Walking through a forest with my dogs one day, I heard the screaming of an animal in distress. After collaring the dogs, we hurtled through the trees to find the source of this dreadful noise.
It was a small duiker, caught in a wire snare that had tightened around her abdomen. She was lying on the ground, immobilised. There was some blood around the snare and one of her front legs looked broken.
I tied the dogs to a tree and approached her. She stopped screaming and started grinding her teeth in terror. Her big black eyes were wide open and looked almost lifeless.
She lay dead still as I talked to her gently and undid the knot in the wire. I flipped her on to her other side and she sprang up and darted for cover.
One of my dogs had meanwhile slipped his collar and started chasing her. She turned to face him, her razor-sharp little horns angled to do maximum damage in her defence. I called the dog and she bounded off. She obviously had no broken bones, and a great zest for life.
I often compare the two sensations of that encounter. The first was the excitement of running through the forest with my dogs, chasing after a wounded and bleating creature. This must be the kind of rush people feel when they are hunting an animal.
The second was a warm, gushing pleasure at being able to give back to the duiker her life and freedom. This feeling is more enduring and less complex than the first.
Most of the men I know would say the second sensation is ”emotional”. I prefer to call it compassionate. It is the reason, I suspect, why women do so well when they take up the cudgels as eco-warriors, defending animals and the planet against abuse.
”Women (more than men) have managed to hold on to our natural compassion in a deteriorating world,” says Louise Joubert, who runs the SanWild wildlife rehabilitation centre in Limpopo. ”We have an inner strength and a determination to protect what is really important in life — love, compassion, moral and ethical values, understanding and integrity.”
In the past four decades some of the most significant information about animals has been gleaned by women. It started in the Sixties, when Rachel Carson laid the foundation for the green movement with her powerful book, Silent Spring. Carson conveyed that every part of the Earth is interconnected, organic and endangered.
Dian Fossey, of Gorillas in the Mist fame, taught the world to understand and appreciate gorillas; Joy Adamson introduced a new understanding of lions through the story of Elsa; Jane Goodall has taught us about chimpanzees.
In East Africa, a succession of women has opened new chapters in our understanding of elephant behaviour and communication.
It is not just in the animal-related spheres that women have made a name for themselves. Yolanda Kakabadse is president of IUCN-The World Conservation Union, the largest environmental NGO in the world.
In South Africa, the list of women bravely tackling the environmental cause is endless. Nan Rice, for instance, has ensured that few people eat tuna these days unless it has been sanctioned with a ”dolphin friendly” stamp.
A string of women around the country run centres that deal with injured and orphaned wildlife. Karen Trendler, director of WildCare, is among the better-known. Sarah Scarth, head of emergency relief at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, funds many of these operations.
Jacqueline Lockyear, head of the Knysna Seahorse Research Project, is doing ground-breaking research.
When it comes to animal welfare, the toughest fighters include Marcelle French, director of the National Council of SPCAs; Sherryn Thompson, founder of the Wildlife Action Group; and Michele Pickover, the tireless leader of South Africans against Vivisection.
These are just a few of the white women in the vanguard. Their shoes are rapidly being filled by black women on the rise: Khungheka Njobe, director of biodiversity at the National Botanical Institute, and environmental educationist Sibongile Masuku van Damme are two worth mentioning. I will not be surprised if our next minister of environmental affairs and tourism is a woman.
Thérèse Brinkcate is manager of The Green Trust, which sponsors a variety of environmental projects, including a number headed by women.
”Women innately understand the need to prepare a future for forthcoming generations, to ensure that our children will have a good quality of life,” she says. Women, perhaps more than men, tend to see and understand the complex and fragile interconnections between things and recognise that caring for the natural environment is caring for humanity.”
Jeunesse Park is CEO of Food & Trees for Africa, a broad-based greening and permaculture NGO. In researching this article, I asked her (and others) why it is that women often head and/or work for the most credible environmental organisations — organisations that don’t focus chiefly on making money, and that usually don’t include killing animals.
”Women are by nature wiser and more humane,” Park said. ”They are nurturers and bring these qualities to our world that urgently needs to abandon the principles of a dominator society ruled by pain, fear and greed.”
To be fair, I asked a couple of men the same question. Saliem Fakir, director of IUCN’s South Africa office, suggested it should be rephrased to ask why so many women are prepared to work for lowly paid jobs in conservation organisations.
”Perhaps the answer lies in the speculation that women are more caring than men, that they are more likely to demonstrate feelings of empathy. This is not to suggest that men cannot show empathy, but a boy among other boys is more likely to demonstrate masculine traits, because of the nature of that social group.”
Gareth Patterson, author of a number of books on conservation, points out that in the past ”a mindset prevailed that women ‘feel too much’, or ‘are much too sensitive”’.
But this is changing, he says, in line with the emergence of women in the priesthood, science and various positions of power. ”I predict that in this new South Africa, women environmentalists will move more and more into prominence in the future. Within this lies hope for wildlife, for the wild places and for ourselves.”