CARACALS AND POLITICS: AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MINISTER RESPONSIBLE FOR NATURE CONSERVATION IN THE NORTHERN CAPE PROVINCE.

March 10, 2001

Your department has laid criminal charges against me and I have been told that I will shortly be summonsed to appear in Court. My offence was to rescue three little caracal kittens from the murderous confiscate-and-shoot policy of your department. My crime was to show compassion for God’s creatures in a cruel land where the only good predator is a dead one. This crime is apparently so serious that two Advocates including the Deputy Attorney-General himself will travel up from Kimberley to ensure that I am convicted.

Yet we did not flout or disobey the law, Minister. You see, being the only registered Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre in the largest province of South Africa, our Kalahari Raptor Centre had a permit to care for birds and small mammals. We had already applied in addition for a specific permit to care for caracals, when we fetched them from the farmer who had trapped them. We immediately and openly notified your department that we had the animals, and asked what we should do with them. That is not breaking the law but rather doing our best to comply with it. Why then am I being prosecuted.?

But that is not the only question to which we publicly ask an answer. There are much more important questions raised here.

Your department’s immediate response to our kind action was to threaten us with prosecution under a piece of apartheid-era legislation called the Problem Animal Control Ordinance of 1957. This law is not only grotesquely cruel to wildlife, it is also obscenely racist and partial. It begins "Any six people who are not black may form a hunt club." It goes on to prevent any black people from belonging to a hunt club and to prohibit hunt clubs from operating on land owned by black people.

My question is this. Eleven years after Nelson Mandela walked to freedom, why is such a racist and destructive law still being enforced by your department?

At our own expense, we have applied to the High Court for this dreadful law to be declared unconstitutional. Surely that was your job, Minister. Why is the Kalahari Raptor Centre having to do your job for you?

When we visit your department we cannot fail to notice that the same white males who governed the department under the apartheid regime are still there. As one would expect from such people, there is no ethic of kindness and welfare for wildlife, only for the perceived welfare of the livestock farming community. The same bullies and the same old laws and policies which have caused such monstrous bloodshed and misery to our wild animals are still operating. Why has nothing changed?

Appointing a black person in the form of yourself to administer this department is both cosmetic and meaningless if the murderous policies and laws of the past are not scrapped and replaced with modern ones that lay stress upon the welfare and interests of the wildlife. And it is not only the wildlife that suffers from the mindless policies of your department. The rural South Africans who subsist in abject poverty are also suffering. The only extensive industry capable of being sustained in the Kalahari is eco-tourism. Studies such as Phinda have shown that replacing livestock farming with eco-tourism has meant, in round terms, ten times the income generated, five times the number of jobs and four times the wages. By neglecting your statutory duty to preserve fauna and flora, you are perpetuating poverty in the Northern Cape.

Then there is the ecology. Livestock farming is killing the Kalahari. The semi-desert eco-system is too fragile to support farming. The camelthorn acacia is being turned into impenetrable swarthaak and sand. Unscientific ranchers export meat and import the desert. What are you doing about that, Minister?

There are political considerations as well. Many South Africans do not have the privilege of owning land, Minister. Yet you take money from the struggling taxpayer to provide services to the landowners which they do not need. And for good measure, you reward the taxpayer for having his money stolen in this fashion by using that money to destroy the country’s wildlife heritage. Your department is a grim caricature of what a nature conservation department should be, and prosecuting someone for showing kindness to animals is a good point on which to rest my case.

If the general public knew what we know about your department’s destruction of our national wildlife heritage, there would be public outrage. We could talk about scarce and valuable animals like Brown hyenas being trapped in vicious gin traps and then shot – by your department. We can talk about canned rhino hunting facilitated by your department in a municipal game park. We can ask the public if it agrees with your department’s refusal to prosecute the hunter who tortured a semi-tame rhino to death over an 8-hour period, leaving it to the Kalahari Raptor Centre and the NSPCA to do your work in trying to get justice for the poor rhino. There are so many examples to choose from arising out of your departments murderous confiscate- and- shoot policies for predators. And the bizarre hunt clubs. We can talk about the illegal and monstrous persecution of the harmless little Cape Fox in 18 of the 28 magisterial districts of our province because your department says it is a ‘potential predator’. What on earth is a ‘potential predator’, Minister?

Misconduct proceedings have been instituted with the Public Protector’s Office against the two senior officials of your department. The complaint refers to threats, intimidation, illegal invasion of property, defamation, malicious prosecution, abuse of authority, abuse of the process of the Court and breach of statutory duty to conserve nature. Why are these officials not being prosecuted, Minister? Or disciplined? Is such behaviour considered acceptable by you?

We suggest you should be assisting the Kalahari Raptor Centre, not obstructing its work. Go to our website www.raptor.co.za to see what we do for your province. This year some 3000 schoolchildren, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, will visit us for environmental education. You should be saving our tourist treasures, not exterminating them. You should be encouraging the changing land use of the Kalahari towards a more sustainable and more economically viable eco-tourism. The Constitution gives all South Africans the right to have the environment protected by reasonable and appropriate conservation measures.(Sec.24) Your department is presently so incestuously devoted to the narrow interests of the hunting and livestock industries that the wider interests of all South Africans, and particularly the rural poor, are being ignored. So much so that we are preparing to bring High Court proceedings against the Minister of Finance for an order prohibiting him from allocating or paying any further public funds to your department until it can show that it has been so completely re-organised that it is no longer a threat to our national heritage.

The insane policies and practices of a brutal past only serve to make conservation, like Apartheid, a dirty word. Why do you rubber-stamp them, Minister?

Yours sincerely

Chris Mercer

Kalahari Raptor Centre

South Africa.

Persons who wish to comment on this open letter may do so to:

Kalahari Raptor Centre krc

President Mbeki president

Minister Responsible minister

Minister Valli Moosa vmoosa