A Certain Curve of Horn by John Frederick Walker

Author:John Frederick Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2002-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

THE IDEA OF anyone shooting Angola’s great endangered antelope had made Anne Dodgson livid. “I’d like to post a reward on the Internet for turning in anyone who killed a giant sable!” she told me.

If she was talking about poachers, Richard Estes would certainly concur. If she was talking about a blanket prohibition against hunting them, he wouldn’t be so sure. “It would seem to fly in the face of everything we’ve stood for,” he once told me, “but …” He was open to the idea of allowing someone to pay an extravagant sum to shoot a bull, so long as the money went directly back into the conservation of the species—providing, of course, that there were enough giant sable left that a few could be shot without putting the herds in jeopardy.

Estes had long wanted Cangandala Park and Luando Reserve to be joined into a single giant sable habitat. One way to do that would be to turn the land between into hunting concessions, and allow a strictly limited “offtake” of the odd trophy animal. Anderson and Estes had discussed it for years, and Estes mentioned it to Serôdio de Almeida, who thought it made good sense.

Estes was all too aware that the giant sable wouldn’t be safe just because it said somewhere on a piece of paper that killing the animal was prohibited. Poachers aren’t deterred by wildlife regulations. Protecting the antelope would cost money, and lots of it. Why not take advantage of the fact that there are people who’d pay handsomely for the privilege to go on a hunt for the “finest horns in the world”? It wouldn’t be to Estes’s taste—in fact, he’d find it distressing—but he understood the advantages. Lots of money was badly needed for game guards, patrols, study, and monitoring—money that Angola didn’t have, or more to the point, couldn’t put toward its animals even if it had it, considering the dire situation of its people and its devastated infrastructure. And even if money could be raised from other sources for giant sable conservation, why not supplement it with some generous hunting fees?

I started on this train of thought after I came across Fred Duckworth’s booth. Duckworth, a grizzled former game warden in Malawi and an experienced professional hunter, now books safaris from his base in the Netherlands. He also has a keen interest in developing conservation schemes for endangered species, and had been in correspondence with Estes about several of them, including Aders’ duiker, one of the rarest species of this Africa-wide tribe of small, spike-horned antelopes. Now confined to the island of Zanzibar, this shy, reddish-tawny, stocky little creature, all of twenty-five pounds when mature, is quickly disappearing into local cook-pots as the island’s forests come under increasing human pressure. There might be only hundreds left. Duckworth persuaded the Zanzibar authorities to consider raising funds for an ongoing Aders’ duiker conservation project by offering a small number of hunting licenses, and was granted five. He was selling them at $5,000

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