Are you taking my picture or my life?
A prime game reserve has asked for a permit to shoot a tusker — even though there are fewer than 30 of these magnificent old elephant bulls left in the wild, writes Don Pinnock
TROPHY CASE: Timbavati, next to Kruger Park, has applied to hunt a so-called ’super tusker’
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Jean Twenge, the study’s lead author and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, said: “These data show a major reversal from
PRIVATE game reserves with open fences to Kruger National Park have applied for permission to shoot a trophy bull. This is despite the fact that there are fewer than 30 of these tuskers left in the wild.
Associated Private Nature Reserves, made up of Timbavati, Klaserie, Balule and Umbabat, contains many privately owned luxury lodges that cater for tourists who pay high rates to experience some of the most exciting animal sightings in the world.
What’s not well known, especially by guests, is that a reserve such as Timbavati is, in terms of its income, primarily a hunting destination; this accounts for 61% of its income, against tourism at 17%.
In total, Associated Private Nature Reserves has applied to hunt more than 5 444 animals. Timbavati — which is right next to Kruger — has applied for the biggest quota of permits.
The issue, according to conservationists, is not so much about hunting Kruger animals that may wander across the fenceless boundary — or hunting at all — but going for a super tusker. These tuskers are named for impressive tusks that nearly scrape the ground.
Elephant numbers in Africa are crashing, with around 30 000 poached a year. It’s only a matter of time before the tsunami hits Kruger. It may, indeed, have begun: since September 2015, more than 80 have been poached in the park — the highest number in its history.
The hunting is perfectly legal: the reserve applies to Mpumalanga or Limpopo’s conservation agencies and, after Kruger oversight, its allocation generally gets approved with just a few amendments. Tourism and hunting are not good bedfellows, however, so over the years the reserves have managed to keep them apart, with almost zero public visual crossover.
Tourists, who pay top prices to stay at Timbavati’s lodges plus R215 a person a day conservation fee (which nets many millions of rands), would not know that many of the animals they come to photograph fall to hunters’ guns when they’re out of sight.
For those unaware of this arrangement, the latest hunting quota application by these reserves might come as a shock. It includes 193 buffaloes (including 76 classic bulls), 34 elephants (including the super tusker), two white rhinos, two lions, two leopards (despite a national moratorium on hunting leopards), 29 kudus, 5 162 impalas, 25 waterbuck, 10 hippos and a hyena, as well as giraffes, zebras and wildebeest.
Many of the carcasses will probably go to Timbavati’s abattoir, which sells impala and buffalo meat.
Game counts for the four reserves show that, apart from blue wildebeest, zebras and giraffes, all other animal numbers went down between 2016 and 2017 — elephants by 142 and buffaloes by 1 797.
Other than deferring the rhino quota and a warning that there is a moratorium on leopard hunting, however, Kruger signed off on the quota. But it appears to have become uneasy about the reserve association’s noncompliance with hunting protocols.
In correspondence with them in January and again this month, Kruger conservation management complained that the reserves’ hunting protocol had not been signed and warned that no further requests would be considered until this was done.
And while shooting animals to raise money is accepted by the four reserves’ owners in general — they have high anti-poaching overheads — its scale now sits uncomfortably with a number of them, who see hunting a trophy bull elephant and rhinos as a bridge too far.
This may explain why some of them have not signed the hunting protocol called for by Kruger.
Information about why Timbavati wished to hunt a super tusker — more than 50 years old with tusks in excess of 50kg — proved elusive. Lodge owners within the reserve said they didn’t want to be named or quoted because it would make their association difficult.
Timbavati warden Bryan Havemann said approval to hunt the bull had not yet been obtained from the provincial authorities. “The ability to find such a bull that will fit all the criteria could take many years and even though it may be put on the quota, the chance of finding such an elephant remains remote,” he said.
However, Dr Michelle Henley, a long-term elephant researcher in the four private reserves, said that between 2004 and 2014, 40 large tuskers (with tusk weight of 36kg or more) had been seen to enter and leave the area, although many of them had only been sighted once and never again. That’s an average of four trophy tuskers a year.
Associated Private Nature Reserves chairman James Campbell pointed out that hunting quotas were up to individual reserves within the association, but that hunting took place “within the context of an environment of high-quality ecotourism and sustainable coexistence”.
According to Dr Lucy Bates, an elephant researcher at Sussex University in the UK, poaching numbers in Kruger may be low now, but a serious threat is imminent.
“South Africa cannot act in isolation, claiming that its elephant populations are not at
Many of the animals fall to hunters’ guns when tourists are out of sight Kruger is one of the last bastions of large-tusked bull elephants in all Africa
risk,” she said.
“They are at risk. Kruger is one of the last bastions of largetusked bull elephants in the whole of Africa. South Africa should be duty-bound to protect and preserve these super tuskers and their genes for the benefit of the entire continent.”
Dr Vicki Fishlock, a scientist at Amboseli Trust for Elephants in Kenya, said that “old and experienced individuals are crucial. They are so much more than ‘a breeder’. By the time these animals reach this size, they have been part of social networks for five or six decades and have accumulated social and ecological experience that younger animals learn from.”
A version of this article appeared in the Daily Maverick