Darran Thomas
Winter in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands is hunting season for landowner and poacher alike and past seasons have seen their share of destroyed hunting dogs, imprisoned poachers, human death and communities at each others’ throats.
But one Midlands man seems to have gone some way towards reconciling the divergent philosophies of hunter and landowner. In what local conservation authorities have called a unique project, a Lions River stock farmer has opened his land to a local dog-hunting association for three hunts a year.
And landowner Robert Smith is smiling. Stock theft and trespassing on his farm have become unheard of, game counts are steadily rising as rhebuck and duiker populations benefit from conditions more conducive to breeding and Smith is looking to further extend his relationship with neighbouring hunters by organising a racing calendar for their greyhounds.
The first hunt took place last year after an informal group of local hunters approached him and Smith agreed that he would allow a hunt to take place on his West Hastings Farm three times a season.
According to Smith, problems usually associated with hunting dogs – such as a lack of discrimination on the part of the dog – were not appearing. “They’re handled by the owners until an appropriate animal, usually a young male, is flushed. So there’s nothing indiscriminate about it. We’re all very conscious of the fact that no female or young animals are to be hunted.”
He explained that most of the hunters have greyhound-type dogs, also known as lurchers, so they concentrate on running buck down in open areas of his farm.
And therein lies the key to Smith’s remarkable story. The hunters, when catered for, have as great an interest in the sustainability of the game as the landowner. At present, Smith caters for the Impendle hunters exclusively, but he sees no reason why the concept shouldn’t be marketed further afield.
Last winter a farmer on a property about 20km from Smith’s had a completely different situation on his hands.
George Lawrence, a fourth-generation stock farmer in the Loteni Valley, spotted a poacher with a number of dogs on his property one evening. Lawrence realised that there was no chance he could apprehend the man and so he shot at the man’s dogs from about a kilometre away. He killed one of the dogs and went home.
Twelve days later, after an extensive search by the police and the community, the body of the poacher, a local school teacher, was discovered close to where Lawrence had shot the dog. Vusumuzi Ntombela had drowned while trying to evade the farmer’s shots.
Politically the Impendle valleys are a volatile patchwork of fiefdoms aligned to the Inkatha Freedom Party’s induna David Ntombela or Russel Ngubo, a local councillor. Within days of the news that Vusumuzi Ntombela had gone missing, councillors and other activists had practically cordoned off the approaches to Loteni and the Lawrence family had to be protected by a contingent of police.
But for Smith, his project isn’t so much about politics as about survival. Other white stock farmers in the region have absorbed the kind of losses in the past few years that will eventually put them out of business. At the time of the Ntombela incident, Lawrence complained of losing up to 15 head of cattle and scores of sheep in a season.
Though West Hastings is closer to Pietermaritzburg and “civilisation” than the Loteni Valley, Smith has lost a single ewe to theft since the project’s inception last year.
“It’s unbelievable. And I’ve also found that buck from surrounding areas too are getting the message and moving in. The farm is quite large, about 2 000ha, and we choose a different part of the farm to hunt each time. The kill rates are low – the dogs aren’t often successful when they do hunt – and they are always under control so they don’t unsettle things on other parts of the farm.”
Jonathan Smythe, KwaZulu-Natal’s nature conservation service’s conservator for the Impendle region, would like to see the concept marketed to other landowners.
“I recall the seeds of what Smith is accomplishing were sown at an acrimonious landholders and community hunters meeting at Lions River three years ago. When someone suggested what Smith has gone and done, the idea was met with a dumb silence. `You’ve lost your marbles -hunting like that isn’t controllable, it’s simply not viable,’ was the thinking.
“From our aspect this hunting or poaching with dogs has really big ramifications. We’ve seen relationships between landowners and surrounding communities really get bad over exactly this issue. With all the publicity last year about killing poacher’s dogs, certain landowners have turned to illegal practices to discourage hunting, such as poisoning dogs with unregistered agro-chemicals.
“The secondary effects of this kind of poisoning on birds of prey and predators is a serious matter.”
Smythe would like to see dog hunting brought on to a more formal level, with practitioners applying for permits and permission to access property in much the same way as other hunters.
One reservation that Smythe has is a concern about the effects on game unique to hunting with dogs. “The negative effects on animals being chased by dogs, this would be more of a long-term issue. There is no research on this subject that I’m aware of. We’d like to know more about how this kind of hunting affects breeding, for instance.”