Cecil’s death hits hunter hard, new laws on cards

Charges of failing to prevent unlawful hunt... faces up to 15 years in prison

HARARE: The death of Cecil the lion, popular with tourists visiting the Hwange National Park, has changed Theo Bronkhorst’s life and may change hunting practices in Zimbabwe and around the region.

The trial of the professional hunter, who helped an American kill Cecil in an allegedly illegal hunt in Zimbabwe, was postponed yesterday to September 28. He faces charges of failing to prevent an unlawful hunt. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison.

Bronkhorst, released on R12 000 bail last week, says he is not guilty. His world has collapsed for a second time.

In 2000, he was one of the first white farmers to be invaded in President Robert Mugabe’s “land reform” programme. He lost his small, but important, farm which stocked game and bred champion cattle in central Zimbabwe. He walked away with nothing and, like nearly all others evicted at that time, received no compen- sation for the land or the capital goods on the farm.

That was why he went into hunting, he says.

Now he and his staff will not be able to earn money because his bail conditions demand that he reports to the police in Bulawayo three times a week. That gives him no time to travel distances for hunts which often take place in remote parts of the country.

And he learnt this week his clients have cancelled all booked hunts until year end.

“I don’t know how I will survive this,” he said on Tuesday from Victoria Falls, where he was consulting his lawyer.

He was accused, along with Honest Ndlovu, who occupies a farm in the Gwayi area, near Hwange National Park, which was taken from another white farmer in 2000.

Ndlovu has not yet been charged and he indicated last week that he may become a state witness in the trial.

Cecil the lion died on the land which Ndlovu occupies, adjoining Hwange National Park. It is public record that he did not have a permit for a lion to be shot, although he is permitted to sell hunts for other animals. So Cecil was hunted with a permit from a rural council which had a quota of one lion a year which it could sell to hunters.

Wildlife analysts predict that the question of permits and the transfer of them from district to district may be a key piece of evidence in the trial.

A ban on transferring quotas of wildlife for hunting is a key reform which will almost certainly be part of a whole set of new regulations.

That was under discussion in Harare when about 100 people involved in various tourism and wildlife organisations gathered at the Parks Authority to strategise a way out of the storm created by Cecil’s death on July 2.

Professor David Cumming, Zimbabwe’s senior ecologist, who is lecturing Master’s students at UCT next week, said the government had banned all hunting around the Hwange National Park for the moment. A working group emerged from the emergency meeting which will concentrate on finding consensus for new regulations to govern hunting.

Ironically, many of the new regulations likely to emerge were agreed at a workshop in Harare during the week that Cecil was killed.

“It was encouraging that the meeting was called and that so many attended, and that a transparent statement will emerge which will have input from all sectors and will be available by the end of August,” Cumming said.

Now those proposed reforms, and some new ones, have to be agreed on and then urgently translated into law.

Bronkhorst said he had heard some of what had been discussed in Harare earlier in the day. “It sounds great. I will be pleased if there are reforms.”

He says he is looking forward to clearing his name at the trial. Cecil was wounded on the first night of Palmer’s hunt and he and Bronkhorst returned early the next day and shot him dead. “I did not know that this lion was famous, nor that it had a collar as it was part of a research project. The lion was shot at night. Both I and my client were devastated when we saw that the lion had a collar.”

He said he wished, now, that he had taken the collar and handed it in to the Parks Authority when he reported the incident to them. – ANA