Fiona Macleod
Douw Kruger has this theory that buck can’t tell the difference between blue and green, because they have a blue receptor in their eyes. To the human eye, however, his bright blue camouflage uniform is an alarm signal.
This means he can stalk really close to his quarry when he’s out hunting, but he doesn’t have to keep watching his back to make sure other hunters won’t accidentally shoot him.
It’s a theory he put into practice this week while hunting a kudu with a bow and arrow in the Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve, 50km south of Johannesburg. Conservation and animal welfare groups had tried to put a halt to the hunt because Suikerbosrand is a public reserve, and they say bow-hunting is unnecessarily cruel.
The only other state organisation to experiment with bow-hunting in South Africa was the former Natal Parks Board, but by the early 1980s it had decided to outlaw it.
A former parks board employee explains the kind of experience which gave rise to that decision: on one hunt, an American client had already put 17 arrows into a rhinoceros when the ranger said he wanted to put the rhino out of its misery by shooting it, but the client refused because this would mean he couldn’t use it as a trophy.
Such tales have led to the professional hunting industry placing a moratorium on hunting the “big five” with bows and arrows. But when it comes to smaller creatures, bow- hunting is increasingly popular.
Until this month, only private game reserves were offering bow-hunting; and when Suikerbosrand advertised that bow hunters could shoot 20 of its buck during May, conservationists protested that it is against state policy. But Gauteng Nature Conservation officials say they changed their policy in 1993 because of pressure from bow-hunting enthusiasts.
Says director Steve Fourie: “There are close to four million registered bow hunters overseas. We’ve decided to experiment with it, and if our tests show the animals are put under greater stress than they would be by hunting with rifles, we’ll put an end to it.”
Fourie says it’s not a money- making exercise: it has been calculated that 820 buck need to be removed from the 13 000ha Suikerbosrand reserve this year; the other 800 will be relocated to a new biosphere reserve his department is creating north of Pretoria, and to various private game reserves. “The relocation could earn us about R1,3-million, whereas we’ll earn at most R40 000 from the bow-hunting.”
The Gauteng officials were at pains this week to illustrate how safe and sophisticated bow-hunting has become. Watched by representatives of the National Council of the Society for the Protection of Animals, they put Douw Kruger through some of the tests each hunter has to pass before he is allowed out into the bush to shoot his buck.
The tests are aimed at determining the hunter’s accuracy and the suitability of his equipment. The officials say the four hunters who went out before Kruger all bagged their buck with a single, clean arrow.
Kruger says he aims for the heart and lungs of the animal. He needs to get 15m to 30m away from it and, with an arrow tipped with razor-sharp surgical steel travelling at a speed of 90m per second, he is assured of a fatal shot. If the animal doesn’t drop immediately, a ranger accompanying him will shoot it with a rifle.
“It’s not about shooting the animal, but about fooling him,” he says. “The kudu is the king of the bush, he has very sensitive eyesight and hearing. Getting that close to him is the real challenge.” To achieve this, he has been experimenting with camouflage for the past two years.
Like Kruger, most of the others taking part in Suikerbosrand’s bow hunt are professional hunters – with the occasional medical doctor and businessman sprinkled in between. They’re all South Africans, from various corners of the country – an indication of the growing popularity of bow-hunting locally.
If all goes according to plan, when the next hunting season opens in May 1999, there may be quite a few more bright blue camouflage uniforms stalking around Suikerbosrand.