BF2S Forums Marlboroman Has Jungle Fever.....

In Central Africa, wildlife poaching has become a form of war. Isolated hunters with primitive weapons have been replaced by well-funded, highly organized groups of foreign poachers. These poachers are heavily armed, and extremely thorough -- they'll kill everything that moves, including people.

By some accounts these paramilitary poaching teams are getting bigger and more destructive. They're a threat to wildlife and political stability. But NPR's John Nielsen reports attempts are under way to turn this trend around.

Until the end of the 1980s, the forests and savannahs on the eastern side of the Central African Republic were full of wild animals. Local hunters and a few poachers killed everything they could eat, and it seemed to make little difference.

Then, in the 1990s, the resource wars began. Large and alarmingly well-organized gangs of poachers came west from Sudan. Hides and meat were cut from the carcasses of lions, leopards, cheetah, hyena, buffalo and elephant.

It was horrible, a tour guide said, speaking to a film crew that later sold some of its footage to NPR. Poachers used anti-tank weapons to blow the heads off elephants. Forests and savannahs were burned to the ground. Groups of animals were killed en masse. The meat is smoked and shipped to crowded African cities, or to exotic restaurants in Asia and Europe.

Dirt-poor governments faced with problems ranging from health care crises to armed rebellions have been powerless to stop the so-called "bushmeat" trade, conservationists say.

Poaching expert Kathi Austin directs the arms and conflict program at a non-profit group called the Fund for Peace. She's tracked African poaching trends since 1987, and says poaching grew more destructive as the market for bushmeat was commercialized, then militarized.

Austin says profits from the sale of bushmeat can be enormous. She predicts war-like bushmeat hunts will be more common in the years ahead, unless governments of Central African countries find the will and the money needed to reverse these trends.

But outside help -- long absent as diplomats and funding sources largely ignored the crisis -- may now be on the way. At a recent U.N. environmental summit in South Africa, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that the United States would contribute more than $50 million to an ambitious plan to preserve wildlife and habitat in the Congo River basin. American environmental groups, American logging companies, the European Union, and other countries have pledged tens of millions of dollars more.

If this initiative proceeds as planned, poachers in the Congo Basin will be tracked by observers, barred from logging roads and shunned by governments that used to look the other way. They will also be confronted by well-trained, well-equipped park guards.

There are so few lions in Africa that they may become extinct there, a wildlife expert warned on Thursday.

Dr Lawrence Frank, from the University of California, said that numbers of the animal had fallen by 90% in the last 20 years. There are now only 23,000 left, compared to 200,000 in the early 1980s. Dr Frank said: "It's not just lions. Populations of all African predators are plummeting." There are only 15,000 cheetahs and 5,000 wild dogs left on the continent.

He Blamed the fall in numbers on people killing them to protect their farm animals.He thinks that with dogs trained to raise the alarm, and better fences, farmers and predators can live side by side.

Kenyan lions killed in revenge attacks

The government is hunting Maasai warriors alleged to be killing the lions
Kenyan Maasai warriors have killed 10 lions from the Nairobi national park in revenge for killing their livestock.

The tenth lion was killed on Sunday after eating six cows, seven goats, seven sheep and a donkey. The government has now sent in the para-military General Service Unit to track down and arrest the Maasai warriors.

The lions have been killed over the last two months when they strayed outside the park to hunt for zebra and antelope.

The Maasai say they will not succumb to government threats to arrest them for killings the lions.

''When one lion is killed, the government is up in arms against us but when over 100 of our animals are killed nothing is done to compensate us," Kenya's Daily Nation quoted Mr Geoffrey Ntampaya, a spokesman for the community saying.

They say they are prepared to be jailed as long as they are protecting their animals.Maasai wealth is traditionally calculated on the basis of the number of cows or goats that an individual owns.

Wildlife conservationists accuse the Maasai of slaughtering the lions and pocketing their manes, tails, claws and teeth for trophies or for sale.

The hunting of game has been banned in Kenya since the late 1970s.

The area covered by the park is traditional Maasai land.

There is a feeling that poachers may have moved in to take advantage of the stand-off between the Maasai and the Kenya Wildlife Service.

The Maasai live and graze their livestock near the boundaries of the park.

During the rainy season between March and July herbivores, like zebra and antelope, move out of the parks in search of fresh pastures.The lions follow them in search of food.Last week the government agreed to protect the remaining lions in special fenced areas while safeguarding and capturing those which had strayed out of the park.

The Kenya Wildlife Service - a semi-government organization - has also been looking into the possibility of fencing the entire park.

Last edited by Marlboroman82 (2006-10-26 19:14:26)