I’ve just spent three weeks out in the cape region of South Africa, helping a colleague in my lab group conduct her research on the Cape Mountain Zebra. What really struck me while I was there was the attitude of the people there towards wildlife. It was my second trip in South Africa working and doing research on nature reserves. It struck me on my first visit and more forcefully this time.
What really brought it home to me was something a woman who worked on one of the private reserves we were conducting research on said when we were talking about cheetah. We were watching their male cheetah lazing about in the shade of a tree, fat and sluggish from a recent kill.
‘What have you been eating?’ She asked it in her thick Afrikaans accent. ‘Something expensive I bet’.
Private reserves like this one stock their land according to what they think guests will want to see. To do this they buy game in auctions or from other reserves and game farms. Each animal comes with a price tag My Western European sensibilities was knocked rather jarringly by this. In my mind, nature reserves exist to try and preserve areas of ecosystems as they would have existed before human disturbance. The animals and plants they house would, in that way, be selected to try and get back, as closely as possible, to this historical system. (Admittedly, this quest to restore to a historical baseline is being questioned. Sometimes it is impossible, sometimes it may be prohibitively expensive or it may in fact simply not be desirable. Novel ecosystems, rewilding and restoring ecosystem function and services are all approaches that don’t necessarily aim for a historical baseline) In this way, species are valued by their contribution to the system.
But this seemingly innocuous statement reveals a mindset that is very different. In South Africa, you own the game on your land. This is a contrast to Kenya, where they belong to the state. Having an animal that eats other animals on your reserve means have an asset that depletes the value of your property by ingesting other assets. It isn’t quite so valuable when it comes out the other end. This can be good business sense because people want to see cheetah. As long as the predators attract enough extra visitors or a high enough price hike to outweigh the loss of other animals then it can be a good idea. The troubling thing to me is that as soon as it stops making business sense, then you get rid of the cheetah. No matter how effectively you were breeding and conserving them, if they stop paying for themselves then why bother. In this way, you get reserves that have a system governed by the market, by economics rather than ecology.
In numbers terms, it is hard to argue with South Africa’s contribution to conservation. Once down to fewer than 100 individuals, there are now over 20,000 Southern White rhinos in the world, the vast majority of which live in South Africa. Many argue, and they are probably right, that this is at least in part due to the ban on trophy hunting being lifted. If land owners can realise the value vested in their animals, they have reason to stock them. The survival of the Southern white rhino is secure. The international trade ban on the Cape Mountain Zebra was also recently lifted. South African conservationists are now optimistic that their number will increase, as game farms and hunting reserves will stock them.
But the question I have to ask is; is it all about numbers? Would I prefer thousands of rhino living in intensively managed reserves that don’t even slightly resemble a nature a system and would fall apart without management? Or fewer rhino living in self-sustaining, wild ecosystems that have close to their full complement of species? The huge, elephant-in-the-room-caveat is poaching. Rhinos are more vulnerable if they are in more natural systems.
Private reserves are a lucrative business, and their existence isn’t going to be thrown into doubt by the moral dilemma of a European PhD student. The South Africans have to live with these animals and bear the expectations of the world for conserving them. I, in a grey and damp Manchester, do not. I would certainly pick this system over extinction. However, to me it would be nice if some places ecology triumphed over economics. A system that defines everything by its value seems a fairly bleak one.
Sherlock Holmes on Roses:
‘Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things — our powers, our desires, our food — are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.’