Bushmeat need shows why private sector in game reserves could help

What conservation units – now being beefed up by paramilitary units in various national parks and game reserves – are doing is to hunt for such poachers. Yet there is a way in which demand for an object outweighs controls placed around its being procured.

Demand for bushmeat becomes a threat to conservation as it brings up a new factor in the natural balance between predators and prey, as the market demand for such meat can easily overwhelm limited licenced hunting as it is often practiced. In addition, licences are usually available for animals whose supply in the natural environment is widespread and in large numbers, which isn’t necessarily what a new market craze will be gunning for. In that case pursuing less populous varieties leads to ecosystem imbalances, in time.

The easier method or one which conservation authorities are used to is to take the bushmeat demand as a problem of law and order, but they face a managerial problem since a segment of the hunting is licenced and another part isn’t. That provides leeway for mixing up, but when it comes to large species like giraffe which may have a special protection regime in conservation regulations, procedural mix up or negligence becomes difficult. Other ways of facilitating poaching thus come in, tied to solidity of law enforcement.

At the same time, bushmeat demand, like the need for wood for charcoal, furniture or export incomes, is something that can be projected over time, where it isn’t the natural environment which forms the focus of time-based management of resource exploitation. It is to place natural forest zones under community groups as in village forest areas management, or private companies especially as it involves skills like the control of predators in given areas. Then the right sort of targeted bushmeat animals can rise in numbers.

Especially at this period where large scale grazing in a customary mode is becoming out of date with drought diminishing the free movement of cattle herders in pursuit of pasture, getting such communities to take up portions of game controlled areas and invest in ponds should not be difficult. They will have boundaries set by conservation authorities, where proactive limitation will be placed on the movement of animals from or into controlled areas, to keep off predators, chiefly. Cattle and giraffes can live together.

That would change the way auxiliary game parks are managed, as a mixture of cattle ranches and bushmeat zones, with an additional advantage of eliminating current wars of farmers and herders, where the roaming herders spread chaos to settled communities. This situation is unmanageable as conservation is strictly the keeping of animals, though it can regroup such areas into mixed prey and predator zones (national parks) and circumscribed bushmeat-cum-cattle herding zones. It can be done if planned out well.