African Wild Dogs (Part 5)
Death by Fencing
by Richard Conniff
This is the dispiriting subtext to Tico McNutt's research: He names his wild dogs, records their genealogies, and chronicles their itinerant lives—in the expectation that they will not be able to live this way much longer, even in a wilderness as vast as the Okavango. On the surface, it's a familiar story of villagers with cattle steadily encroaching on wildlife: In Shorobe, a cluster of mud huts on the edge of the Okavango, a group of threadbare farmers sit in the dust to talk, beside a well they have just drilled for a new water hole, and they sound like livestock ranchers everywhere. They long to kill predators. They gripe about government compensation programs, which pay for their lost animals slowly or not at all. They live outside the loose perimeter known as the southern Buffalo Fence, and they routinely lose livestock to roaming lions, hyenas, and wild dogs.
When I suggest it might be better not to keep cattle this close to a wildlife refuge, my translator does me a favor by refusing to translate: “Wildlife belongs to the government, and livestock belongs to the farmer. If it gets into the farmers’ minds that you think wildlife is more valuable than cattle, then you will be starting a fire.” And he adds: “According to Botswana culture, you cannot live without cattle.” It could be Wyoming, outside Yellowstone National Park. But the farmers are also attuned to new possibilities. They envy another village up the road, which operates its district as a wildlife management area, and profits from concessions for hunting, sightseeing, and tourist lodges. “We can live with wildlife on one side of the Buffalo Fence, and live- stock on the other,” a farmer says. “All we want,” says another, “is some benefit from our natural resources.”
Environmental critics say the larger threat to the Okavango and its wild dogs is commercial cattle ranching. This industry is heavily subsidized by the European Union, which opened its markets to Botswana beef in 1975 on the condition that the cattle come from disease-free areas. To limit disease, the country built an extensive network of veterinary cordon fences. These fences have cut off ancient animal migration routes nationwide. In one notorious incident in 1983, 50,000 wildebeest piled up dead against a new fence that prevented them from reaching water. Populations of some species have plummeted by more than 8o percent, just since 1978, and the fences have lately begun to close in around the last great enclave of wildlife in the Okavango. With hundreds of miles of new fence being built, range for large mammals and their predators has continued to dwindle.
According to a report from the University of Botswana, the economic benefits of the European subsidy program have gone almost exclusively to commercial ranches controlled by the nation's wealthy ruling elite, not to rural villagers. The same powerful interests are likely to benefît if the Okavango flood plains are converted to ranchland. ”People aren't starving in Botswana,” Tico McNutt says. "It has to do with a small number of people getting an economic gain out of it.”