COMMUNITIES AND WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT - CHALLENGES
What do “Wildlife” and “Communities” have to do together? Well, there are only two ways to manage wildlife in Africa (and probably in many other parts of the world…): against the local communities (anti-poaching, strict law enforcement, zero-tolerance policies, displacement of human settlements, etc.), or with the communities.
Managing wildlife against the communities becomes necessary because of the simple fact that many of the most impoverished populations live on the border of National Parks, Wildlife Reserves, or Hunting Concessions.
These communities receive almost no benefits from the animals living on what used to be their ancestral land, and who now stray on their patches of food-growing land - gorging themselves whenever they get a chance.
Hungry, robbed of precious crops by wild animals, their cattle killed by predators, their people killed or mauled by rogue elephants, leopards, lions, hippos, or buffaloes, the local communities do what anyone else would do. They kill the wild animals. Any of them, anytime they get a chance: to eat them, or to prevent them from eating their crops or their cattle - or their children.
To be able to work with the local communities for the management of wildlife, the same communities have to change their perception.
And the only way human beings’ basic perception of anything changes positively, is if the benefits derived from, the value of the particular thing, change.
We do not believe in charitable handouts as means of development. For decades, charities and various organizations have been pumping billions of “Aid” dollars in Africa, achieving very precisely the square root of zero.
But give the local communities a fair value for whatever resource they may have, and you give them the means to obtain what they need through this essential tool: commerce.
As we explain in our Conservation page, wildlife is a commodity.
Give it a value, and pay that value to the rightful owners - the people on whose land the wildlife lives - and you immediately change subsistence poachers into the best guardians of wildlife.
Help the communities to get rid of the few real Problem Animals, and give them a fair return from the visitors, or from the animals hunted, and the goats or sorghum eaten once in a while will be paid for tenfolds.
Instead of killing wild animals, the communities will protect them: because they derive more benefits from having wild animals around, than from eliminating them.
When was the last time that you heard about cows being an endangered species?
How many millions of them are killed every day?
Yet there are always more cows to replace the ones killed. Simply because they have a value, and it's good business to rear cows.
Now, if cows belonged to no-one, if it was prohibited to own or buy or sell them, if no income could be had from them, would there be any fields set aside as pasture for cows? Would anyone bother about cows’ health? Would anyone accept to have stray cows chewing their lawn or wolfing down corn in their fields? How long do you think it would take before we would be eating the last one?
Think!
What do we mean by “Wildlife Resource Management”? Exactly that. Wildlife is a resource, it needs to be managed in order to increase and prosper, and our job is to do it together with the local communities.