Residents in Nature’s Valley, a popular holiday village on the Western Cape’s Garden Route, are at each others throats about troops of baboons that raid homes in search of festive leftovers. Like the ”dethroned white males” who have become ”alienated, depressed spoilers” in the recent sparked by Malegapuru Makgoba, some residents want to take out their wrath on the primates by shooting them.

Three white lions have been reintroduced into the heart of the Timbavati, almost 30 years after their species disappeared from the famous private reserve bordering the Kruger National Park. The three white lions arrived in the Timbavati heartland barely a week before a major row erupted between Bantu Holomisa and the Timbavati chairperson over commercial trophy hunting in the reserve.

A Gauteng zoo owner is suspected of laundering permits to import nine old circus and zoo lions from Brazil last week, in the face of a ban on bringing the big cats into the country. Conservation authorities are investigating whether Pablo Urban fooled Free State permit officials into facilitating the deal after Gauteng officials refused to give him permits to import the lions.

The government plans to use microchipping and special enforcement agents to stamp out ”canned” lion hunting — but there are concerns about the ability of provincial officials to curtail this industry. If regulations published on Friday become law, all large predators kept in captivity will have to be microchipped and recorded in a database.

South African National Parks (SANParks) is reconsidering a management plan that will see between 400 and 1 000 elephant culled in the Kruger National Park annually for at least five years. At a high-level indaba held this week to discuss burgeoning elephant populations, SANParks director of conservation services, Hector Magome, said it was time to dust off a plan that was launched in 1999 but shelved amid controversy.