There are countless dedicated people in South Africa, many of them in the government, who have dedicated their lives to the environment and to preserving our fauna and flora which is under severe pressure from all sides. What a let-down it must be to them to read in ”SA seeks trade in white rhino horn” (February 8) that the government is investigating allowing wild cheetahs to be hunted.
If any animals could be said to be severely endangered it is the cheetah, and one of the biggest reasons is all those trigger-happy far-right so-called farmers sitting on their drought-stricken pieces of veld and killing everything that might threaten their scrawny sheep and goats. They are already illegally killing more than 100 cheetahs every year and if they get a permit to shoot 15 who is going to keep count? The way reasonable people see it is that they will still kill 100, but will manage to get someone to pay them dollars for it. There are farmers in Namibia and the Kalahari who brag that they have shot 300 cheetahs and will shoot 300 more. Should they not be shot themselves, with dum-dums?
Some time ago, a friend of mine in the hospitality trade got a hunting magazine in the mail, with a letter asking for his hotel to advertise. Everybody he showed the mag to was sickened, as it contained page after page of colour photographs showing the overseas beer-boep and dollars brigade holding up bloodied leopards, some shot to pieces, stomach shots, the lot. It is shocking to hear that there are currently 75 permits to hunt leopards, and that it might be increased.
Towards the end of last year we visited the Kruger Park for 19 days and saw only one leopard and no cheetahs. Will not more big cats lure more paying tourists? Some years ago we found a fully grown leopard crossing the road late at night in one of our Western Cape mountain passes and the sight stayed with us for months. Must everything be killed for money? Will the people agitating to hunt more big cats not make more money by selling them to people with cameras, since they could then be ”shot” over and over? Or is this kind of ”hunting” too much work, and the lazy bastards are only interested in easy money?
I hope that sanity will prevail, and that the best Minister of the Environment South Africa has had will take a stand, and not only prevent legal cheetah hunting, but also put a stop to current permit-based hunting of leopards. If he can prevent the illegal cheetah hunting that is now happening, there will soon be so many of them that more people will turn up to see them than would have turned up to shoot them to bits. Jerry Buirski, Cape Town