poachers
Eddie Koch
IT was the week in which conservationists launched a series of missions to save not the white rhino or an endangered species of whale but thousands of poisonous scorpions, hairy baboon spiders and swimming crabs that were plundered from Mozambique in an effort to smuggle them out of the country through South Africa.
The operation – which highlights the fact that it is not only big and hairy mammals like elephants and gorillas that are being poached to the verge of extinction in one of the world’s poorest countries – began when Neil Fraser and Rick Allan woke long before dawn on Wednesday and carefully began packing their four-wheel-drive with hundreds of little crates.
The pair of crack investigators from the SPCA had to work quickly. There were 1 200 boxes to load and, because each contained a single spider or scorpion, they had to be placed in such a way that they would be properly ventilated. Fraser and Allan also wanted to be on the road well before the Highveld sun made it uncomfortable for their passengers to travel.
So as soon as the cargo was packed they jumped into the van and headed down the N4 in the direction of Mpumalanga’s Swadini Game Reserve where they were intent on setting 1 200 of the little creatures free.
And once they got there it wasn’t simply a question of dumping their load in the bush. They had to dig hundreds of small holes in the veld for the spiders, each of them at least a metre apart, and then find lots of rocky terrain in which to liberate the captive scorpions in their natural habitat.
The rescue mission was staged after officers from the SPCA’s Special Projects Unit earlier this month confiscated a consignment of more than 2 500 lizards, snakes, chameleons, geckos, tortoises, spiders and scorpions at the Johannesburg International Airport destined for pet shops in the United States.
It was by far the biggest cargo of indigenous animals ever impounded by the SPCA in South Africa and by the time the investigators got to them hundreds of the animals had already been squashed or suffocated to death.
Allan says chameleons had been sardined into boxes half the size of a shoe box, lizards were packed into containers that had their ventilation holes blocked, while scorpions, some of them with young on their backs, clambered and clawed their way over each other in a desperate bid to escape the slaughter.
Allan said he was tipped off about the plight of the animals while he was confiscating 30 parrots, also from Mozambique, that had been squashed into a birdcage and sent out of the country via the Johannesburg airport to the US.
He reported that by the time he saved the consignment of creepy crawlies, some 2 000 animals had already been flown to the US so that they could be sold to pet shops in Hollywood, according to packaging labels on the crates.
Allan and Fraser arranged for the entire cargo to be transferred to the Pretoria Zoo where efforts were made to resuscitate some of the dying animals and to ensure that the fatality rate – which exceeded 50% for most of the species while they were in transit – be kept down.
This week’s dawn rescue, which was due to take two days because of the special attention that each of the spiders needed, was just the beginning of a campaign to save the creatures. Once the little ones have been reintroduced to the wild, the SPCA will turn its attention to ways of saving the geckos, chameleons and lizards.
The Swadini operation took place in exactly the same week that a consignment of more than 2 000 swimming crabs was intercepted on a train from Maputo bound for Johannesburg and confiscated by officials from the Mpumalanga Parks Board.
The seafaring creatures had apparently been packed into baskets and were being sent to restaurants and fishmongers in Gauteng. A large percentage had died and many were missing their legs or claws by the time they were saved, according to parks board officials.
The group of surviving crabs was taken to an aquarium in Pretoria where they have temporary asylum until the authorities decide how to deal with them.
Both incidents highlight the fact that, while the illicit trade in ivory, rhino horn and primates from Africa receives most public attention, every week thousands of species lower down the animal order are being poached and exported from countries in Southern Africa to wealthy industrial countries in the north.
They also show that conservation authorities in Mozambique are unable to control an apparent haemorrhage of wild animals, birds, tropical fish, crustaceans, plants and trees from its shores. Unscrupulous traders appear intent on stripping the country of these natural resources while its government lacks the ability to control the illicit trade.
“We are concerned about the export of just about everything that grows in Mozambique – ranging from temperate and subtropical timbers to tropical fish,” says David Newton, South Africa’s national representative for an international organisation called Trade Records Analysis of Fauna and Flora in Commerce (Traffic).
He added that it appeared some syndicates moving prawns, crabs and abalone out of Mozambique were also involved in the illicit smuggling of rhino horn and elephant tusks. Last year a consignment of crabs seized in Johannesburg led the police’s Endangered Species Unit to a network of ivory smugglers.
Newton said the Johannesburg office of Traffic – the world’s largest wildlife monitoring organisation – had received reports of fishing trawlers using bottom nets to scoop catches of prawns off the Mozambican coast. “The by catch is often 98 percent of what they haul in and there is very little control over what these fishing companies do with this.”
Traffic is also concerned that South Africa, increasingly being used as a transit point to smuggle to smuggle creatures large and small, lacks the legislation to control the trade. While laws and fines dealing with ivory and rhino horn, the causes celebre of the animal kingdom, were tightened up a few years ago other wild things lack similar protection.
Last year, for example, a Cape Town man was convicted for the illegal collection, possession, transport and export of 13 000 platanna frogs. Further investigation showed that nearly two million platannas had been sent to a single United States pet dealer between 1992 and 1994. Of these animals, which fetch about two dollars on the American market, only 3 000 had been exported with proper permits.
The dealer was convicted and received a fine of R7 500. “Fines imposed on illegal wildlife dealers are far too low and there is an urgent need to for uniform national legislation to effectively protect wildlife resources in all the nine provinces of South Africa,” said Ashish Bodasing of Traffic at the time.
Current legislation, which differs from province to province, is not able to control the sale of frogs, beetles, succulent plants, tortoises and other species that flow out of the country. The rare stage beetle, which sells for as much as 14 dollars in America, is not a protected species in the Western Cape but it is in the Free State. Tortoises bought in South Africa for a mere R50 each can be sold in Western countries for up to $600 each.
“It’s about a source of income that’s been left in the hands of an elitist group of people simply because of mismanagement,” said Bodasing.