Not so long ago, the media carried reports of Chinese nationals in Mushumbi, a remote previously wildlife-rich area in the Lower Guruve District, who were allegedly poisoning elephants in the area for their tusks.
We also recently received reports from the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force (ZCTF), that illegal hunters in the Charara area of Kariba have come up with a plan to try and prevent the authorities from discovering their activities.
It has come to their attention that when they shoot an animal, vultures circling in the sky above have been giving them away. So in order to avoid detection, they are now shooting animals and spraying them with a poison such as DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — a deadly synthetic pesticide). When the vultures feed off the carcass, they die from the poison, hence reducing the number of vultures available to give them away.
From such reports, it is clear that poaching is not going anywhere anytime soon as the illegal hunters have evidently upped their game in their relentless bid to self-enrich at the expense of the country's wildlife and overall ecological balance.
Poachers are mainly targeting the rhinoceros and the elephants for the ivory and reports show that if the poaching continues at the current pace, the rhinoceros will especially become extinct, and soon. Already there are very few left.
There are no exact statistics to show how much wildlife Zimbabwe still has as the Ministry of Environment and Human Resources Management and the department of National Parks have not conducted an audit that would take stock of the animals. Read the full report here.
Source: by Chipo Masara, The Standard.
