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ISSUES
South African National Parks and the Business of Conservation
It appears that SANParks CEO, Dr Mabunda , has become an apologist and spokesperson for the hunting industry. (Hunting Can Protect Wildlife: Sunday Independent, 17 May 2009). The internet is littered with boasts by mainly white men from Europe and the USA who seem to get a perverse thrill from killing 'Kruger animals' from what they often offensively refer to as the 'Dark Continent', and sticking them on their walls as symbols of domination and prowess. The alarming thing is that not only does SANParks seem to think that this is okay but they appear to be promoting it.
Let's get it absolutely straight, trophy hunting is not conservation, it is not an ecological act and killing for fun is not a human right. Trophy hunting has no place in the modern world, and is not morally defensible in the 21st century. It is a cruel, abusive, exploitative and learned activity, where the animal hunted is a non-voluntary conscript and the animal's subjective experience is totally ignored. Trophy hunting is nothing more than a deliberate, violent form of so-called 'recreation' which commodifies complex and sentient beings. In South Africa it is a practice that is not only becoming endemic but is also extremely difficult to monitor or police and is fast becoming a front for poaching and illegal activities as the current war on rhinos has shown. Mabunda's article also gives the false impression that the industry is under control and that canned hunting is outlawed. This is a perversion of the truth. The reality is that most trophy and sport hunting in South Africa is canned to a greater or lesser extent and the industry is growing. By its own admission SANParks does not have the resources to properly police the areas under its control.
We must stop thinking of wild animals as 'resources' and 'game', and see them as sentient beings that deserve our wonder and respect. It is time to stop allowing hunting to be creditable by calling it 'sport' and 'recreation'. As for hunters, it is long past check-out time. Wild animals in and from protected areas in South Africa are not simply government property or a 'natural resource' to do with as bureaucrats please. They are sentient creatures deserving of care and respect. That wild animals have intrinsic value is already recognised in a number of national wildlife policy documents and international conservation agreements.
SANParks appears intent on selling off and killing our heritage, along with our reputation. This poses a direct threat to ecotourism and community livelihoods. Hunters shoot an animal once, but photographic tourists can harmlessly shoot it a thousand times. Instead of promoting hunting as a preferred activity, SANParks should rather be empowering communities through non-consumptive, non-violent tourism. Wildlife in protected areas should be held in trusteeship on behalf of the people of South Africa and private individuals should not be able to hunt such wildlife for profit in adjacent private or communal land. South Africans need to seriously question the current drive by government – with strong support from the trophy industry – to push trophy hunting as an acceptable practice.
Hunting in national and provincial parks or in conveniently called 'buffer zones' - where fences have been deliberately removed by SANParks - is totally at odds with our responsibility to protect our national heritage and to safeguard the interests of the individual animals. It is alarming that SANParks has moved away from a prudent, precautionary approach to a situation where our natural heritage has to 'pay its own way' and it is pushing the agenda of the powerful commercial hunting industry that drives the notion of 'use it or lose it'.
SANParks is hiding behind green-sounding names such as 'sustainable use', which is an anathema conjured by the so-called 'wise use' movement to mask activities killing animals merely for fun – it is an alibi for profit-making and gratuitous violence against wild animals. In reality, 'sustainable use' is about misguided politics and markets and has nothing to do with science, let alone ethics or compassion.
SANParks should be at the forefront of having the problematic, outdated and contested notion of wild animals being res nullius ( ownerless and therefore allowed to be freely exploited) legally replaced with the concept of wild animals as res publicae (in public ownership). Instead Mabunda is using it to renege on SANParks' mandate, thereby allowing rich people in areas adjacent to national parks like Kruger to pay for their levies through the trophy hunting of what clearly includes Kruger animals. Removal of fences between national parks and private or communal land does not mean that State has 'lost' ownership or that the wild animals are now 'ownerless'. Res nullius has no place in South Africa – it was first proposed as a political justification for white ownership of land in the Cape in the 1830s and is closely linked to colonial and imperial notions of possession and ownership. It is in conflict with the South African Constitution and is no longer justifiable in our democratic society.
The fate of humans and other animals is inextricably linked. In order to meet the growing threat to our shared world and the massive extinction of species, only a sweeping restructuring of the way we see ourselves and our role in the natural world can help turn this backlash around. Urgently needed are new, ethics-based approaches to wildlife conservation. The way conservation is currently practiced in South Africa has become part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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