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Poaching is wiping out Zimbabwe's wildlife
Ed Stoddard, Reuters
July 02, 2004

http://www.enn.com/news/2004-07-02/s_25494.asp

JOHANNESBURG - Rare species like the black rhino are being wiped out in Zimbabwe because of rampant poaching and human settlement on private game reserves seized by the state, a conservation group said on Thursday.

"At the moment the situation really stinks," said Johnny Rodrigues, the head of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, a wildlife advocacy group. "The reports we're getting from the guys on the ground are that all the wildlife stocks have been completely wiped out in the private conservancies. There's nothing left," he said from his Zimbabwe home.

Rodrigues said private reserves, once one of the backbones of Zimbabwe's thriving wildlife and tourism industries, were being decimated by President Robert Mugabe's seizure of white-owned land for distribution to blacks.

The black rhino population has halved in four years, and the African wild dog is in danger of extinction in Zimbabwe, he said. Elephant numbers have also dropped.

Game reserves as well as farms have been targeted under Mugabe's land redistribution policy. Rodrigues said only 12 of the country's 88 private conservancies had not been confiscated by the state.

Impoverished settlers are snaring animals for food and reducing habitat by cutting trees for firewood, while unscrupulous rangers are bringing in foreign trophy seekers for uncontrolled hunting, he said.

The government has frequently denied reports of an upsurge in poaching linked to lawlessness and a collapsing economy, which has experienced fuel and foreign currency shortages along with food supply problems linked to the farm seizures.
But Rodrigues said there was growing evidence Zimbabwe's once magnificent herds of wildlife were suffering.

"In 2000 there were 400 to 500 black rhinos in the country, but we now estimate there are only 200 left, if that.... We know of at least eight that have been poached this year," he said.
The plight of the black rhino in Zimbabwe stands in contrast to the rest of Africa, where the lumbering colossus is on the rebound. The World Conservation Union and the wildlife preservation body WWF International said last week that black rhino numbers in Africa now stood at around 3,600, a rise of 500 over the last two years.

Poachers typically hack off the horns, valued in East Asia for medical purposes, and leave the hulking carcasses to rot under the African sun.

Wild Dogs in Peril
Rodrigues also said Zimbabwe's population of African wild dogs, the continent's second rarest carnivore, appeared to be on the brink of dying out because of humans.

"Subsistence poaching you'll never stop because of the poverty and unemployment (in Zimbabwe)," he said. Unemployment in Zimbabwe is at least 70 percent, and the contraction of commercial agriculture has been blamed for food shortages.

"But foreign hunters are being brought in with no controls, and that could be stopped, except they pay dollars."

He said the nationalization of prime game land was a grave mistake, as wildlife conservation has huge costs, such as electric fencing and antipoaching patrols.

Zimbabwe is also one of the last great elephant range states in the world, with tens of thousands of the huge creatures, but Rodrigues said their numbers were also falling.

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