Activist anger at planned sale of E C buffaloes

THE planned sale of 23 buffalos by the Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency (ECPTA) has angered animal rights activists.

EMS Foundation SA spokeswoman Michele Pickover labelled the sale as “state captu by the hunting industry and said it perpetuated trophy hunting.

Pickover said she was concerned the animals would be bought by game farmers and then used for hunting purposes.

She said current legislation was inadequate and needed to replaced as there was “no articulation between environmental legislation and the Animal Protection Act”.

“And another huge problem is that there is no government agency enforcing the Animal Protection Act. In a way it has been totally outsourced to a under-resourced BGO – the NSPCA – and they do not have any real teeth either.”

Pickover said the 23 buffalos would probably sell from anywhere between R100 000 and R1million each, depending on the size of their horns.

But local game farm owner John Rance said there was a great demand for hunting and it had contributed towards the growth in the buffalo population in the last 10 to 15 years.

Rance said sentiment such as that expressed by Pickover would lead to a decrease in wildlife numbers.

He said the hunting industry was enormous, both provincially and nationally, and contributed greatly to the country’s GDP.

“There are more wild game in the Eastern Cape now than there was in 1900 and that’s only due to the demand from hunting.”

ECPTA spokeswoman Nopasika Mxunyelwa said it became necessary to periodically manage the population of these animals in a bid to conserve biodiversity in the Eastern Cape’s protected areas.

She said the agency managed a strategic system informed by monitoring through aerial game census and other means that annually recommended effective management mechanisms like hunting, culling and live sales of these large herbivores.

“ECPTA is selling the 23 buffaloes in line with its strategic goals of securing key biodiversity in the province through improving management effectiveness of protected areas as well as developing and implementing a provincial protected area system that assists in growing revenue from biodiversity goods,” she said.

Mxunyelwa said the agency had a good selection of animals to sell, including quality bulls. It was impossible to predict how much the sale would generate as this would be determined by market forces.

The price depends on sex, age and condition of the animal and most importantly the market appetite at a given point.

The spokeswoman said the agency would invest funds raised towards conservation programmes.

The buffalo are from the Great Fish River Nature Reserve and the sale would be held at the agency’s office in Southernwood at the end of the month. —