A bloody fight to the death is being waged on the slopes of Cape Town’s Table Mountain. At stake are the lives of about 100 Himalayan tahrs – an exotic species of mountain goat that has lived on the mountain for about 70 years – and the right of the public to be informed and consulted on conservation management practices.
As part of the government’s drive to eradicate “alien” species, the tahrs have been targeted by zealous officials determined to restore the balance of nature in this spot of world-renowned scenic beauty.
But the controversial extermination of the small pocket of endangered Himalayan tahrs has drawn fire from conservationists. The tahrs are descendants of the rare mountain antelopes introduced into South Africa by Cecil John Rhodes. They are nearly extinct in their Himalayan homeland.
Officials from the Cape Peninsula National Park (CPNP) say the tahrs are destroying indigenous vegetation unique to the Cape Peninsula and their aggressive behaviour prevents the reintroduction of formerly indigenous animals, such as klipspringers, into the mountain reserves.
But concern groups say the CPNP has not conducted an environmental impact assessment (EIA) and is employing cruel and inhumane means to achieve its ends. They say CPNP made a unilateral decision to exterminate the tahrs – without consulting environmentalists or conservationists – and without looking at other alternatives.
CPNP’s determined attempt to eradicate the animals has led to a running legal battle to save them. A concern group called The Friends of the Tahr was formed in 2000 to prevent their extermination and to seek other alternatives, including an international rescue operation.
The method of killing the tahrs – by darting them with scoline, a substance banned in many countries, including the United Kingdom and United States – has caused the loudest outcry. Scoline is a muscle-paralysing agent, used in surgery in conjunction with anesthesia and assisted respiration.
Jeanne Wadee, the unofficial head of The Friends of the Tahr, says when used on its own, scoline causes extreme pain as muscles are “blocked” into paralysis and the animal remains fully conscious. “Within minutes the animal dies a terrifying and painful death of asphyxiation,” she says.
Since the group was formed, it has brought several High Court injunctions against South African National Parks (SANParks) – CPNP’s parent body – to prevent officials from killing the animals. It has also offered several solutions to the problem, many of which have been rejected by SANParks.
The group first brought a High Court injunction against SANParks in February 2001.
According to Wadee, the first the public knew of the planned exterminations came after the local press received a phone call from parks officials in May 2000, inviting them to come along for a helicopter ride to watch the killing of the Himalayan tahrs on Table Mountain.
“The parks officials obviously did not anticipate any fuss over a few goats,” says Wadee. But The Friends of the Tahr received more than 4 000 letters of protest and petition signatures. Copies of these were given to CPNP, the CEO of SANParks in Pretoria, Mavuso Msimang, and Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa.
“Our petitions all indicate that the public was overwhelmingly opposed to the slaughter of these few mountain goats, which have lived on the upper slopes of Table Mountain since the 1930s,” says Wadee.
In the face of this opposition, SANParks referred the issue to its ethics committee. The committee declared scoline unacceptable and suggested several alternatives, including live capture and removal of the tahrs, contraception, or shooting the animals with soft-nosed ammunition or shotguns. The committee said live capture, removal and contraception were the preferred alternatives, and that the third – shooting – was acceptable only if the other two were impractical.
SANParks said after carefully evaluating the three options, it had concluded that only the shooting option was practical. The Friends of the Tahr maintain that SANParks refused to consider any alternative other than extermination and kept raising problems with both capture and contraception. “Their refusal to countenance any alternative to killing led to the legal option being the only available method left to save the tahr.”
Paddy Gordon, CPNP’s manager: northern region, defends the decision to exterminate the tahrs. He says they have “very little conservation value” and there are other populations in New Zealand that are being hunted. “There are thousands of these animals in New Zealand. You can go and hunt them there – so we see little benefit in conserving the population on Table Mountain.”
The Himalayan tahr, one of three species of tahr, are close relatives of ancient mountain goats. They stand about 97cm high at the shoulder and their diet consists of grass, plants, leaves and twigs. The animals have been poached to the verge of extinction in much of their native range in India.
While the tahrs are not listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) as a protected species, they have been listed as a vulnerable species by the IUCN-World Conservation Union since 1996. According to the union’s guidelines, this means that the species faces a high risk of extinction in the wild in the medium-term future. India also includes the Himalayan tahr in its Red Data list of endangered species.
Gordon acknowledges the tahrs are an endangered species in their native homeland, but upholds the CPNP’s decision to remove them. He maintains the animals have caused widespread destruction and erosion on the mountain: “When you fly over the mountain and look down, you can see the paths these animals have eroded.”
Wadee disputes these claims, saying the CPNP has never conducted formal EIA studies: “If those footpaths were eroded by the tahrs, I would be most amazed. Perhaps they are eroded by the millions of annual visitors to the park.”
The tahrs on Table Mountain are remnants of a colony that started in 1936 after two tahrs escaped from a zoo. The original animals were brought to South Africa at the turn of the century by Rhodes.
The CPNP, which encompasses the Table Mountain nature reserve, still supports a wide array of animal and bird species, such as bontebok, grysbok, caracals, mongoose, otters and baboons. A recent head count conducted by the CPNP has put the number of tahrs on the mountain at about 100.
Gordon says the tahrs’ foraging poses a major threat to the mountain’s fragile ecosystem and plant life. The tahrs are aggressive and territorial animals who don’t cohabit peacefully with local South African antelope. As a result, he says, park authorities have not been able to introduce South African klipspringers into the reserve.
Wadee counters: “SANparks’s own reports repeatedly state that the tahr was found to be a non-aggressive animal, even in the rutting season. The idea that they are incompatible with klipspringers has no basis in fact whatsoever.” She adds that klipspringers are endemic to Southern Africa and are not an endangered species.
Concerned groups are also accusing SANParks of not adequately consulting affected communities or conservation experts.
Advocate Chris Mercer, a director of The Friends of the Tahr, says the battle to save the mountain goats has far wider repercussions for environmental conservation as a whole. “We inherited an authoritarian system of nature conservation from the previous regime,” he says. “This case shows that officials are turning a blind eye to the new democratic laws.”
The original court injunction that prevented CPNP from killing the tahrs with scoline expired in October 2001. Officials started shooting the animals with soft-nosed bullets in 2002, despite widespread media attention.
The Friends of the Tahr managed to get another stay of execution against SANParks in January this year. Mercer maintains that killing the tahrs is unlawful in that the authorities have acted beyond their powers in making such a decision on their own discretion, and in deciding matters of animal welfare without first ascertaining the wishes of the animal welfare community, which is an “affected community”.
“New laws like the National Environmental Management Act require that authoritarian conservation bodies like SANParks must transform themselves into democratic and accountable institutions. Animals in public-funded parks must now be co-managed with interested and affected members of the public,” Mercer explains.
According to The Friends of the Tahr, the minutes of a meeting held by SANParks at Newlands forest on November 17 1999 confirm that the decision to kill the tahrs was made and implemented without any consultation or disclosure to the public. To date, no animal welfare bodies or organisations such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have been consulted.
The Friends of the Tahr have put forward several proposals to save the animals’ lives. The suggestion that they be transported to a private reserve where they would be sterilised was rejected by SANParks on the basis that they might escape. In desperation the group put forward its most ambitious proposal: to trap the animals from the air and ship them to India.
The move was welcomed by the Indian government after the group approached Manika Gandhi, then Minister of State for Animal Welfare, about the plight of the tahrs. India agreed to accept the tahrs and established a special sanctuary for them in Himachal Pradesh, near Kashmir, close to the borders of Nepal and Bhutan. Last year, Vishwas Sawarkar, dean of India’s Wildlife Institute, visited Cape Town to confirm that the tahr is endangered in India and that his government had put in an official offer to take any that could be captured.
At the same time, James Innes – one of the world’s foremost helicopter net-gun capture experts – was brought to Cape Town to evaluate the feasibility of the project. He affirmed that his team would be able to capture most of the tahrs on Table Mountain.
The biggest sticking point was the cost of trapping the animals – about R900 000. Neither the Indian nor the South African government was willing to finance the operation, so the onus for raising the money fell on The Friends of the Tahr.
Wadee feels that by shifting the responsibility for the animals on to the group, CPNP abrogated its responsibility and was putting obstacles in the way of “small people” who dared to question its methods. “The issue is really not about ‘the tahr’, but whether SANParks has unfettered discretion to do what they like, when they like to any animal under their jurisdiction, whether the public or animal welfare community objects or not.”
The situation has reached a stalemate pending the outcome of the latest High Court application by The Friends of the Tahr. This holds that CPNP is not authorised by its own legislation to order the killing of the animals, and that its disregard for consultation processes is unconstitutional.
“We are raising funds for the legal defence of the tahrs’ lives in a test case of our constitutional and environmental rights. That will have implications for other animals under the jurisdiction of SANParks and nature conservation authorities as well,” says Wadee.