A South African conservation law that has been withdrawn after a legal challenge had the unintended consequence of threatening the viability of keeping 16 million wild animals, ranchers and hunters said.
(Bloomberg) — A South African conservation law that has been withdrawn after a legal challenge had the unintended consequence of threatening the viability of keeping 16 million wild animals, ranchers and hunters said.
An amended version of the Threatened or Protected Species, or TOPS, list was pulled ahead of its planned implementation on April 1 after a legal challenge from Wildlife Ranching South Africa and the Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment said in a statement on Wednesday.
The hunters and ranchers said the proposed rules on movement and breeding of the 16 million animals, ranging from lions to antelope, kept on their land would have slashed their value, meaning that the ranches could be closed or turned back to traditional agriculture. After the amendments were released in February there was inadequate consultation and the department ignored the contribution of the private sector toward conservation, they said.
“Government has got to learn to consult with its constituents and it has to take the private sector seriously,” said Dries van Coller, chief executive officer of PHASA, said in an interview on Thursday. “We were conveniently pushed to one side.”
The department reached an undisclosed settlement with the organizations and agreed to pay their costs.
South Africa decades ago prompted a boom in the game farming industry by allowing farmers to own wild animals on their land. Today 80% of the 20 million wild animals in the country, which boasts the world’s biggest population of rhinos and is key to the survival of species ranging from cheetahs to sable antelope, live on private land.
The number of wild animals in South Africa has jumped 36-fold from 557,000 since 1964 as private ownership gave value to the animals as they could be bought or sold, the organizations said in court papers. Today wild animals are actively bred, traded, hunted and kept for ecotourism purposes on private land, which is often of little use for agriculture because it is barely arable. The number of wildlife ranches has climbed to 9,000 from 3,500 in 1992.
The industry, including government-run protected areas, employ 418,000 people, according to government figures.
The department didn’t count the animals kept on private land in their assessment of whether animals were protected or not, the organizations said. This resulted in them saying there were 1,346 adult sable antelope in the country while the organizations estimate there are as many as 125,000 with a breeding bull of the scimitar-horned antelope fetching about 45,000 rand ($2,462) on auction.
Managing Elephants
“It’s a massive threat to the industry,” Richard York, CEO of WRSA, said in an interview. “Legislation was based on the department’s own failure in their own protected areas.”
To curb hybridization of endangered animals the department wanted to limit the movement of some species to within their natural ranges without defining what those were, York said. Common species including blesbok, blue wildebeest and zebras were classified as endangered even though culling has to be undertaken to keep their populations under control, he said.
The organizations also objected to rules that would prevent them from owning free roaming cheetahs and leopards and hunting lions in controlled areas, or large farms, as opposed to an earlier prohibition that had stopped the shooting of the big cats in relatively small enclosures — a practice known pejoratively as ‘canned hunting.’
In addition to withdrawing the new protected species list the department also halted the implementation of new and revised regulations related to elephant ownership and management, leopard hunting and trade in rhino horn as the laws were said to be inter-related.
“The department is still committed in reforming the legislative framework in relation to the threatened or protected terrestrial and freshwater species,” it said.
It didn’t immediately respond to further queries.
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