The Hunt for the Golden Mole by Richard Girling

Author:Richard Girling [Girling, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619024106
Publisher: Counterpoint

Uninvited guest – the lioness brought a sudden end to breakfast

Another day, we rumble across the plain to the conservancy’s airstrip. It is heavily grazed and, at ground level, difficult to distinguish from the land around it. A small Cessna has touched down and is parked among a group of gazelles. Down from the cockpit steps Richard Lamprey, Fauna & Flora International’s technical specialist for Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, who has flown up from Nairobi to meet me. FFI’s fingerprints are all over Ol Pejeta. The land was once a 40,000-hectare ranch owned by the mining and farming conglomerate Lonrho, which was put up for sale in 2004. Conventional cattle ranching by then had become difficult. Controlling wild animals had been made all but impossible by a hunting ban, and by an influx of elephants from the drier country to the north which had destroyed most of the fencing. Decreasing productivity and rising costs were driving ranchers into insolvency.

For wildlife, and for the conservationists who cared for it, it was a situation that presented both danger and opportunity. The danger was that the land would be sliced up into plots. As movement through the area was vital to the flow of animals across the plateau, this would have critically reduced its value for wildlife. The opportunity was to buy and save the land for wildlife, and at the same time to grow the local economy. This is the twin-track approach upon which the future of endangered species ultimately must depend. The late Christopher Hitchens pointed out an oddity of the English psyche – evidenced by involvements in places like Greece and Spain – which leads the queen’s subjects to show more enthusiasm for other people’s patriotism than they do for their own. For conservationists in particular, this has tended to extend not just to other peoples but to other species, whose ‘rights’ are promoted over man’s. But there is a fatal flaw in this. Animals are killed or displaced for a reason. Their persecutors expect to profit by it, and conservation is not popular where communities feel their interests are secondary to those of the wildlife. The substitution of the word ‘poaching’ for ‘hunting’ in the language of the law is a perfect example of conflicted priorities. I am reminded of the two prisoners in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park who were punished for shooting a warthog. It is a simple fact. Conservation cannot succeed without popular support, and people as well as animals need to see the benefit.

As Richard Lamprey explains, FFI is not in the business of owning land. It is in the business of encouraging purchases where land is of value to wildlife. At Ol Pejeta it managed to secure funding from the Arcus Foundation, a private charity set up by an American philanthropist, John Lloyd Stryker. Stryker had a particular passion for great apes – importantly for him, Ol Pejeta already had a refuge for chimpanzees – but he shared FFI’s broader vision and wanted to help. So it was that by late 2004 Ol Pejeta belonged to FFI, though its ownership would be short-lived.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.