The Sunday News
Mhlupheki Dube
ONE of the challenges facing livestock farmers is predation. This is a perennial problem that sadly in most areas has not found a sustainable solution. Most livestock farmers lose a lot of their animals to predation.
The culprit animals are usually hyenas, jackals, lions and leopards depending on the area. These prey on different sizes and types of animals, with jackals mostly menacing goats and sheep especially young ones. Leopards mostly specialise in calves while hyenas have evolved to prey on any animal regardless of type and size. Donkeys are in trouble with hyenas but so are goats, sheep and cattle.
The predicament that livestock farmers face with regards to controlling these predators, is the law that forbids poaching and for some reason killing an animal which is killing your livestock and driving you to poverty, is regarded as poaching! So, farmers cannot defend and protect their livestock by killing the predators, as they will be arrested and tried for poaching. Council and ZimParks officials are supposed to come and deal with the predators but most of the time they are incapacitated because they either claim they have no vehicle, fuel or both to go and attend to the problem animals.
Some councils have handed over the problem of animal control (PAC) duties to private safari operators. These operators then send in hunters to come and hunt down the animal and put it down. The challenge, however, is that safari hunters are usually interested in specific animals which they can display as trophies in their cabinets. These are usually animals falling within the big five categories or any such related animals. They are unlikely to be interested to burn fuel coming all the way to track down and kill a jackal or even a hyena.
The response time of these safari hunters is also a problem because most of them are found in big cities and yet problem animals are way into the deep end of the sticks. Therefore, for the majority of farmers in rural areas are left to rely on ZimParks.
In some cases, affected farmers have been asked to organise fuel for the council to ferry game rangers. Farmers have not been amused by this suggestion as they feel it is not their responsibility to finance organisations to discharge their duties. They argue that, if a case of poaching is reported, these same organisations will be on-site in no time without begging for fuel from farmers.
Why then should they fuel them when it’s a call for PAC? I am calling for the responsible authorities to find means that will help them conduct effective, timely and regular PAC so that farmers are not left at the mercy of wild predators year-in, year-out.
It is very painful for a farmer to lose calves, kids and even mature animals to predation. While some of the losses can be prevented by kraaling the animals at night, what we observe is that these predators seem to be evolving such that some known nocturnal predators are now being recorded to have done killings during the day. Some have become so daring, they will attack your animals right inside the kraal which is next to your homestead. Perhaps an all-stakeholders approach to review methods of predator control and share working experiences from other areas can be effective.
There are some farmers in some problem areas with regards to predators, who have since learned some mitigation measures and these are working for them. These measures can be shared and possibly replicated in other areas experiencing the same challenges.
Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo. Feedback [email protected]/ cell 0772851275.
