buffalo
Fiona Macleod
All the buffalo sold at the prestigious annual KwaZulu-Natal Conservation Service game auction last year were diseased, and the service is now facing huge claims for damages from the buyers.
Last year was the first time the KwaZulu- Natal conservation authority sold buffalo at the annual auction, which has become a celebrity event with buyers from around the world.
Buffalo with a clean bill of health fetch a high price because of the prevalence of diseases in most of the country’s herds. At the auction, 22 buffalo were sold for about R108 000 each.
Alarm bells started ringing after five of the buffalo were moved to a farm in Dundee recently. They came into contact with cattle, and as a result at least 150 of the cattle died.
Tests showed the buffalo have corridor disease, a tick-borne disease that is not fatal to buffalo but is deadly when transmitted to cattle.
This week veterinarians established that all the buffalo at the KwaZulu-Natal Conservation Service reserve in Weenen – which supplied the animals for the auction – are infected with corridor disease.
The discovery caused panic among conservationists and farmers in various parts of the country. In Cullinan, near Pretoria, where one of the auctioned buffalo has broken out of its pen and is on the loose among smallholdings, a huge hunt with helicopters and trackers was being planned late this week.
In KwaZulu-Natal, plans were being made to translocate the remaining 130 buffalo in the Weenen reserve. Vets were also busy testing the 70-odd buffalo in two other small provincial reserves that until now they had considered clean.
State vet Dr Brian Weaver explains that most of the “clean” buffalo in KwaZulu-Natal originally came from the Addo Elephant Park in the Eastern Cape.
“For years, the Addo herds have been considered disease-free. This is why we were under the impression it wasn’t necessary to test the buffalo before putting them on auction,” he says.
A moratorium has been placed on moving Addo buffalo while they too undergo tests.
The KwaZulu-Natal game auction in June this year won’t be offering any buffalo for sale. “It’s a big blow,” says conservation service representative Jeff Gaisford. “We had been working on the herd in Weenen for quite a long time.”
More worrying for the service is the threat of legal action. Pretoria businessman Hendrik Graphorn, who bought six buffalo at last year’s auction, claims he has lost at least R7-million as a result.
Other buyers refused to put a value to their losses this week, but say they could also run into millions of rands.