Fiona Macleod
South Africans are smuggling rare and endangered wildlife species out of Zimbabwe in an attempt to “save” them from becoming victims of the political chaos in that country.
In one daring “rescue”, a Potgieters- rus game farmer smuggled 24 sable antelopes into South Africa in a Dakota. The plane managed to avoid radar detection and landed in a mielie field.
Sable, handsome black and white antelope with curved horns, used to be plentiful in Zimbabwe but are like gold in South Africa. A single breeding animal can fetch at least R120 000 on the open market.
Things started to go wrong for the Potgietersrus farmer, Hugo Ras, when 13 of the sable died as a result of their journey and neighbours got to hear about it. Veterinary authorities imposed emergency quarantine measures on surrounding farms in Polwer.
Captain Herman Lubbe of the South African Police Service’s stock theft unit, who investigated the incident, says the biggest danger in smuggling antelopes into the country is the possibility that they might spread foot and mouth disease. The two countries signed an agreement in August providing for strict checks on cross- border movement of livestock.
Ras was whisked into court late last month and fined R41 000, or four years and three months in jail, for importing the sable without the necessary permits, customs clearance and veterinary certificates.
Lubbe says his unit receives reports of sable being smuggled into the country almost on a daily basis. The Mail & Guardian has received independent reports of lions being smuggled in for breeding and “canned” hunting operations.
Most reports are virtually impossible to verify because the sympathies of sources lie with the smugglers, whom they regard as saving the animals from certain death.
In just one wildlife conservancy area in south-eastern Zimbabwe, it is estimated that about 30 000 animals have been killed in snares and by poachers over the past 18 months. The Bubiana Conservancy was set up in 1993 primarily as a sanctuary for black rhino, which are on the critically endangered list.
The government, which owns all Zimbabwe’s rhino, evacuated 38 black rhinos from areas where poaching was rife and put them in the care of the conservancy. In eight years, their numbers swelled to more than 100. Bubiana had the highest concentration of rhinos in Zimbabwe, second in Africa to the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal.
But since land invasions began at the conservancy, 12 of the rhinos have been found in snares and a calf was burnt to death in one of several poachers’ fires that have killed countless smaller animals.
At the Bangala Ranch, once a prosperous fishing and hunting concern, the settlement of about 600 families has resulted in the annihilation of all the wildlife, including herds of sable.
“Sable are very easy to poach because they return to their home range a number of times before pressure forces them to leave,” says Bangala managing director Stephen Schwarer.
Sable are popular in South Africa because they are rare. “We only have a few thousand, whereas particularly in the western parts of Zimbabwe there used to be so many sable that they were almost as common as impala are here,” says Paul Bartels, director of the Wildlife Biological Resource Centre.
In the mid-1990s the Zimbabwean game industry woke up to the fortunes that could be made out of sable trading at the time a sable sold for R10 000 in Zimbabwe fetched about R80 000 in South Africa. A moratorium was placed on selling or moving sable, with the intention of finding out how many there are in Zimbabwe and placing controls on the market.
But the political chaos has ensured that, though the moratorium still applies in theory, there will be no game counts or controls in place in the near future and only the smugglers will profit.