Shooting Times & Country Magazine
A sporting life in Africa
Loss of income due to COVID-19 has forced many Kenyans to resort to desperate measures
Life on the ranch in Kenya has continued entirely unaffected by the COVID-19 lockdown. I’ve sold cattle and rams, bought a champion Boran bull for the stud and seen some wonderful calves born.
We’ve had plenty of lion around – and one night they managed to hunt down a cock ostrich. Elephant, buffalo, giraffe and other plains game have been enjoying the explosion of green after one of the best rainy seasons on record for East Africa.
But beyond our farm boundaries, across Africa, disaster beckons for wildlife.
Many townspeople feel nature has thrived across the world during the COVID-19 lockdown. People in the tourism industry have a different view, and across Africa the total collapse of business has robbed the world’s poorest continent of money and jobs.
The conservancies that surround us on Kenya’s highland Laikipia Plateau all depend on tourism. All wildlife lodges were closed when Kenya went into lockdown in March and all commercial flights were banned. Tourism businesses have started collapsing.
On a conservancy down the road from us, 90 people working the lodges have been let go. In Nairobi, the world-famous Norfolk Hotel has been closed permanently. Our friends relate how on visits to the Maasai Mara game reserve in southern Kenya, they are able to witness the onset of the annual wildebeest migration almost entirely by themselves, with no other vehicles in sight on the savannah.
On the one hand, there’s a wonderful feeling to have the plains all to themselves.
“Around 1.6 million Kenyans lost their jobs when tourism came to a hard stop”
On the other hand, there’s the realisation that this could really be the end of the game for wildlife. Around 1.6 million Kenyans lost their jobs when tourism came to a hard stop. There is absolutely no prospect of business returning to normal any time soon, which leaves tremendous numbers of people going hungry in a state that offers no welfare to the unemployed.
Poaching spike
As a result, there has naturally been a spike in poaching. Most of this is for food, wild animals being killed by hungry men to feed their families. There has also been a spike in the type of poaching driven by
Far Eastern cartels, who feed the illegal trade in wildlife that goes mainly towards Chinese traditional medicine: rhino horn, pangolin scales, lion bones, ivory, hardwood timber – but also body parts from tortoises, aardvarks, abalone, sea slugs...
Far from making themselves scarce after allegedly triggering the global coronavirus pandemic due to their eating habits, the Chinese have become even more visible in the African media over the past three months, as large gangs of men from the People’s Republic appear in courtrooms from Uganda to Malawi on charges of wildlife trafficking.
Given that photographic tourism will be dead in the water for at least a few years, there is surely a strong argument for sport hunting to be both sustained and extended across Africa. Hunters are more resilient and likely to travel to the continent and their type of exclusive tourism is less of a health risk than any other type in the business. Sport hunters are more likely to have eyes on the ground to help monitor the security situation and protect nature – and they will be just about the only ones giving out jobs and putting money in the pockets of communities in remote corners of the continent.
The case for hunting was good before the pandemic. Yet despite the fact that it might now be the only thing that could save the game, one senses the mad Western collective of eco-zealots and animal rights activists will use the virus as an excuse to ban everything completely.
The impact of this will be that ordinary Africans will be forced to scale up poaching, while the rarest of species will be driven to extinction by the profitable demands of the Chinese medicinal market. They will, literally, be eating Africa, even though this might in turn unleash another zoonosis that could trigger yet another pandemic.
The European polecat (Mustela putorius) was once considered to be a vicious, cold-blooded killer of gamebirds and, as such, was fair game for gamekeepers. Indeed, the keepers’ employers used to insist that all polecats, along with many other predatory species, were hounded unmercifully. Little wonder then that at the end of the 19th century the polecat was all but extinct, with just a few tiny populations left in areas not used for game shooting.
In 1914, thousands of gamekeepers joined the British Army and headed to France; few returned. The world had changed and one of the consequences of this was that estates no longer had the manpower to carry out intensive pest control. The polecat prospered.
Today, the polecat is widespread throughout Wales and has spread across the Midlands, too; with research proving that, in winter, the vast majority of the polecat’s prey species are rodents, particularly rats. Consequently, farmers are not too bothered about controlling their numbers. Under the 1981 Wildlife & Countryside Act, it is unlawful to trap polecats, and more and more country folk are welcoming back this once almost extinct animal.
Pure blood
For ferreters, the polecat has always held a special place; it is believed by many that the ferret, so beloved by countrymen and women for generations, is a domesticated European polecat. It has also been stated by many that ferrets ‘with a bit of polecat blood’ work many times better than the average ferret.
I have read several British books, the authors of which assure the reader that they have acquired a ‘wild polecat’ and hybridised it with the ferrets from their own backyard.
Almost without exception, these authors claim that the resultant hybrids have been “the best workers any ferreter could wish for”.
How true is this statement? Think about the facts: man has worked for hundreds (some would claim thousands) of years to domesticate the polecat in order to produce an animal that is just right for man’s purposes: the ferret. Why, then, should breeders try to reinvent the wheel?
Isn’t hybridisation of polecats and ferrets a retrograde step, undoing the efforts of our predecessors and giving the ferret many of the undesirable traits that our forefathers have bred out through many years of hard work and dogged determination?
Modern ferreters do not help the matter with their clumsy use of erroneous and misleading terms. Many of today’s ferreters refer to polecat-coloured ferrets as ‘polecats’ or ‘poleys’; the correct term for such an animal is a ‘fitch’ or ‘fitchet’. Many also claim that every coloured animal found in the wild is a true polecat – even when they claim simply to have walked up to the animal and picked it up. Such animals are, without doubt, feral ferrets, regardless of their colouration and markings.
Polecats are skittish, nervous, fast and will avoid human contact wherever possible. In other words, exactly the opposite of what every ferreter demands from his/her ferrets. What good is a ferret that avoids the hands of a ferreter trying to extricate the animal from a rabbit warren? Anyone who has had to suffer a skulking ferret will tell you that it is one of the worst habits possible.
Attractive kits
I have tried crossing ferrets and polecats; the results are interesting and nothing like those recorded by others. The kits from matings of a polecat and a ferret are extremely attractive – a rich, dark colouration with a black nose.
If left to be reared by their dam, these kits are impossible to pick up; they hiss and spit at the approach of a human hand, moving into the depths of their enclosure and sinking their teeth into any bit of human flesh that comes within range. When hand-reared (from four weeks) they will tolerate handling but still remain skittish, trying their best to avoid the hand attempting to pick them up.