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The
Wild Life
Observations and Reflections on Africa's Wildlife
I - Gras (Springbok)
I got an email from Africa, from Jannie and Anri, from Gras Ranch in Namibia, where
I spent some time with my sons awhile back. Gras Ranch is 90,000plus acres on Namibia’s central plateau, halfway between
the red sands of the Kalahari Desert and the high dunes of the Namib; rolling hills of shrub savannah and grassveldt with
sweet-thorn trees and broad expanses of broken volcanic rock; beautiful country - high, wide and very exposed.
The
Fish River winds through Gras for 20 miles or so; filling and flooding once each year during the rainy season. Where the river
bends, it has cut deeply into the rock of the plateau, leaving high cliffs above pools of still water in the dry Namibian
winter. Chacma Baboons sit along the cliffs that face the ranch house barking and howling in the evening and morning. Barking
back at them quiets them momentarily, but shortly they resume.
There is unending conflict between baboons and people
in rural Africa. Anything left unattended baboons destroy. At the tented camp down by the river, a full-time guard is stationed,
or the baboons will tear everything up. Throughout Africa, they are considered vermin, and often shot on sight. They keep
their distance and bark warnings to each other and flee long before we get near them when we are out hunting antelope on the
veldt.
Anri, in her email, said that Jannie and the other men were out catching springbok. They had caught 35
that morning in a boma*. Catching springbok sounds like great fun to me, and it makes me wish I were there. I feel like
I belong in rural Africa, but for now, I live in urban America. When I tell people here about the game ranches of Africa,
I am met with blank stares, suspicion and sometimes rage. There is no frame of reference other than what is learned from television
shows and nature writing, both heavily biased toward a Disney-World view of wildlife. Moreover, people here seem unwilling,
and at times unable, to even consider ideas which fall outside of that perspective. To most urban Americans, hunting is anachronistic,
an idea that has no place in their lives. To the media, it is a topic best avoided altogether.
Errol, my PH*,
told me how springbok are caught live as we rode across the ranch hunting for kudu. A boma, almost an acre in size and open
at one end, is built out on the veldt. Jannie goes up in his ultra-light aircraft, locates a herd of springbok, and runs them
toward the boma. A few men and vehicles extend outward from the open end, directing the herd inside, after which the opening
is closed. Of course, it’s not quite that easy; Jannie has to do some pretty clever flying for a successful capture,
and the work doesn’t stop there.
When the time comes to transport the springbok to another ranch or preserve,
one by one they must be grabbed by the horns, hogtied and blindfolded. They are too wild too herd freely into a truck and
would break horns and legs in their panic. Darting them with tranquilizer is simply too expensive. This work is not subsidized
by the Namibian Government, or financed by wealthy, concerned environmentalists, conservation organizations or NGO’s
of any kind. Like all sustainable conservation work, it must pay for itself. And hunters do not shoot captured animals. Except
for a few quasi-canned lion hunting operations in South Africa, the “Canned Hunt” is an Environmentalists myth.
Springbok are small antelope; a mature bull stands just 4 1/2 feet at the horn tips and rarely weighs more than 90
pounds, but grabbing a wild one by the horns, while not extremely dangerous, is a skill. Jannie had a fresh scar on his forehead
from a springbok horn when I saw him last. Even though a large herd of elephant can be relocated a thousand miles in half
an hour on the Discovery Channel, the truth is that it takes a lot of hard work to relocate even small African wildlife.
Springbok and many other species are thriving at Gras. Jannie estimated that there were about 3,000 springbok on the
ranch when I was there in July of 2000, a population that had grown to 5,000 when I went back in 2002 and now stands at some
7,000. Twenty years ago there were fewer than that in all of Namibia, but that was before sustainable utilization in the economics
of wildlife management was properly understood or widely employed.
It is still not widely accepted. Next Page: Hunting
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Notes (*)
Boma: Fence enclosure
PH: Professional Hunting Guide
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