As a warden of Uganda’s largest national park, Murchison Falls, Juma Mohammed’s main task is to repel poachers.
“We must conduct patrols day and night,” says Mohammed, who coordinates a platoon of rangers. “If we don’t, the poachers will take over.”
The battle between rangers and poachers in Uganda intensified after the outbreak of COVID-19. As cities locked down and businesses closed, many villagers turned to poaching for money and wild meat for sustenance. With borders closed and the tourist revenue stream cut-off, parks like Murchison Falls also struggled to fund the daily tasks needed to keep on top of the wave of illegal activity, including elephant poaching.
“If we [let up] the poachers will take over.”
In response, the African Elephant Fund, an initiative administered by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), provided financial and logistical resources to enhance patrols in poaching hot spots, train judicial officers on wildlife laws and conduct investigations on elephant poaching cases.
“Conservation costs money,” said Margaret Driciru, the Uganda Wildlife Authority’s chief veterinarian stationed at Murchison Falls. “If it wasn’t for international support from organizations such as the African Elephant Fund, we would have been in serious trouble.”
Tentative recovery
The International Union of the Conservation of Nature has listed African savanna elephants as endangered with over 60 per cent of the population estimated to have been lost since 1965.
While poaching for ivory has traditionally been the greatest threat to elephant health, the development of agriculture, coupled with the associated human-elephant conflict, is now a major contributor to the reduction in elephant populations.
According to a database compiled by the Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants, an international project, the proportion of illegally killed elephants fell by approximately 30 per cent across the African continent and over 90 per cent in Uganda since it peaked in 2011.
But COVID-19 has reversed some of those gains. Conservation officials in Uganda and other parts of Africa have reported a rise in the number of elephant deaths in recent years.
Many have stumbled into rudimentary traps made from car tires and wheels designed to snare smaller animals, such as antelope and warthogs.
Elephants, along with other larger animals, like buffalos, are often maimed when trying to break free, resulting in an amputated limb or deadly infection.
“We have a lion with three paws,” explains Driciru as she prepares a dart gun. Her team has been called out to help an injured giraffe that has a wire snare attached to its hind hoof. While attending to the injury, the team discover a second snare attached to the giraffe’s front hoof.
“Maggots had infested the wound, and if left untreated, the maggots would have travelled up the giraffe’s arteries and infected the heart or lungs, resulting in death,” says Driciru as her team finish the treatment and release the giraffe to a round of applause.
“If it wasn’t for international support from organizations such as the African Elephant Fund, we would have been in serious trouble.”
Since the start of the pandemic, rangers have collected more than 28,000 wire snares in Murchison Falls, said Mohammed while standing in front of a storeroom filled to the ceiling with traps. Between 2014 and 2019, 23,000 snares were collected.
Human-elephant conflict and habitat loss
Ongoing conflict between wildlife and surrounding communities is one of the biggest threats to conservation efforts and the safety of local residents. Across Africa, elephant habitats are becoming increasingly degraded, fragmented and, in some cases, lost entirely due to agricultural expansion, logging and mining.
Elephants are prolific crop-raiders and compete with park-bordering communities for scarce water and food. As a way to control the damage, communities resort to desperate measures, such as physical confrontation or planting poisoned pumpkins, often leading to human, elephant and livestock fatalities.
The African Elephant Fund supports programs that stimulate the awareness and involvement of the wider community in conservation and management principles.
“The community is our most important stakeholder,” says Kagoro Wilson, Warden of Community Conservation with the Uganda Wildlife Authority. “One of our interventions is to equip and train communities in ways to chase elephants back into the park without causing injury or death to the wildlife or community.”
Many park borders are porous so non-lethal methods are required to keep elephants away. Those include the construction of electric fences and, in the case of Murchison Falls, so-called acoustic deterrents. Villagers around the park yell, blare vuvuzelas and bang on diesel barrels. The exercise is capped off with a blast of a banga, a hammer-shaped device packed full of matchheads that creates a loud explosion when triggered, much like a firecracker.
“We also run sensitization programs to try and influence how the community views the park and the wildlife,” says Kagoro. “We can stop poaching at the source if villagers see the value in preserving wildlife, and can also enjoy the benefits that the park brings.”
Preventing the next pandemic
Research shows poaching, illegal wildlife trade and emerging infectious diseases, such as SARS, Ebola, and COVID-19 are linked.
Zoonotic diseases are contagions that originate in animals and jump to humans. They represent up to 75 per cent of all emerging infectious diseases and have the potential to trigger the next global pandemic as did SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19.
Meat and animal products obtained for human consumption through wildlife poaching poses a higher risk of passing on an infectious disease from animal to human.
“Many zoonoses that have become pandemics have been linked to environmental factors like deforestation, and are exacerbated by climate change,” said UNEP wildlife expert Julian Blanc. “We will not succeed in securing human health while we continue to neglect the health of the environment.”
Even neglected zoonotic diseases, which include a range of contagions beyond COVID-19, kill an estimated 2 million people a year.
Into the future
With habitat loss, climate change, a global pandemic and insecure financing streams, the battle to halt poaching and the illegal trade in animals is a fight for the survival of the natural world.
The pandemic has highlighted the need for governments and wildlife authorities to diversify wildlife-related income streams. Promoting sustainable and inclusive wildlife economies will further enhance conservation efforts and, through community cooperation, improve human-wildlife coexistence, say experts.
In Uganda, the opening of borders has meant that revenue from tourism has started to flow back into parks and more money has become available to combat poaching. “This has brought the rate of poaching down,” says Driciru. “But we cannot relax, the moment we do, it’s all gone.”
The African Elephant Fund is a collaboration venture between thirty eight African elephant range States, donor States, UNEP, the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the Convention of the Conservation of Migratory Species (CMS) who are working together to curtail the growing threats to elephant populations.
The 19th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES (COP19) will take place in Panama in 2022 from 14 to 25 November. Leaders are expected to reinforce the safeguards of the Convention and calling on industries that use wildlife to invest in the species' long-term survival.
