Safari Journal - January - 2020
PREEMPTING POACHERS - the new frontier
This series will be posted BI-monthly. We will be presenting the most current efforts and technology being used to detect poachers before they endanger protected animals.
Texas hounds chase down rhino poachers in South Africa
At first, enforcement teams in South Africa’s Kruger National Park used foxhounds on leads to track rhino poachers. But the slow pace of the man-dog pairs meant that poachers often got away. After free-running hounds brought here from Texas arrived, poacher arrests picked up dramatically, from 2% to 50%. These dogs are descended from a hundred-year bloodline of free-running hounds.
The Texan connection started early in 2017, when Theresa Sowry, CEO of the Southern African Wildlife College—a wildlife management and training facility based near Kruger—visited Braman in Refugio, Texas, to discuss his experience with hounds and watch them in action. She’d heard about a unique bloodline of aggressive free-running pack dogs—black-and-tan hounds—used in Texas law enforcement to track down escaping prison inmates.
Trainer Johan Van Straaten releases Texan black-and-tan coonhounds on an exercise in Kruger. These dogs are descended from a hundred-year bloodline of free-running hounds - Photograph by Sean Viljoen
Kruger National Park
Kruger was one of the world’s first national parks. Paul Kruger, the country’s president, set aside land here for wildlife preservation in 1898 and successors have added to it. It is, more than almost any other great world wildlife refuge, a people’s park. No place has better facilities for getting around and seeing things.
The largest national park in South Africa (7,700 square miles/20,000 km2, about the size of Wales or Massachusetts) with more mammal species than any other reserve on the continent. It has huge populations of elephants (over 8,000), buffalo (25,000), and Burchell’s zebras (25,000), along with a wide variety of other herbivores, including both black and white (wide-lipped) rhinos.
Artificial Intelligence - Malawi
Using AI In Malawi To Save Elephants
One of the founders of Microsoft, Paul Allen started a massive, multi-million dollar project to create a program called the "great elephant census". He found that between 2007 - 2014, 1/3 of the African elephants were killed by poachers. Programmers entered all of the known information about the reserves, poacher activity and animal habits into the program then uses gamer technology to predict poacher activity, on a daily basis and preempt it.
September 17, 2019
Heard on: “All Things Considered”
By: DINA TEMPLE-RASTON
Malawi
Mammals roaming five national parks and four wildlife reserves include rhinoceros, hippos, and large herds of elephants and buffalo, along with nyalas and other antelopes and smaller jackals, warthogs, honey badgers,monkeys, and baboons. Among 650 bird species are such spectacular specialties as wattled cranes, collared palm-thrushes, racquet-tailed rollers, Bohm’s bee-eaters, and blue swallows.
If you found these articles interesting, check back in March for another edition in this series "Preempting Poachers - the new frontier". Please "like" our social media pages to be notified.
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Botswana Predator Conservation Trust
For over two decades, the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust has been working to study and preserve wildlife in Africa.
Tusk's approach to conservation recognizes that the long term future for wildlife and Africa's other natural resources is dependent on sustainable rural development. more... Tusk believes that if conservation is to succeed and environmental degradation to be reversed then education needs to be promoted at an early age.
Cheetah Conservation Botswana (CCB) aims to preserve the nation’s cheetah population through scientific research, community outreach and conservation education, working with rural communities to promote coexistence with Botswana’s rich diversity of carnivore species.