Richard Leakey on sustainable use of wildlife products

[Guest guest]

*Kruger is a large park, close to Tsavo in size. Unlike Tsavo, however, it

is actively managed, meaning that certain animals, primarily buffaloes and

elephants, are culled if their populations reach certain levels. Robbie

Robinson(director of Kruger) thought I was overly sentimental about

elephants and told me so several times. Like many wildlife authorities in

South Africa, he was proud of his country's managed parks and modern

wildlife-management strategies-including the culling operations. The park

had a state-of-the -art abbatoir for killing, butchering and canning the

different animals, and he took me to see it. *

* Housed in a large, concrete warehouse, the interior of the abbatoir was

glistening white. It was fully equipped with cranes and carving hooks for

lifting the carcasses, hydraulic hoses for washing out the rooms after the

butchery, and meat processing facilities. A team of white men in shorts and

white gum boots, blood stains up to their armpits, were busy preparing the

meat and hides of forty-five recently culled buffalo. They worked

efficiently, despite the blood and gore. The hides and tinned meat would be

sold, Robbie explained, and the proceeds used for the park. *

* I watched for a while impressed by the size and scale of the operation

but appalled that this was what " wildlife management " in the late twentieth

century had come to. Conservationists who once used to talk about the value

simply of protecting nature in and of itself were now saying that wildlife

and lands had to " pay " their way to survive; that unless they made money,

like a factory or business enterprise, they could not expect to endure. To

me this has always been a wrongheaded argument. If wildlife and wilderness

were regarded solely as items that generate money, their days were surely

numbered. Inevitably, someone would find a way to use them to make more

money from them than protecting them does. I fear that conservationists who

use bottom-line reasoning as the key argument for saving the animals they

love are actually dooming them to extinction. *

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* Excerpted from WILDLIFE WARS: My Battle To Save

Africa's Elephants by Richard Leakey, 2002, pages 220 and 221,Pan Books,

London, Basingstoke and Oxford*

**

*Richard Leakey has made international headlines with his work in Kenya for

more than thirty years. He has written or co-authored over a hundred

scientific articles and books, including The Origins of Humankind, Origins

Reconsidered and the Sixth Extinction. His previous autobiography, One Life,

about his life before his involvement with Kenya's wildlife and politics,

was published in 1983. He lives in Nairobi, with his wife Maeve, who

continues to study human orgins and palaeontology. *