South Africa's Once and Future Park
by Alex Hawes
Animals plus tourists equals money—it's a simple formula. We humans can't help but adore the outdoors, and the creatures that bring music to the silence. Even the ones that might gnaw on our legs given half a chance. E.O. Wilson labeled the phenomenon "biophilia," in case anyone needed a term for our love of nature.
Animals plus guns equals money. Rhino horn, elephant tusk, lion hide. You'll find the remains in black market medicine stalls across the Far East, in the delicate keys of an old Steinway, or gaping wide-eyed on hardwood floors by flickering fires. Land defines the battleground on which these competing formulas clash. And the granddaddy of all battlefields—conservation's Waterloo—is Kruger.
Kruger National Park, South Africa, a wildlife reserve larger than Israel, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Throughout this century Kruger has served as a guinea pig in the grand experiment of park management. Maintaining wildlife in perpetuity involves more than a mastery of the previous equations—namely, making animals worth more alive than dead. In recent years the challenge before the park has shifted to limiting the impact of burgeoning game populations. The garden Kruger has tended is growing beyond its patch.
Yet 100 years ago, elephants, hippos, giraffes, eland, and other now-common species had all but disappeared. An outbreak of rinderpest (a viral disease) in 1896 nearly wiped out the entire population of buffalo, and many species of antelope. And white Voortrekkers striking north in search of farmland and gold introduced a foreign concept: killing wildlife for sport as well as subsistence. One famous hunter, Major Pretorius, shot 557 elephants in his lifetime.
Enter President Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, a sixth-generation Afrikaner, and a brash, imposing man deserving of such an imperial moniker. Despite being a hunter himself, Paul Kruger challenged the Volksraad—the Congress of the pre-Boer Transvaal Republic—to create safe havens for game animals. The Volksraad responded, establishing Sabie Game Reserve, the precursor to Kruger National Park, on March 26, 1898—two and one-half decades after the world's first national park, Yellowstone, came into existence.
The Boer War broke out the following year, but conservation at Sabie continued. The British government reproclaimed the land between the Sabie and Crocodile Rivers as a reserve in 1902. In 1926, sensing the curious growth of popularity in what we now label "ecotourism," the nascent Union of South Africa announced the Bill on National Parks. The first order of business: upgrading Sabie. More than 35 distinct vegetation zones, covering 750,000 acres in the northeastern corner of the country and overlapping much of Sabie's old boundaries, formally became forever off-limits to farming and hunting.
Re-named to honor the figure who first gave it life, Kruger National Park opened its gates to the public in 1927. Three cars, each charged a pound—worth roughly $45 today—drove in that first year. The next year 180 cars, carrying 800 people, drove through the park. And the year after that, the park staff realized the need for overnight accommodations, and built 17 concrete, windowless huts. Dwindling wildlife populations rebounded dramatically, and by 1955 more than 100,000 people were visiting each year.
Today, apartheid's demise has made the country a hot vacation spot for foreigners. The South Africa Tourist Board expects 1.8 million overseas visitors annually by the year 2000. With the average tourist spending $1,500 per trip, more than $2.5 billion may flood into the country each year, spilling down into craft stalls, roadside cafes, quiet B&Bs, and safari tour operations.
Take away the animals, however, and the tourists won't come. Dedicated rangers crisscross Kruger via Land Rovers, bicycle, helicopter, and on foot to make sure that doesn't happen. Yet when tourism, conservation, and commerce all tug on the wildlife fabric, the edges start to unravel.
Containing Nature
As the adage goes, fences make good neighbors. Ideally, fenced wildlife parks keep wild animals in, and livestock and people (save low-impact tourists) out. This doesn't always happen. Kruger borders Zimbabwe to the north and Mozambique to the east. Conservation quickly becomes complex in such a geographical bind. Since 1992, Mozambique has struggled with the transition to peace after two decades of revolution and civil war. The turmoil in Mozambique, the world's poorest nation, has produced a steady flow of illegal immigrants into South Africa, the continent's richest. From 1993 through 1997, more than 16,000 illegals were picked up in Kruger; from January to July of this year, 2,160 were arrested. The eastern border offers a perfect entry spot for those seeking to disappear into the bush. Perfect, with one exception: the carnivores on the other side.
How many illegals are killed is anyone's guess. Rangers report human footprints in the veld vanishing into nowhere and cite scraps of torn clothing as evidence of immigrants being killed by wild animals. One notorious pride of lions killed at least seven Mozambican immigrants in two weeks. Fearing the safety of its own personnel, the park management decided to shoot the pride. "It was very scary, I promise you," says Kruger's head veterinarian Douw Grobler. And at 6'4", Grobler—known as the "Gentle Giant"—does not scare easily. He hopes in the future to use radiocollars to keep track of man-eating lions, and to avoid having to kill carnivores that are simply following their instincts.
Some lions have managed to sneak out of the park. Others, however, appear to have been lured out for safari hunters to shoot. "You just dig a little under the fence and leave a bit of rotten meat," confided one safari operator to The Cook Report, a British documentary series.
The park is replacing the six-foot-high western fence with eight-foot fencing, and electrifying it. The primary target of this $3 million investment is not man-eating lions or gun-toting poachers, however, but disease. Tuberculosis particularly. Bovine TB has spread through the park more quickly than the perennial dry season fires.
The disease has shown up in as many as 70 percent of buffalo in herds grazing the southern regions of the park, while northern herds may have only one in 100 infected. The outbreak poses no direct threat to humans, according to the park management. Nonetheless, the disease could spread to cattle outside the reserve—where it probably came from in the first place—if buffalo stray. And it could then move to people who drink unpasteurized milk from infected cows. Some buffalo also carry foot-and-mouth disease—"a hundred times worse for cattle" according to Douw Grobler. Farmers are nervous.
Buffalo TB has proven difficult to detect in living animals. Mitchell Bush, chief of veterinary services at the National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center (CRC), has worked with local South African scientists to solve this problem. He and David Wildt, also of CRC, have done research at Kruger and elsewhere in South Africa since the early '80s, where they also developed safe anesthesia techniques for wild giraffes and other large mammals, with direct benefits to zoo veterinarians back in the States as well.
Bush's tuberculosis work offers hope that Kruger staff will be able to track the spread of the disease—the first step in containing it. Bovine TB potentially poses a threat to other wildlife too. Lions, a cheetah and a leopard, a troop of baboons, and a large number of kudu have acquired the disease, either from eating infected meat or drinking contaminated water. Grobler estimates that about ten percent of Kruger's lions are infected. None are known to have died of the disease; however, lions that test positive are killed to prevent further spread of the disease. Bush has recently taken a pre-emptive strike at elephant and rhino TB—which hasn't yet manifested itself in Kruger—by starting collaborative studies with South African scientists to develop diagnostic tests for these species similar to those for buffalo.
As with human tuberculosis, no vaccine yet exists to treat bovine TB. Fenced in, the disease may simply be left to take its natural course, part of the eternal ebb and flow of animal populations. Bush contends, however, that bovine TB came from domestic cattle, and should not be regarded, or treated, as natural.
And Nature certainly has nothing to do with it when bullet holes fill the carcasses.
Tusk and Horn
Ken Maggs, head of Kruger's anti-poaching unit, sees the casualties firsthand. It is Maggs' job to keep potential poachers out, and endangered species safe. The end of the civil war in Mozambique left the region with big guns and empty pockets. Aside from tracking the occasional illegal pet dealer or plant thief, Maggs' mission is fairly simple—protecting elephants and rhinos.
"The threat is out there, with drug and firearm syndicates," says Maggs. Even gold smugglers get involved. "To people that are moving contraband, rhino horn or (elephant) ivory is just another commodity that people can latch on to."
Last year, a Kruger warden found a South African and an illegal immigrant from Mozambique searching the veld in vain. In their possession: 13 rounds of ammunition, an AK-47 assault weapon, a Russian-made Nagat rifle, and illegal ivory. Hidden in the brush nearby lay the black male rhino the poachers had shot dead, but couldn't find.
Six more rhinos have been killed so far this year. But with the help of the South African police and army, local tribal chiefs, and a network of informants, Maggs' unit has forged a proactive approach. A National Police reservist, Maggs has legal authority to pursue poachers inside and outside Kruger. The Mozambican government has begun to cooperate too.
"Poachers are now not immune. We follow them right into Mozambique, in the company of Mozambican authorities. One time, if poachers went back in, they could stand on the other side of the fence and laugh at you," Maggs says. "That's changed. We've brought it home to Mozambique-based operations that it's no longer safe for them."
Yet the South African government allows a tightly controlled sale of elephant ivory from herds owned by private entrepreneurs, or from elephants that have died in national parks. Only craftsmen holding permits may purchase raw ivory; worked ivory then can be sold legally within the country. South Africa may one day join Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia in the export of ivory as well. The United Nations' Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) will allow these three countries a one-time "experimental" sale of 59 tons of confiscated ivory to Japan next year.
Poachers shot 102 South African elephants in 1981 alone, but only three in the last two years. Poaching pachyderms, as Maggs describes, is not a job for amateurs. Elephants are larger and more dangerous than rhinos. It then takes a long time to cut a tusk out—often long enough for park rangers to show up. And once the ivory's extracted, it's heavy to carry and hard to conceal. Slow and not terribly aggressive, rhinos on the other hand make easy targets.
"Rhino poaching is a sustained, ever-present threat," warns Maggs. While ivory's purpose is ornamental—witness the carved signature stamps still treasured in Japan—rhino horn's purpose is medicinal. Traditional healers in eastern Asia sell powder from rhino horn as an analgesic. "It's something ingrained in the culture," says Maggs. "It's like me coming to you and saying, 'Tylenol—you really shouldn't be using it.'"
CITES
narrowly rejected South Africa's proposal this past summer
to downlist the white rhino from the most endangered species
list, and to allow the country to sell off its stockpile of
rhino horn as its three neighbors have done with ivory. Rhino
horns grow back when trimmed, and the South African government
has considered permitting a domestic trade in this product
similar to that of ivory, while still protecting wild rhinos
from hunting.
The country's stance has left most conservationists cold,
but Maggs looks at it more pragmatically. "The first
thing you have to say is, 'Was the ban successful?' I'd personally
have to say no." More than 90 percent of rhino poachings
have occurred since the 1977 international ban on rhino horn,
while elephant poachings are far worse in countries farther
north, such as Kenya and Tanzania, that have strictly complied
with the 1989 international ban on ivory.
Both elephant and rhino populations, in fact, are on the rise
in South Africa. This is not altogether good news.
The Dumbo Pill
Elephants are bulldozers with floppy ears. To say they alter their habitats is like saying the QE2 leaves a wake. Closed woodland becomes open grassland as they trample brush and uproot trees. While essential to the regeneration of the ecosystems they inhabit, elephant populations left unchecked threaten the very survival of countless other species. In Kenya's Tsavo National Park, for example, 4,000 black rhinos may have perished in one year due chiefly to elephant-wrought habitat disturbance. "We don't manage just for one species, just for the elephant," says Douw Grobler. "From the smallest species to the largest, we manage for total biodiversity"—a medley of life that includes nearly 150 species of mammal, 500 species of bird, and 2,000 species of vascular plant in the park.
From 1966 until 1995, up to 600 elephants per year were culled by park staff. Rangers took to the air in helicopters, and shot the creatures with darts carrying lethal drugs. The chemicals paralyzed the animals' ability to breathe; the elephants, still awake, occasionally suffocated to death before rangers found and shot them. Carcasses were sent to the park's very own abattoir, ground up, and canned for immediate sale.
The world winced. Norway even threatened to resume whaling, in a twisted tit-for-tat. And so South Africa has halted the practice, for now. Only two alternatives to culling exist: translocation or contraception.
Moving a seven-ton load, much less several hundred such loads, is easier said than done. Trucking elephants to other protected reserves requires specialized equipment and drugs, experience, and patience. Being territorial, translocated elephants often find themselves disoriented, struggling to find food sources or even crashing into unfamiliar electric fences. And the target reserves themselves have quickly become saturated with the beasts: 136 elephants were moved from Kruger last year alone.
The notion of elephant contraception stretches the imagination even further. Jay Kirkpatrick of ZooMontana and Douw Grobler have teamed up to test a vaccine designed to prevent pachyderm pregnancies. Kirkpatrick has done this before, having developed vaccines for the wild horses of Assateague, white-tailed deer on Fire Island, wild donkeys in the Virgin Islands, and water buffalo on Guam. The U.S. Humane Society, preferring contraception to culling, sponsors much of his work.
The park rejected an earlier contraceptive solution that used estrogen implants; while effective in stopping pregnancies, the hormones caused females to be in continual estrus, and to suffer constant harassment from mating-minded males. The current birth control vaccine, however, operates within the female elephants' normal estrous cycle. Like any mammal, a female elephant's zona pelucida, made up of four varieties of protein, forms a sheath coating the egg. For the egg to be fertilized, the sperm receptor (ZP-3—the third of the four proteins) must open the way for the sperm to enter, like a key into a keyhole. Kirkpatrick found that after introducing a vaccine containing follicles of a pig's zona pelucida (PZP), an elephant's proteins will attack and bind onto these foreign antigens, essentially distracting the sperm receptors from facilitating fertilization.
Within a period of eight days in October 1996, the researchers captured an astounding 100 elephants. Of these, they selected 21 non-pregnant females to receive the PZP vaccine, and another 20 to receive a placebo. Their data have not yet been published, but Kirkpatrick can report general success: "It worked—there was a significant reduction in fertility" among females that received the vaccine.
For long-term population control, park staff would need to administer annual shots to vaccinated elephants for the contraception to last. With more than 8,000 elephants in the park, some 3,500 (or 70 percent of the female population) would require boosters each year. That's ten injected elephants every day. "It gets pretty dicey," Kirkpatrick admits.
Yet on the eastern side of the Kruger-Mozambique fence, pristine habitat languishes, seemingly yearning for the rumble of large animals to "come and get it." Therein may lie the ultimate solution.
Park in Peace
Kruger has too many elephants and an embarrassment of other large mammal riches. Thirty years of pre- and post-independence fighting decimated similar populations on the Mozambican side of the fence (and left thousands of active landmines South Africa now is helping remove). Yet the upheaval did limit development, preserving vast expanses of healthy habitat. The land is ripe for restocking.
But Mozambique's government alone can't afford the cost of building the roads, policing the reserves, and restocking the empty terrain. The World Bank has stepped in to stimulate private investment and bureaucratic backing for a "transfrontier conservation area" (TFCA), linking Kruger with Mozambique's Gaza region. A hunting concession along Kruger's border would join with three existing Mozambican reserves—covering a 7,500-square-mile area—to form the Gaza TFCA. A private enterprise, Gaza may include sections set aside for hunting, as well as a "pure game park," according to the World Bank's Robert Clement-Jones, the project's task manager.
Economics will determine the ultimate outcome, but already several South African and European companies have expressed an interest in Gaza. "Kruger is jammed with people visiting," explains Clement-Jones. "If you can just siphon off ten percent, you're doing incredibly well."
The concept has grown wings. Last year, millionaire businessman Anton Rupert, a former president of World Wildlife Fund-South Africa, created the Peace Parks Foundation. The foundation proposes extending the Gaza TFCA into areas of southern Zimbabwe, to form the world's largest nature reserve—an area the size of Maine. The foundation also conceives of parks straddling the borders of South Africa's other neighbors: Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, and Namibia.
Truth and Reconciliation
Meanwhile, the South African government has turned its gaze inward, trying to right past wrongs. The nation today is struggling with the nobly complicated idea of land restoration, after decades of apartheid policy forced blacks from their homes into segregated townships. Kruger and other of the country's parks owe much of their existence to this evil legacy. In 1969, the South African government dispossessed the ten villages of the Makuleke tribe, a community then living in the Pafuri region between the Levuvhu and Limpopo Rivers, near the Mozambique and Zimbabwe borders. The park snatched 50,000 acres from the tribe, and last year the Makuleke sued to get their land back.
On May 30 of this year, the government announced a breakthrough: a landmark settlement in which the Makuleke receive ownership of the area under claim, and an additional 12,500 acres of sensitive wetlands adjacent to the park, in exchange for cooperating with South Africa National Parks (SANP) to preserve this habitat and the wildlife that calls it home. The Makuleke will forfeit rights to inhabit or exploit the natural resources of this land, but will gain control of all ecotourism ventures here. They plan to contract out lucrative lodging and safari tour operations—including tours of their own cultural heritage, such as the ancient baobab tree under which elders once met to discuss the community's affairs, or the recently excavated site of Thulamela, a kingdom ruled from AD 1250 to 1700 by ancestors of the Venda people. The settlement with the Makuleke may provide a template for other outstanding land claims in South Africa's game reserves.
SANP hopes to draw black South Africans back to the natural heritage of their ancestral home. Within the last two years, blacks' presence in National Parks management has surged from ten to 70 percent; the new SANP Chief Executive, Mavuso Msimang, is black. However, the proportion of black visitors to the parks has not increased similarly. The average black farmer toiling just outside Kruger's gates makes less in one month than some lodge rooms inside the park cost per night. A vehicle is also need to tour Kruger's hundreds of miles of paved and dirt roads. But cars are still a luxury for most of the park's neighbors, and bus tours, usually filled with foreign tourists, are also prohibitively expensive.
Yet Nelson Mandela's new South Africa has flung Kruger's gates open to any and all, money willing. Biophilia is driving people to the park in record numbers, and to the tune of $60 million a year. But Kruger's caretakers can't afford complacency. Poaching, disease, and overpopulation all risk damaging the delicate web the park has worked a century to nurture, and SANP must continue to improve community relations, and make Kruger both palatable and profitable to those who see it as a legacy of the colonial past.
Bush and Wildt of the National Zoo have done their own part to ensure the future of some of the park's wildlife. By refining techniques of cryopreservation—collecting and freezing the sperm of rare or endangered animals—they are making progress toward establishing genome banks for such species in the event of natural—or unnatural—disasters.
But Kruger's caretakers can never rest.
"Someone could come in tonight and shoot four or five rhino," says Ken Maggs. "I'm very cautiously optimistic. I have no option."
Former ZooGoer intern Alex Hawes is a freelance writer and photographer.
Friends of the National Zoo regularly hosts safaris to South Africa, which include a visit to Kruger National Park. For information, please call or 202/673-4953.
(ZooGoer 276) 1998. Copyright 1998 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.)
