Wildlife must not run out of space in the future

LIMITED to a handful of enclosed protected areas, Zululand’s wildlife of today knows nothing about the freedom their ancestors once enjoyed.

From cross-border migration between Mozambique and South Africa, the African elephants of the region once roamed untethered and unharmed.

Fast forward to today and it’s a very different story.

The front page of the previous edition of this publication carried the story of five elephants that were shot after venturing outside Ndumo Game Reserve.

Given that they were euthanised by the very conservation body charged with their protection, the future indeed looks grim for these beautiful beasts.

It’s in their DNA to migrate, and we witnessed this last year when 11 bull elephants trekked 800km from Mozambique, through Swaziland, into South Africa and were eventually safely rounded up and taken into Kruger National Park.

But not before they were shot at and one so severely wounded it had to be euthanised.

And not forgetting that they were shot at by communities only once they crossed the border into South Africa.

While large animals like elephants can be dangerous to humans and their livelihoods, the mindset of destroying anything that has this potential, however vague, is slowly destroying our wildlife.

Apart from the five elephants shot last week outside Ndumo, this year has seen the destruction of numerous animals that ventured outside HluhluweiMfolozi Park.

These included a pride of lion, at least one rhino and several buffalo.

Which brings us to the crux of the problem.

Our game reserves’ fences are as porous as the border between SA and Zimbabwe.

As long as people need to continuously expand every which way, our wildlife will be under threat.

But if we don’t want the bottom to fall out of our national economy, there must be space for both wildlife and humans.

The fight over land is dire, but dwindling wildlife equals dwindling tourism, which leads to a dwindling economy.

Conservation authorities must not let unsettled land disputes linger, but settle up and come to more comanagement agreements as is in place for the land claim on Ndumo’s western boundary.

They must also fence

Ndumo Game Reserve appropriately, to safeguard the remaining elephants.

While Ndumo was never an elephant sanctuary so was not fenced accordingly, things change and we must keep up.

Everything comes at a price, and it’s high time national government places more importance on the preservation of our country’s wildlife by allocating more money in the budget to Staterun game reserves.

Once these are in place and government funding is used for its intended purpose, we can return to the utopia in which wildlife and humans are safe from each other, and tourism dollars plug the holes in our leaking economy.