Homo sapiensToday, the vast majority of us live free from human-wildlife conflict – HWC in conservation speak. By HWC I mean the kind of conflict that humans lose when the stakes are terrifyingly high, such as being eaten or trampled by a large, wild animal. Most of the people who live in the shadow of potentially fatal wild animal attacks are the poorest of the poor, generally in Africa.
Like other SDG targets – such as rolling out clean water and sanitation – the faunal poverty line is both a symptom and cause of extreme impoverishment. It is no coincidence that Africa is the world’s poorest continent and the one where HWC extracts its highest toll. This stems from one of the most arresting features of global biogeography: Africa is the last great refuge of megafauna – big animals that kill humans.
The Aarhus researchers, crunching the biggest data set to date, found: “Megafauna extinctions were strongly linked to hominin palaeobiogeography and only weakly to glacial-interglacial climate change.” One reason: climate continuity rather than change – South America had high extinction rates despite a fairly stable climate, in marked contrast to sub-Saharan Africa where weather patterns were similar.
Several large warm-blooded carnivores, including cave bears and lions in Europe and sabre-toothed cats and American lions and cheetahs, also went extinct – a typical scenario when an alpha predator invades new territory. This marked the start of an epoch that many scientists now call the “Anthropocene”. But for humanity it was, in many ways, liberating: it was the initial lifting of the faunal poverty line, enabling growing numbers of humans to go about their everyday business without the immediate threat of large animal attack. And a world devoid of such threats is one more conducive to a range of economic activities, from farming to trade.
But cattle ownership in drought-prone Africa is a precarious foundation for household savings. And the ubiquity of witchcraft belief – a conservative social force that discourages innovation and capital accumulation – in Africa may stem from the historical intensity of HWC. Animal attacks in rural Africa are often attributed to sorcery – hardly surprising as it is the one natural event that resembles an intentional act of malice.
Large carnivore populations have been on the rebound in the developed world because of conservation measures. The study also cited data showing a marked increase in people engaging in outdoor activities, including visiting wilderness areas. And these city slickers tend to do “risk-enhancing” things that spark attacks, such as leaving children unattended or approaching a female with young.
But there have been detailed assessments in Africa – which shows it can be done. Between 1990 and 2005, 563 people were killed by lions and more than 300 injured in southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique, a feline reign of terror that became the subject of a paper lead-authored by Craig Packer, probably the world’s foremost lion authority.
The DEA says it is looking at compiling a database. And there are precedents: South Africa keeps detailed statistics on rhino poaching – surely deadly HWC incidents can also be tracked. This is not always easy – for example, there is no hard data on the number of Mozambican migrants killed by wildlife in the Kruger National Park, in part because the evidence vanishes when a human is devoured by lions.
South Africa has been a leader on this front in one crucial area – the use of fences to mitigate HWC. In South Africa, elephants, rhinos, buffalo and lions are all contained on land, state or private, that is fenced. This keeps the vast majority of South Africans on the safe side of the faunal poverty line. Pointedly, South Africa is the only industrialised economy that has had dangerous African megafauna within its borders.
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