Hessequa set to Draft By Law Amendment to Wildlife Damage Management

Dear all

It has been confirmed that recipient of the National C.A.P.E Fynbos Biodiversity Award, Mayor Chris Taute 2009 has initiated steps to facilitate the process of amending the present Hessequa By-Law to include measures to prohibit certain wildlife damage management techniques. This comes to light based on the recent photos attached. This will in effect mean, that Mr Chris Taute is the first politician to set the wheels rolling to prohibit the use of gin traps in South Africa.

This scene of barbarism greeted the police and conservationists on Sunday morning on the road between Riversdale and Vermaaklikheid, Western Cape, South Africa.

African Penguins

Date: 08 March 2009 07:00

Producer: Hein Ungerer

Presenter: John Webb

Genre: Environment and Conservation

Read more: African Penguins - Carte Blanche

Tenikwa Rehabilitation Centre receives approximately 60 penguins each year for rehabilitation.  These penguins come ashore once they have been washed out into strong currents and away from their colonies.  At the centre, the penguins are checked over, blood tests taken and they are dewormed.  Many of the penguins are too weak to eat by themselves, and they have to be tubed with a fish gruel.  Some need to be medicated for Babesia, a blood parasite, and many have already contracted pneumonia from over-exposure.

On the 5th of June, we were privileged to be invited by the Landmark Foundation to witness fruits of their leopard research project.  A call had come in earlier that morning.  A farm labourer, as part of his routine checking of the research traps on a farm near Reenendal, heard the angry growls of a leopard.  The vet was summonised, and what transpired, was really a huge privilege for us to see.

We met outside the farm gate, a small group of people who had been invited to witness the research.  The farmer was there, and also a few members of the conservancy.  The area where the trap had been situated was in known leopard territory.  The Landmark Foundation are already tracking an adult male, and were hoping that the new leopard would be a female.  Of course, it could also be the known male, but this would give the Foundation opportunity to see how he was doing physically.  The traps that are used by the Landmark Foundation are the typical "trap and release"method,  allowing the animal to be trapped safely and then released unharmed. Their work is also sanctioned by Cape Nature and they have a research permit to study leopards in this area.

Source: www.news24.com

Vanderbijlpark – It is the end of the road for South Africa’s 123 lion breeders and 3 000 canned lions.

This follows a verdict in the Free State High Court in Bloemfontein on Thursday that these semi-tame animals may only be hunted 24 months after being set free from their breeding cages.

By Laura Ashbaugh

One night in a pub, Fred Berrangé overheard a group of drunken men talking about going out that night on a bakkie to shoot leopards.

"I would ask 'How do you justify shooting a leopard'?" Berrangé recalled. "They would say, 'It's my turn now. My great granddad did it, my granddad did it', and so on."

I met a tortoise crossing the road….

How many people stop, pick the tortoise up and take it home?  How many thousands of tortoises are lost to the gene pool every year because of a misguided sense of conservation.  Tortoises are not lost when you come across them in the veld, they are just moving to a different grazing area, perhaps after some favourite little morsel in the veld that they remember from last year.