Poachers outnumber tourists on world's biggest private game reserve

Date: 14 August 2000

Source: Independent (UK)

Author: Anon

In Mugabe's bankrupt and lawless land, wildlife is being systematically annihilated

It is the height of the safari season, but this year the poachers – chief among them Mugabe's ‘war veterans' – outnumber the tourists.

The ‘vets' and hungry farm workers do not come to feast their eyes on some of the most beautiful and endangered creatures on Earth. They come to fill their bellies with rhino, zebra and cheetah.

What they do not eat, they will sell.

The Independent newspaper (London) reports: ‘As Zimbabwe's political crisis reverberates deep in the magical wilderness of Save Valley Conservancy, the world's biggest private game reserve, thousands of rare animals are the latest victims of a land war which has become a free-for-all among impoverished people struggling to survive.

The animals include black rhinoceros, African wild dogs, giraffes and leopards.

Amid what he calls the ‘systematic annihilation' of stocks by thousands of poachers, the estate manager Dave Stockil, who works with his uncle, Clive, is in despair.

‘The scouts are patrolling the Conservancy but they are powerless because the police will not intervene,' he says.

Mr. Stockpile estimates that the 850,000-acre reserve has already lost thousands of antelope – killed by crude circular snares made with wire stolen from the perimeter fence.

A tusk from an elephant which had apparently been shot was found to have been removed and the reserve's conservator, Graham Connear, believes rhino-horn traders have arrived in the area.

Mr Connear estimates that at, any one time, between 500 and 2,000 poachers are on the conservancy – a tract of land the size of Majorca.

The government has cause to act because tourism – currently down to a trickle –is a major foreign currency earner. In addition, Zimbabwe's European Union meat sales licence is in jeopardy because poachers destroying perimeter fencing raise the possibility that foot and mouth disease in the reserve's buffalo could spread to cattle.

Dave Stockil says: ‘If the poaching stopped now we would need a seven ton truck to remove the snares because there are thousands of them and they are killing animals far faster than the poachers can collect the meat.'