Loaded for Bear: A new movement is needed to address human-wildlife conflict that puts poor people first

Zambian farmer Sheila Phiri stands behind the gaping hole in her mother’s house where elephants smashed the walls and door down for the maize in the storeroom. (Photo: Ed Stoddard)

By Ed Stoddard

7 Jul 2024

In the warm heart of Africa, a grassroots campaign is blazing a new trail to bring compensation and comfort to the human victims of human-wildlife conflict — impoverished Africans dehumanised by animal welfare NGOs. This needs to become a movement.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw) was founded in 1969 to stop the commercial hunting of seal pups on the east coast of Canada.

Ifaw’s anti-seal hunt campaigns gained momentum in the 1980s and the NGO raised money by the boatload to launch others and spread its message of animal welfare — which in many cases was and is noble.

But in many other ways, it is ignoble pandering to emotions without a care in the world for poor people.

As an east Canadian — I hail from Nova Scotia — I recall being put off in the 1980s by Ifaw’s harping over the annual seal hunt, which depicted rural Newfoundlanders from often remote coastal villages known as “outports” as heartless hillbillies bashing baby seals with clubs.

Trust me, to trudge out on ice floes to pursue seals is something few people would do by choice. The hunt, driven by commercial interests, underscored the limited economic opportunities available to fishermen at a time when the once-teeming cod fishery on the Grand Banks was collapsing.

It is true that fishermen blamed this unfairly on seals, and part of the backlash against the Ifaw campaign was grounded in romantic notions about “traditional” ways of life which reinforced images of rural backwardness in the urban mind.

But the men — it was almost always men — who hunted seals wanted to remain in their coastal communities and this provided them with a means to do so.

Ifaw had struck gold.

loaded for bear human-wildlife conflict ifaw harp seal A Harp seal pup lies on an ice floe in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence near Charlottetown, Canada. (Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

Baby seals are cute, making them the perfect poster children for animal welfare campaigns.

Blood-chilling terror in Africa’s warm heart

As I have reported, I was in Zambia in late June to investigate the terrifying aftermath of the ill-conceived translocation of 263 elephants to Kasungu National Park in Malawi from Liwonde National Park in that country’s south.

Read more in Daily Maverick: ‘Conservation imperialism’ brings death and destruction to poor communities in Zambia and Malawi

This was spearheaded by Ifaw, African Parks and the Malawi government.

What I observed there would melt an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland.

There is no fence along the Zambian border of the park and the Malawian side is only partially fenced. Blood-chilling terror has been unleashed in Africa’s warm heart.

Warm Heart, a volunteer organisation spawned in response to the ensuing crisis, has documented the deaths of nine people in Zambia and Malawi killed by elephants and one killed by a hippo displaced from its pool by the pachyderms.

It has also documented a man shot to death by rangers in the park on 5 June while he was foraging for root tubers with seven other people, including his wife, after their crop was wiped out by elephants. These people were forced to enter the park, the source of their terror, to gather instead of farm.

The Malawi authorities deny this incident happened — they say rangers had a firefight that day with poachers — but told me that “investigations are continuing”.

Warm Heart estimates that $3-million in damage — an amount rising almost daily — has been inflicted on small-scale farmers by elephants devouring and trampling their crops. Homes have also been damaged. The number of victims is estimated to be at least 10,400, including more than 50 children who have lost a parent.

The data were compiled by Warm Heart, with no budget and a handful of dedicated volunteers who painstakingly gather and verify reports of the carnage wrought, including photos, video and estimates of the crop losses.

loaded for bear human-wildlife conflict Mike Labuschagne (left), founder of Warm Heart. (Photo: Supplied)

Its founder is Mike Labuschagne, a former Ifaw consultant who warned of the dangers if the translocation went ahead. The Zambian and Malawian volunteers have an expanding network of contacts and informants on the frontlines of this conflict who constantly send incident reports by cellphone.

This is grassroots activism driven in response to the crisis and it represents a new kind of conservation campaign — one that draws attention to the human victims of big animal attacks in Africa.

Labuschagne (66) is a former South African Special Forces officer who subsequently carved out a career leading anti-poaching operations in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. He considers himself to be a law enforcement officer and not an activist.

But he and his volunteers have pioneered a fresh kind of activism which should gain traction elsewhere.

Callous disregard for African life

The translocation has perpetuated the view in Africa that affluent Westerners value the lives of wild animals more than the lives of people. It is a view that is not far off the mark.

In February 2000, I covered a story about an extension to Addo Elephant National Park in the Eastern Cape which required the purchase of private farmland that had been funded by Ifaw amid concerns that SANParks might pull the trigger on a cull to curb the pachyderm population.

Pointedly, a proper fence was erected around the new territory before part of the fence was taken down to provide the animals with new room to roam.

South Africa is the only industrialised economy in the world which has the Big Five on its territory, and its solution for decades has been to contain all but leopards — which cannot be contained — with fencing.

This is the response of a relatively affluent society, with commercial farming interests, to the threat to humans posed by large and dangerous African wildlife.

But poor rural Africans are fair game.

“You will find human-wildlife conflict across Africa. This is nothing that’s specific, or significantly different than other communities who share a space with wildlife,” Julika Riegler, Ifaw’s vice-president of brand marketing and communications, was quoted as saying in the Financial Times regarding the drama raging around Kasungu.

This is a shockingly callous statement.

The people around Kasungu had not experienced anything like this in their lifetimes. I interviewed scores of people and none from either the Malawi or Zambian side had ever seen an elephant before 2022.

Implicit in the statement is the view that it is somehow natural for Africans to co-exist with menacing megafauna — a state of affairs that no one in the West would wish for themselves or their kith and kin.

Animal welfare activists generally regard themselves as a branch of the progressive and even woke left, but such a view reeks of racism — an echo of the classist condensation that portrayed Newfoundlanders and other eastern Canadians with limited economic means as backwater brutes.

“Several human-wildlife conflict (HWC) events affecting communities living close to Kasungu have occurred since 2022, leading to the deaths of several individuals, causing trauma and negatively affecting bereaved families. We are deeply saddened by the deaths or injuries of each person impacted by the elephants that strayed into the surrounding communities. Our thoughts remain with their families,” Ifaw said in a statement on 4 June.

This is what Republican politicians in the US typically say after a mass shooting — that their “thoughts and prayers” are with the families and victims.

loaded for bear human-wildlife conflict Zambian farmer Sheila Phiri stands behind the gaping hole in her mother’s house where elephants smashed the walls and door down for the maize in the storeroom. (Photo: Ed Stoddard)

It displays a cruel disregard for the plight of the people around Kasungu, who have been thrust below what I call the “faunal poverty line” — a nightmarish realm where your poverty makes you vulnerable to the threat of animal attack and predation.

Poverty in this case makes you prey. As the poorest of the poor, such people are generally voiceless and seemingly powerless — unless they take matters into their own hands and kill the animals that threaten them.

But the people around Kasungu are making their voices heard and the horror they face is documented regularly.

After I returned from Zambia, Labuschagne sent me a message on 3 July about a Zambian child who had her arm broken the day before by elephants which smashed into her house to gain access to the maize in the storeroom.

It is a relentless cycle of violence and property and crop destruction which the volunteers are chronicling, at huge effort, for the record. As I reported, a civil class action lawsuit may be looming to compensate the victims of this translocation and there is a mammoth trail of spoor to back it up.

Four years ago, Labuschagne said in an email to Ifaw executives that their dithering over a fence then was a travesty and that he wanted to “make sure that the public and the courts became aware of what was going on”.

Through Warm Heart’s efforts, the public is now becoming aware of the importance of a fence.

The elephants have also been traumatised by the relocation with reports that calves have been abandoned in villages.

A new poster child for conservation

The image of a seal pup tugs at human emotions. But so surely does the image of a human child.

Success, pictured here on his mother Elphina Joseph’s back, will never meet his father Josephi Kapalamula, who was killed in Malawi by Kasungu elephants in July 2022.

Children like Success could be the image for campaigns that seek to eradicate human-wildlife conflict by putting the needs of poor people first. Such a movement will also have a conservation imperative because animals suffer from such conflict — this is a war with no winners.

In the long run, the only hope for Africa’s majestic big wildlife and the crucial ecological roles that such keystone species play is to bring the curtain down on human-wildlife conflict.

It is also the only hope for the people who live below the faunal poverty line — a consequence of their impoverishment which in turn exacerbates and entrenches it in a vicious cycle bloodied by fang, claw and tusk.

The Canadian seal hunt, by the way, continues to this day with four species targeted. Informed opposition to it, and debate about it, is legitimate.

I would argue that there are far more urgent needs in rural Africa, where people, because of their poverty, still face prehistoric terror in the 21st century. This is our oldest conflict and it needs to be resolved for the sake of people and animals. DM

If anyone is interested in supporting this cause or getting involved, please email me at [email protected]

Daily Maverick's journalism is funded by the contributions of our Maverick Insider members. If you appreciate our work, then join our membership community. Defending Democracy is an everyday effort. Be part of it. Become a Maverick Insider.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

Africa

Blood-chilling terror in Africa’s warm heart