 1970s.”

The conservation of Africa’s diverse and charismatic large mammals has become the battleground for opposing philosophies based on fundamentally different beliefs regarding the treatment of animals. For the most part Africans view wildlife as an environmental good that can be used for their benefit, whether as food, items to trade, or, more recently, as a means to generate returns through consumptive or non-consumptive tourism, or both. This underlying instrumental or utilitarian philosophy is readily translated into conservation through sustainable use.

In contrast, the philosophical underpinnings of animal rights movements assign an intrinsic value to individual animals and strongly oppose the killing of wild animals for any reason. As Glen Martin convincingly portrays in this highly readable book, the end result in Africa is that wild animals possess little, if any, (legal) value to rural people. There is no strong incentive to sustain large wild animals on their land.

The modern approach to conservation of wildlife in Africa is barely a century or two old. It grew out of colonial administrations and the decimation of wildlife by overhunting and diseases, such as rinderpest, during the 19th Century. The first attempts to save remnant herds involved establishing laws to control hunting as well as setting aside game reserves. With the advent of cinema, television and nature films, in which wild animals were increasingly depicted as individuals with human characteristics (e.g. Disney films and Bambi), the stage was set for the increasing influence of western-based values and animal rights movements on conservation in Africa.

Glen Martin explores the fundamental rift between utilitarian and animal rights approaches to conservation and their consequences for the survival of Africa’s large mammals. He does so by skilfully and engagingly weaving the insights of the many experienced conservation experts he interviewed on his travels in Africa with his own commentary on the issues and complexity surrounding the conservation of Africa’s wildlife. A primary focus is the state of conservation in Kenya where the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), and other animal rights protagonists, have been instrumental in convincing Kenya to maintain and reinforce a 1977 ban on hunting and the consumptive use of wildlife. Despite Kenya’s high profile as a wildlife tourist destination, its conservation record is abysmal and marked by a 70% decline in large mammal populations since the 1970s. Martin contrasts the Kenyan situation with those in Tanzania, Namibia and South Africa, where hunting by citizens and foreign tourists is an integral component of wildlife management. In stark contrast to Kenya, wildlife-based land uses and the sustainable use of wildlife is expanding, along with stable or increasing wildlife populations in Namibia and South Africa.

Martin notes the increasing influence of the animal rights movement on wildlife policy in South Africa and Botswana. In November 2012 hunting was suspended in Botswana on the pretext that safari hunting was responsible for the decline in several antelope species but not elephants. However, decision makers in Botswana have apparently ignored the fact that numbers of the corresponding species are stable or increasing just over the boundary in Namibia, where community conservancies receive the full returns from tourism and wildlife utilisation. The importance of local values, incentives and tangible benefits from wildlife again looms large in the conservation equation in Africa.

Clearly the influences on conservation in Africa are far more complex than the conflict between western and African value systems regarding the use of wildlife. In the final chapters Martin draws out the deeply ingrained problems of corruption and failed governance in Africa and their impact on conservation. The much-touted conservation and development paradigm that assumes that win-win outcomes for both conservation and development are possible is critically scrutinised. His interviews with scientists at the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University convince him that there are always trade-offs with winners and losers. It is these dynamics that require far greater attention. The growth of human populations, land use change, habitat loss, soil erosion and land degradation are also outlined and are seen by Martin as additional important contributing factors to the demise of wildlife populations.

This book is an important contribution to the debate on wildlife conservation in Africa and needs to be widely read. Above all it provides a timely warning of the likely impacts on Africa’s rich and unique biodiversity of ill-conceived conservation policies and inappropriate ideologies. I fear, however, that those who most need to read this outspoken and hard-hitting book may not have the courage to do so.- Review Comment D. H. M. Cumming (Honorary Professor, Percy FitzPatrick Institute, University of Cape Town and Research Associate, Tropical Resource Ecology Programme, University of Zimbabwe.)

http://www.iucn.org/about/unio...e_4/sn4_gamechanger/





"Game Changer- Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa's Wildlife" by Glen Martin.



Book review by Brian Joubert







They tell of the baby elephant that was saved in a specific locale, but they don’t tell of the scores of other elephants in the region that were killed because of crop depredation or land tenure disputes. IFAW’s methods have thus proved effective in saving individual elephants, and for this their strategy is sound. Setting up elephant rescue centres is doable. But the larger mission implied in their work – “saving” Africa’s elephants – remains unfulfilled and may in fact be sabotaged by IFAW’s own work. The lavishing of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the suckling of baby elephants while locals see their maze crops razed and their cattle stomped flat by irate pachyderms sends the familiar, loud , and dissonant message to rural Africans: too bad about you; this cute little elephant comes first.(Glen Martin, pg 200).

Alongside biology, pecuniary incentives and conservation sociology are ever more important core foundations in wildlife management and in the efforts to conserve Africa’s – and the planets’- wildlife. In Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife, Glen Martin provides a thought provoking analysis of what he describes as the ‘ascendancy of animal rights based conservation policy’ and how it is driving the decline of many of Africa’s great game populations. The apotheosizing of Africa’s mega fauna as ‘untouchable’ has had perverse outcomes in many areas once rich in wildlife. While the reasons for decline in wildlife can stem from poaching, Malthusian population expansion and agrarian conflict, Martin highlights exactly how and why a hands-off legislative approach further compounds these threats and often provides a disincentive for local-level conservation efforts. If the people that live with and share the landscape with wildlife are divorced from conservation decision making processes, denied compensation for wildlife conflicts, edged out of wildlife-based incomes and generally shut-off from legal and sustainable use they not only lose conservation incentives but often see wildlife as a menace to other land-based livelihoods. Simply put, the old adage of ‘if it pays it stays’, albeit often bandied about a bit casually, often underpins the most effective conservation policy.


Martin spends much of his critique focused on Kenya. This country is still seen by many as the bastion of African conservation – the safari destination, famous for its abundant big game. Little do many know that Kenya’s famous big game populations have been declining precipitously in the last few decades. Perhaps more concerning is the substantial, often ill-considered support that Kenya’s ‘hands-off’ policies receive. Many people seem convinced that Kenya’s legislation that bans, or makes near impossible, any wildlife cropping, legal hunting or decentralized problem animal control is the most ethically appropriate course of action. Despite evidence to the contrary, to many it still seems intuitive that declining wildlife must be left wholly alone and this misconception remains a powerful influence for those ready to donate to certain influential NGO’s. The book is filled with the narratives of experienced and well educated Kenyan conservationists who labour under these misguided policies and who make explicit exactly why the hands-off approach hinders effective wildlife conservation in that country. Martin outlines how a broken government bureaucracy has been heavily influenced by foreign animal rights NGO’s, like IFAW, who successfully sway wildlife management policy and agendas in a manner more doctrinaire than pragmatic. Rural Kenyan’s, unable to benefit meaningfully from localized wildlife, typically show antipathy for animals they see as a nuisance and financial liability, as opposed to a potential source of manageable livelihoods.

The author then visits a country that arguably has become the new ‘blue-eyed boy’ of African conservation – Namibia. In contrast to Kenya it’s a country that allows and encourages the sustainable use of its wildlife not only through tourism in a few major ‘destination parks’ but also through its burgeoning system of community conservancies and on private holdings. The model functions on the premise that if people are allowed an active hand in managing and benefiting from local wildlife there will be an incentive to sustain those populations and their habitats. Through tourism, hunting and cropping more Namibians now see wildlife as part of their value systems and as part of their livelihoods, not as a nuisance or sentimental curiosity for wealthy foreigners.

I found the short time that Martin spends with Richard Leakey to be very enlightening. Leakey, as many will remember drew equal amounts of scorn and praise for his infamous burning of 12 tons of ivory in 1989. Leakey, then head of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), had the valuable ivory torched as a symbolic gesture in support of the ivory trade ban. For years this act earned him much malevolence from more utilitarian conservationists who saw this act as the wanton waste of a highly valuable resource in the name of a policy that would damage elephant conservation instead of enhancing it. During his interviews for this book it becomes clear that Leakey only perpetuated non-consumptive polices in Kenya because in his opinion the government and KWS were so corrupt and incompetent that allowing legal hunting, for example, would have blown the door wide open to abuse and mismanagement. Leakey’s views on traditional pastoralism, east African cattle-culture, the social imperatives for conservation and his view for the future will surprise you…

One thing that I as a hunter found interesting is the admission that Max Graham, Director of Cambridge University’s program on human and wildlife conflict, makes about the often unfortunate killing involved in problem elephant control – and its vital role in maintaining amicable local relations. He describes how many problem elephants that threaten lives and livelihoods often die miserably at the end of multiple spear wounds by residents or just as unfortunately at the hands of KWS rangers. Cumbersome KWS legal process coupled with incompetence means that many of these unfortunate beasts are dispatched inefficiently and wastefully, let alone for income, due to laws that prevent more practical solutions. He describes how ill-trained rangers often pepper elephants with inadequate rifles and without any knowledge on proper, humane shot placement. Ironically in a country that prides itself on its 1977 hunting ban Graham believes that “...we may have to establish an elephant-shooting school at some point. We need to start training people now, because in a few years this entire skill set will be lost in Kenya” (pg 144). I have read of this exact situation in other country where conservation is beleaguered – Malawi. In 2010 I read a local newspaper account of rangers trying to dispatch a trouble-making elephant. The incident turned into a messy running gun battle and ended up in the death of a local village child caught in the fray. Even the newspaper journalist critiqued the rangers for not having the tools and knowhow to place a large calibre bullet in the appropriate place to conclude the task correctly. If the completely pachyderm-inadequate US donated M16 (5.56 NATO) carried by the Liwonde ranger who accompanied us for ‘safety’ on a walk in that park was any sort of measure, that incident near Mzuzu must have been frightening indeed!

Overall I found this book very worthwhile and can highly recommend it. Martin’s writing style is very enjoyable. I personally hold strong spiritual and intrinsic values for wildlife but those share my ideological space with equally strong utilitarian and resourcist beliefs. As such, I didn’t find anything revelatory or ‘new’ in this book but rather considered it further evidence that wildlife policy shaped by a hands-off, non-use agenda is often more useful to the proponents' conscience than to wildlife and the environment. Anyone with an interest in animal rights or conservation would do well to add this to their library. Most notably, people who lack a foundation in these topics might have their eye’s opened to the reality that the Kenya style approach of governing wildlife often results in the opposite of the desired effect. With ever increasing pressures on wildlife people need to see value in their wild neighbours. Some have the luxury of spiritual, sentimental and aesthetic connections. Many others need a little more material incentive to favour antelope over cattle or not poison water holes to extirpate nuisance predators…

Here is a radio interview with Glen Martin about the book.

Here is a Huffpost column from Martin, on this topic.

Here is a TED talk about the rise of Nambia’s conservancies. Note the debate that ensues in the comments about the prevalence of hunting in these conservancies. Unfortunately these are debates that are all too frequent but must be tempered with reason and researched information.

Reference: Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife. Glen Martin (2012). University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-26626-1

© Brian Joubert 2013



http://orionmind.blogspot.ca/









I am currently a graduate student working on a PhD in geography. I was born and raised in South Africa but relocated to Canada. I am fundamentally a child of Africa but have fallen in love with my new home. I have an educational background in Forestry, Nature Conservation, Geography and Rural Sociology. I have spent most of my working life as a field guide, working in reserves or as a river guide on three continents. I am passionate about the science and philosophy of environmentalism, rivers, environmental politics, human-nature interactions, hunting and shooting. I love good books, music, good food and might even think of myself as a renaissance redneck ;-) Enjoy the blog...

'Game Changer,' by Glen Martin: review

David Perlman (San Francisco Chronicle) June 17, 2012





Game Changer - “Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa's Wildlife” By Glen Martin (University of California Press; 254 Pages U$29.95)

Review By David Perlman (San Francisco Chronicle) June 17, 2012

The African animals we see again and again on spectacular PBS programs like "Nature" can make anyone yearn to head out on the next safari, but the continent's wildlife is threatened as never before.

Even in Kenya, where hunting has been completely banned since 1977, lions, elephants and other "charismatic" beasts are disappearing fast as poachers, beleaguered farmers, snares and poisons take a devastating toll, Glen Martin reports in "Game Changer

A former Chronicle reporter who wrote about conservation, Martin has eaten oryx steak in Namibia, watched astonished on Tanzania's Serengeti Plain as zebras, topi, hyenas and countless other beasts crossed the road, and traveled widely through Kenya's corrupt and crowded cities and its national parks

But "Game Changer" is much more than an adventure travel book: It's a perceptive if partisan examination of a continent-wide controversy over how best to preserve Africa's amazing wildlife heritage.

Through long visits to some of Kenya's most authoritative experts on conservation, Martin argues strongly against the Kenyan model: The country's hunting ban has failed completely, he insists, and he argues that carefully regulated "consumptive" use of wildlife can protect the declining animal population far more effectively.

Trophy hunting, for example, could be effectively controlled, and wealthy foreign hunters could provide significant income for the people who live where the trophies are, Martin argues.

Deliberate culling of old and diseased animals would relieve pressures on habitat, and allowing Africans themselves to harvest animals as crops for hides and meat would give communities a true stake in wildlife protection, he insists.

At least in Kenya, Martin argues, wildlife "must be legally and rationally exploited for the people; otherwise the people will exploit it as they see fit until it disappears

David Perlman is The San Francisco Chronicle's science editor. E-mail: dperlman@sfchronicle.com

http://www.sfgate.com/books/ar...n-review-3638142.php

Amazon Review - Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa's Wildlife Hardcover

by Glen Martin (Author)



Are conservation and protecting animals the same thing? In ‘Game Changer’, award-winning environmental reporter Glen Martin takes a fresh look at this question as it applies to Africas megafauna. Martin assesses the rising influence of the animal rights movement and finds that the policies championed by animal welfare groups could lead paradoxically to the elimination of the very species; including elephants and lions; that are the most cherished. In his anecdotal and highly engaging style.



Martin takes readers to the heart of the conflict. He revisits the debate between conservationists, who believe that people whose lives are directly impacted by the creation of national parks and preserves should be compensated, versus those who believe that restrictive protection that forbids hunting is the most effective way to conserve wildlife and habitats. Focusing on the different approaches taken by Kenya, Tanzania, and Namibia, Martin vividly shows how the world’s last great populations of wildlife have become the hostages in a fight between those who love animals and those who would save them.



Publisher’s Weekly Review



In this nuanced investigation into the health and future of East African wildlife, Martin (National Geographic’s Guide to Wildlife Watching) explores the conflict between traditional wildlife conservationists—“dispassionate, data-driven, focused on habitat and suites of species”—and “New Environmentalism,” which focuses on “the inherent rights of the individual animal.” Through interviews, Martin finds that the essential dispute lies in the old line conservationists’ views that to save the wildlife, “game that can be taken without affecting base populations should be taken, with the proceeds…going to local people,” whereas animal rights proponents like James Isiche, the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s director for East Africa, promote hunting bans and ecotourism.



But whether in Kenya, where the hunting ban is undermined by rampant poaching and illegal trading and development associated with ecotourism results in degradation of ecosystems, or Tanzania, where both trophy hunting and subsistence hunting are contributing to game decline, corruption, lack of enforcement, and overpopulation overwhelm the merits of either approach.



Meanwhile, biometrition Lyman McDonald concludes that without controlling population growth and overgrazing of cattle, conservation is doomed to fail. Because big families and wealth measured by livestock are key elements of rural life, massive cultural change may be African megafauna’s only hope for long-term survival in the wild. Photos. (Mar.)



http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-520-26626-1





Environmentalism & African Wildlife

WIREDCOSMOS.COM COMMENT by Jason Carr



As Ian Parker, an Anglo-Kenyan who spent most of his life as a game warden in East Africa explained in an interview with Martin: “It was most unfortunate when conservation transformed into environmentalism. The –ism is the problem. When you start creating –isms, you’re creating systems of belief and faith rather than pursuing science-based courses of action.”



In his provocatively titled article The Giant Rat of Kenya, published in 1990, Tom Bethell compared the game management laws of Kenya and South Africa. In the former, hunting of such animals as the black rhinoceros and the elephant were either banned outright or so restricted as to be effectively outlawed. Meanwhile, in South Africa, hunting was encouraged in a controlled manner. In South Africa, elephants had economic value as a source of income through license fees and ancillary visitor spending; hunters from all over the world, wanting to experience an African safari, flung money in great fists-full at the national treasury (hunting license fees), guides, outfitters, hotels and restaurants and local farmer/villager residents who provided on-the-spot assistance. As a result, elephant populations in South Africa were carefully managed. In Kenya, they were just large, destructive pests and were the targets (literally) of locals. The result was predictable: South African herds grew, Kenyan ones dwindled.



It has not gotten any better in the past 20 years. Glen Martin, a wildlife and ecology writer, wades into waters filled with something far more dangerous than the mere great white sharks he has swum with before: environmentalists. This book is not a rewrite of or revisit to Bethell’s thesis (Martin doesn’t even mention the article), but the same subject is being addressed. The population pressure on land and wildlife populations and the resulting government and non-government programs to preserve African wildlife are examined carefully. The author laudably avoids demonization, but he does identify practical successes (few) and failures, and describes both practical versus well-intentioned if sometimes muddled and ineffective (at least) philosophies.

As Ian Parker, an Anglo-Kenyan who spent most of his life as a game warden in East Africa explained in an interview with Martin:

“It was most unfortunate when conservation transformed into environmentalism. The –ism is the problem. When you start creating –isms, you’re creating systems of belief and faith rather than pursuing science-based courses of action.”

This system of belief is expressed best, Parker goes on to explain, through the anthropomorphism of animals and specifically the individualism of animal species. So, lions become “Elsa” (of Born Free fame), not a predator in a complicated ecosystem that now requires human management in order to survive. But don’t take the word of just one person; Martin, rightly, doesn’t. In this carefully-researched and –considered review of the state of African wildlife under the misguided hand of environmentalism, the author visits and interviews managers of private game reserves, field researchers, government game managers, hunting guides and, yes, environmentalists. He relates their views, goals and actions, allowing the actors to speak for themselves and explain their own motives and beliefs. Martin takes pains to provide an historical context of the philosophy of conservation and environmentalism and show the interplay of governments, NGO (non-government organizations), farmers, tribal hunters, media, popular culture, smugglers and tourists. It’s a complex, constantly shifting… well, environment.

It is not an easy book to read, on several levels. It is, however, well worth the time and effort to absorb and understand the complexity of the debate and the trend of the reality on the ground. Even if the reader in, say, North America or Europe, does not have the means or desire to visit Africa to see what’s left of Africa’s wildlife, this book can serve as a very important warning of what could happen – has – is – happening where they do live, visit, farm, hunt, die.

Reference:

Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife / by Glen Martin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 254 p. $29.95

http://wiredcosmos.com/2012/05...nd-african-wildlife/

Sporting Shooter Mag - Animal rights: wildlife's death by ideology

Review 13 Nov 2012 Mick Matheson

“Out of this, groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) sprang up. IFAW has dug itself deep into Kenyan society, and Martin shows how it has used its wealth to buy influence, trading on the image of orphaned elephant babies to bring in Western funds yet becoming a monolithic barricade to meaningful conservation efforts. It has created its own truth and will not broach alternatives, despite the fact that Kenya’s wildlife is dying under IFAW’s watch.”

Anthropomorphism and the wealth of animal rights groups have failed African wildlife, but that’s not the message getting out to donors in the West.

This is one of the conclusions in Glen Martin’s book, Game Changer, which explores the failure of conservation and the well-established animal-rights groups who have come to dominate so much of it.

Martin argues for change, particularly for conservation underpinned by both trophy hunting and sustainable utilisation.

Ultimately, he reasons that what we’re doing now is not working and, after taking the reader on a circuitous tour of east African conservation, politics and daily realities, he sums up what needs to be done in the last two words of his book: “whatever works”.

As trite as that might sound, by the time you’ve reached the end of Martin’s very readable and well researched book, it makes perfect sense. Like Africa itself, conservation is complex. There is no silver bullet. Hunting will not, on its own, save the game of the African plains; yet nor is Kenya’s hunting ban working, because wildlife numbers have plummeted in the decades since it was enacted.

I’m sure I don’t need to detail to you the reasons hunting is beneficial to conservation. Placing a value on animals – be it monetary, for food or cultural – ensures they’re protected as a resource; a source of wealth, health or wellbeing. It doesn’t matter if it’s trophy hunting or subsistence living, people will conserve creatures they see as valuable.

Martin’s book demonstrates the truths of this in examples ranging from the remarkable growth of the rhino population down to the attitudes of individual Africans in their daily lives.

More importantly, perhaps, he demonstrates how and why the conservation establishment is a dangerous failure. Animal rights issues have twisted everything so that individual creatures are more important than the long-term survival of a species. Martin traces it directly back to the lions hand-reared by the Adamsons, the big cats that inspired the “schmaltz” of Born Free.

Out of this, groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) sprang up. IFAW has dug itself deep into Kenyan society, and Martin shows how it has used its wealth to buy influence, trading on the image of orphaned elephant babies to bring in Western funds yet becoming a monolithic barricade to meaningful conservation efforts. It has created its own truth and will not broach alternatives, despite the fact that Kenya’s wildlife is dying under IFAW’s watch.

Special note - Glen Martin Interview with Richard Leakey - Chapter 13 - The Sage Reconsiders - Abridged aspects relevant to the current debate - Page 154 - 159. Refer following !!

Martin interviews Richard Leakey, the man infamous for implementing Kenya’s ban on hunting, which has been in place since 1997, and finds that Leakey is not anti-hunting and that he believes Kenya’s situation is in many ways worse than ever. Leakey partly blames the misplaced agendas of IFAW and similar groups.

Animal rights, Martin says, are basically incompatible with conservation. That is at the heart of the problem.

He investigates Namibia, which enshrined hunting and sustainable use as policy two years before Kenya enacted its hunting ban. There, he eats a surfeit of meat and finds a country that celebrates hunting. The nation does have its problems, but it appears far better off than Kenya.

Martin’s chapter on Namibia is edifying from a hunter’s point of view, but Martin doesn’t go on to argue that hunting is the answer. It can work, he says, and it should be included, but he finishes Game Changer by looking broadly at eastern Africa. Nothing there is easy, especially solutions.

He leaves us with no doubt that animal rights and the powerful groups that espouse them are only making the situation worse. African wildlife will not survive by being given rights. The cuteness of orphaned cubs will not save lions as a species. Anthropomorphism will not save wildlife. In fact, it may do the opposite.

Published by the University of California Press, 2012. Hardback, octavo, 254 pages

http://www.sportingshootermag....-s-death-by-ideology



Game Changer - Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife - Glen Martin Interviews Richard Leakey - Chapter 13 - The Sage Reconsiders - Abridged aspects relevant to the current debate - Page 154 - 159





Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS)



Richard Leakey, the first director of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the world’s most celebrated paleoanthropologist. Leakey took a hard line on poaching during his years with KWS and is widely credited with stopping the elephant slaughter of the late 1980s and 1990s. He is not, however, opposed to regulated hunting, culling, and game cropping. (Courtesy Royce Charlton, Inc.)



In any event, says Leakey, “KWS is a complete failure. It is clear we can’t manage our wildlife through the civil government, which is utterly dysfunctional. We need to try new things. The lust for land is destroying wildlife”



“And that’s a dynamic we won’t be able to change: we can’t put the desire for land back in a box. It’s part of our society now, so we have to direct it, use it to promote conservation goals. It’s ou only real chance.”



Leakey parts with some in the conservation community who claim that nonconsumptive wildlife policies compound the tragedy of diminishing game by threatening pastoral societies. Anthony King of the Wildlife Laikipia Forum, for example, feels that trophy hunting and subsistence hunting allow pastoral communities to augment their income and diets while pursuing traditional lifestyles.



International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Born Free, the Humane Societies in the United States and the United Kingdom, and other animal welfare groups.



Leakey maintains he understands the impulses of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Born Free, the Humane Societies in the United States and the United Kingdom, and other animal welfare groups. He even, he says shares some of their goals. “I believe, for example, that wildlife shouldn’t be snared, that birds should be caged and fed properly, that zoos should have exhibits that allow their animals a semblance of their natural habitats,” he says. “But it is difficult to make a jump from that to saying animals shouldn’t be hunted with rifles out of ‘principle.’ I don’t understand that principle. Life and Death are the most basic of realities, especially where wildlife and the environments that support them are concerned. That’s what natural systems are all about, and to say otherwise is to confuse the essential message about conservation.”



“For conservation to succeed in Africa, you can’t shove human rights aside for animal rights.”



The animal rights groups active in Africa mean well, Leakey continues, “but for conservation to succeed in Africa, you can’t shove human rights aside for animal rights. Unfortunately, that’s the impression (animal rights) groups are leaving - that an elephant or lion is worth more than a human being, that if some lion eats your cow, well, that’s how things are sometimes. You can’t shoot the elephant that’s raiding your crops or the lion killing your livestock, you can’t hunt for meat; you just have to take it, you have to ‘support’ wildlife because it’s the right thing to do.”



And ultimately, says Leakey, that philosophy will fail in Kenya and across all Africa. Or more likely, it will fail and ‘simultaneously’ be championed and ‘officially’ supported: it will remain the law of the land, people will take all the money the animal rights groups offer - and the game will still be poached, poisoned, and snared to extinction.



“As I said, I sympathize with the animal rights groups to a certain degree,” Leakey says. “But I would like to see them refine their goals, to address issues where they can have a real impact. By that I mean they should stick to domestic animals and their problems. The abuses her are horrendous; check ou any abattoir, look how cattle and donkeys and goats are treated on farms and ranches. Focus on industrial poultry production, where hens are kept crammed in batteries where they never see the sun and can barely move. These are real abuses, and they cry out for real action. But they’re not getting like the attention paid to elephants, a species that can’t be logically addressed by defining its ‘rights’.”



“There isn’t as much money to be raised from the plight of a donkey as from the plight of an elephant, is there?”



And why is that? Leakey ventures on of his tentative smiles again: Well, there isn’t as much money to be raised from the plight of a donkey as from the plight of an elephant, is there? And as far as that goes, I have to add that IFAW and other groups aren’t as powerful in Kenya as they were a year or two ago, and money - I mean the lack of it - is the cause. IFAW gets most of it’s money from public donations, and its marketing materials featuring big-eyed African animals threatened by hunters and poachers were always very effective in raising funds. But the global recession took a big bite out of (IFAW’s) income- for now, anyway. When the times get better, people will donate again.”



A sizeable segment of the conservation community does not share Leakey’s opinion that IFAW’s influence has waned, of course. In any event, Leakey feels the fight between animal rights and traditional conservation is a sideshow. In the longer view - the only view the paleobiologist considers reasonable - this fight will be subsumed by larger issues. “We need to look at past periods of climate shift to understand the changes that are coming down on us, changes that will completely alter everything, including conservation,” Leakey says. “The warming climate, marine acidification, the inexorable growth of human population - these will put stresses on wildlife and wildlife habitat that are beyond anything that we are now addressing.”



“A kind of ark strategy: a gene bank for wildlife, artificial habitats where animal diversity can be maintained until conditions improve.”



At a certain point, Leakey continues, these threats may well require a triage approach to conservation - or beyond that, a kind of ark strategy: a gene bank for wildlife, artificial habitats where animal diversity can be maintained until conditions improve. And ultimately, they will improve, he emphasizes : there is no stasis in nature. The world’s human population may well hit twelve billion, but it cannot sustain that figure. One way or other, human numbers will fall. That could allow the restocking of the game lands with “ark” specimens.



Sub-edited by TC ~~



Kenya: A Contrarian View

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...-view_b_1542148.html



Posted: 05/24/2012

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Africa's wildlife is being loved to death. Kenya's much-praised ban on hunting, in fact, has had an impact opposite to its intent: wild animals are disappearing at an accelerating rate. "Charismatic megafauna" -- elephants, lions, rhinos, the larger antelopes -- are in a true death spiral.



When Kenya's hunting ban was passed in 1977 in response to the "Ivory Wars" that were ravaging the nation's elephants, it was hailed as a new and progressive paradigm for wildlife management. With the hunting pressure off, animal lovers opined, the game would bounce back. And it's true that elephants did recover modestly over the ensuring two decades.

But now the slaughter has begun anew, driven by an unrelenting demand from a prosperous Asia for ivory objets d'art. Meanwhile, everything else is going down the tubes, including carnivores and antelopes. By best estimates, Kenya's wildlife has declined by more than 70 percent over the past 20 years.



What happened? While the ban played well in the developed world, it was catastrophic for the people who lived in the rural hinterlands of Kenya -- the places where wildlife actually exists. Basically, folks out in the bush had the responsibility for maintaining wildlife on their lands, but they were deprived of any benefit from the animals. Such a situation is intolerable for subsistence pastoralists and farmers.



Subsequent to the ban, they could not respond -- legally -- when an elephant raided their maize and stomped their goats, or when a lion killed a cow. But laws made in Nairobi are seldom if ever applied with rigor in the Kenyan bush. Even as animal rights groups lionized Kenya's no-kill policy and urged its adoption across Africa, the killing has continued unabated. Carnivores are poisoned, antelope snared, elephants speared and shot: Crops can thus be raised and the livestock grazed in peace.



Michael Norton-Griffiths, who has served as the senior ecologist for Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and the manager of the Eastern Sahel Program for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, likened the situation to owning a goat. Assume, says Norton-Griffiths, that you're a poor pastoralist in rural Kenya, and your assets consist of a goat. You can eat this goat, or milk it. You can sell it, gaining hard currency that you can use to buy necessities. Or you can breed it, increasing your asset base in the form of another goat.



But now imagine that a law is passed that forbids you to eat, sell, or breed that goat. In fact, the only thing you can do with it is allow tourists to take pictures of it. Even then, you obtain no benefit; the money derived from the tourists photographing the goat goes to the owner of the "eco-lodge" they are patronizing. By substituting wildlife for the goat, says Norton-Griffiths, you have the situation that exists in Kenya today.



If African wildlife is to survive -- let alone thrive -- local people must value it. In other words, they must be allowed to gain both income and meat from it in a sustainable fashion. And repugnant as it may seem to most urbanized westerners, lion, buffalo and elephant hunting can be sustainable enterprises -- like most large African mammals, these species are fecund. Wealthy hunters will pay between $50,000 to $100,000 to take a trophy male lion or elephant bull, and up to $20,000 for a buffalo with big horns. If that money is returned to local communities -- along with the meat -- then tolerance for wildlife reflexively improves.



Similarly, the commercial cropping of certain species of plains game for hides and meat (Burchell's zebra most specifically) can build support for conservation among Africa's pastoral and agricultural communities.



This isn't to say hunting is a panacea for Africa's wildlife crisis. Kenya's wildlife stocks currently are too depleted to allow any kind of "consumptive" game policy. Tanzania has larger populations of wildlife than Kenya, and both trophy and subsistence hunting are allowed -- but the game is dwindling. Over-hunting due to poor enforcement of the quotas and general government corruption is widely acknowledged as a contributing factor.



But a template for a rational wildlife policy exists: in Namibia. By the late 1980s, wildlife was almost wholly extirpated from this vast southwestern African territory following decades of conflict between South Africa and the Southwest Africa People's Organization (SWAPO). Following Namibia's independence from South Africa in 1990, the leaders of the new nation established wildlife policies that invested tribal communities with control over the game, while simultaneously establishing firm quotas for individual species. Income from both hunting and cropping is rigorously tracked, and diligently returned to the communities.



Namibian wildlife, in short, was changed from a liability to an asset. Today, Namibia is burgeoning with wildlife, game and non-game species alike. The country has the world's largest population of cheetahs. Elephants are abundant -- in some places too abundant -- and lions are returning. Rare antelopes such as kudu and sable are anything but rare in Namibia; their meat, the yield of certified cropping programs, is easily found in supermarkets.



Obviously, this would not be possible without relatively good governance. In the 2011 corruption index for 182 countries released by Transparency International, Namibia ranked 57th and Kenya was close to the bottom at 154. If Kenya is to duplicate Namibia's success, it must address its rampant corruption as well as revamp its game laws.



Still, Namibia points to a better way than the blanket no-hunt policy that has become holy writ among some animal rights groups. And it's better because it's pragmatic: It addresses the needs of people as well as the rights of animals. Unlike Kenya's current wildlife policy, it actually works.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...-view_b_1542148.html



Selected Comments

Vet Barnes

Those who negate this common sense policy which actually works and has worked well in other places besides Africa are animal rights people who think they can control all human beings by turning them into a vegan cult. This was started by Peter Singer an animal rights philosopher who thinks all people are a stain on this earth. This is about how a cult has become irrational by eliminating the most important nutrient from their diet which is ACTIVE VB12 found only in meat. Inactive VB12 comes from plants and actually causes the brain cells to die faster. HSUS, PETA and AL the first animal rights cults in the US are intent on pushing a VEGAN world. America brought back the Buffalo by making it part of our lean meat food chain. We have for 35 years practiced the animal rights philosophy on the Tiger and now there are fewer than ever. What does work is what we did with the buffalo and that would work for the Tiger as well. In fact the largest population of Tigers live with their owners in the US which of course the HSUS is trying to eradicated with their campaign against owning an exotic pet of any type. So, if you really want to save a species make it valuable to the person standing next to it or living with it. Only then will it be saved to produce another generation. That is how nature designed all of our biological functions.

26 May 2012



FaunaAndFlora



192 Fans·Daughter of Pan

And yet Namibia has a thriving population of free-range elephants and black rhinos. In Kenya, most elephants and rhinos are confined to Tsavo. The population of elephants in Tsavo numbered 35,000 in 1965. Eight years later, there were only 900 elephants left in Tsavo because they had overgrazed their habitat and died of malnutrition. That's what happens when large herbivores are confined to a piece of land without any

I love this book, one of the best coservation books ever written about Africa. Must read