Every year South African sheep and goat farmers lose millions of rands’ worth of stock to small predators like jackals and caracals. One farmer in Namaqualand estimates that in a single year predators killed 400 sheep on his farm, running up a financial loss of around R120 000.
Many farmers in this predicament reach for drums of poison or set out gin traps. Says Eastern Cape farmer Larry King: “I know many farmers hate the jackal with a passion. They are not only concerned with economic losses but the sight of three or four lambs, dead but hardly eaten, is enough to get any stockman going. Farmers do care about their livestock in ways other than economic, and revenge is what some are after.”
Like most stock farmers, Larry King and his brother Gray tried every way possible to kill the predators. But nothing seemed to work. “We tried gin-trapping, running a hunting pack of dogs, ‘coyote-getters’ [a cyanide-loaded explosive cartridge] … in fact all the ‘kill the predator’ options open to us. Nothing we could do offered any permanent solution,” he says.
Such drastic measures are seldom successful, and they pose many environmental risks. Non-target animals and birds of prey often end up being killed and there are risks of contaminating underground water supplies and streams when poisons are used. Research has also shown that jackals react to efforts to exterminate them by breeding more often and producing larger litters.
“Chatting about the problem over the shearing table one day in the mid-90s, we realised that all kills were made by a bite to the throat,” King says. “We wondered, what about protecting the prey, instead of killing the predator?
“Our first attempt was to mix the hottest chilli we could get our hands on with grease and apply this mixture to the lamb’s throat. But this did not work — someone said we were just providing the jackal with relish to go with his meal!” This attempt was followed by experiments that saw sheets of tin from a canning factory attached to the lambs’ throats. Although this showed promise, the metal rusted and spoiled the wool.
“Now that we knew the concept worked, we looked around for other materials and were introduced to high-density polyethylene, a sort of plastic, a high proportion of which is made from recycled material,” says King. “As the collars began to catch on, we decided to buy some machinery and manufacture the product ourselves.”
In 1999 the King Collar won two SABS design awards — for engineering design and industrial design —and the rest, as they say, is history. Priced at between R3,50 and R5 each, there are now about 170 000 King Collars in use. “They have really revolutionised predator management,” says Gerhard Verdoorn of the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s poison working group. “It is hard to believe just how successful these devices have proved in ‘teaching’ carnivores not to eat lamb.
“Our advice to farmers is to first prevent carnivores getting access to their stock. This is one of the best ways of doing so. Predators soon learn not to bother trying to take lambs.”
The collars reduce predation on domestic stock by jackals dramatically. Occasionally lambs are bitten on the hindquarters, and some of these survive the attack.
But King admits caracals are a different story. “The collars are not nearly as successful in preventing losses to caracals,” he says.”We think this is because the animal has claws that they use to hold the struggling lamb still enough for the caracal to be able to find the small, unprotected gaps.
“We are busy developing an extra ‘bib’ that can be added to the original collar that may offer extra protection against caracals, but it’s a long process as we obviously do not have caracals on call to test the prototypes.” — Southside Media