The Kruger National Park is selling off ‘surplus’ and ‘problem’ animals that often face horrors when they reach their new homes
Fiona Macleod
South Africa’s premier game reserve, the Kruger National Park, is selling off its wildlife without restrictions to unscrupulous hunting outfits.
At least six lions have been sold in the past year to outfits that have been implicated in “canned” hunting, where the animals are killed in small enclosures or after they have been drugged. Two of the cats went to Albert Mostert, a Northern Province lion breeder and hunter, while the other four were sold to Doug Fletcher of Sandhurst Safaris, a Northern Cape hunting outfit.
Now there are fears a pride of 13 wild lions that have been held in cages in Skukuza, the park’s administrative centre, for two weeks will be sold to a similar outfit.
Park officials say they want to avoid selling the lions to a hunting outfit, but the tender documents offering the cats for sale do not stipulate this.
They also say they will be guided by provincial conservation officials on the suitability of the outfits that have expressed interest in buying the pride, but Mpumalanga is the only province that has outlawed “canned” hunting – and none of the offers comes from Mpumalanga. Park officials say they will try to avoid selling to hunting outfits, but in some instances will have no choice.
Willem Gertenbach, general manager of nature conservation at the Kruger, says the park has received offers ranging from R68E000 to R210E000 for the pride, which comprises three females, two males and eight cubs aged between five and eight months.
Gertenbach says the park decided to sell the cats after they left the park twice and ate cattle belonging to the Malumulele community along the north-west border of the Kruger. The money raised will be used to compensate the community.
“We could have shot the lions and sold their skins, but we probably wouldn’t have got R20E000 for them,” he says.
“We’ve sold several live lions to buyers over the past three years. Part of the South African National Parks’s new policy on sustainable utilisation of natural resources is to start farming wild animals.”
Big money can be made out of such sales: Kruger bull elephants tendered for sale earlier this year cost between R60E000 and R200E000 each, depending on the size of their tusks. The offer did not stipulate anything about hunting, only that the elephants could not be sold to circuses.
But the litany of horrors facing the “surplus” and “problem” animals when they reach their new homes indicates not enough checks are being done at the receiving end. Stories abound of elephants and rhinos being shot within days of relocation.
Two elephant bulls sold to a Northern Province hunting outfit last year were mowed down in a hail of bullets after they escaped from their new home. The Northern Province officials who shot them ran out of ammunition and had to cadge some from a passing motorist to finish the job.
A rhino shot by a hunter within days of being relocated was wounded and left to rot in the veld.
One of the reasons behind the present furore over the 13 lions up for sale is that they are certified disease-free, at a time when it is estimated that up to a third of the Kruger’s lion population is infected with tuberculosis and between 60% and 80% have been exposed to the feline version of HIV.
But Gertenbach says though they are disease-free and valuable as breeding stock, they won’t be a loss to the park. He “guesstimates” the present lion population in the park to be about 2E500 and says most of the diseased animals are in the south of the park.
The break-out and capture of the 13 lions was the latest in a spate of break-outs by predators and other animals in recent months. Rangers say this is due not only to flood-damaged fencing, but to the recent closure of artificial water holes in the north of the park.
“Prey species moved off after they shut down the waterholes, but lions are territorial creatures and can’t move around much. Once they leave their area in search of prey, they have to keep moving and nine times out of 10 they are forced into the adjacent farming areas,” says one ranger.
Douw Grobler, head of the Kruger’s capture team is looking after the 13 lions at Skukuza, says the fate of the predators in the communal farming areas in the north is horrific.
“There were 17 in this pride, but three were snared and one was poisoned, so other scavengers would also have got killed,” he says. “What is wrong is when people put snares and poisons out.”