A bit about poaching in Namibia

I've been collecting photos relating to poaching of wildlife and livestock in Namibia. I'll let the photos do the talking for the most part. Although poaching has declined in Namibia over the last 20-30 years, with the establishment of communal conservancies (this trend according to publications released by WWF), it has not disappeared. Namibia has the highest rating (worst) as gauged by the Gini index, which measures economic disparity, or inequality, in countries. It measures the 'gap' between those who have wealth and those who are poor. As long as the gap remains in place, poaching will be a way for the have-not's to get what they need from the have's in Namibia.


Poaching of livestock is a problem near population centers in Namibia. Many commercial farmers hire anti-poaching units to patrol their lands. This is one potential benefit of commercial conservancies--collaboration on hiring and coordinating these units across several farms. Some farmers install anti-poaching watch towers like the one in the photo above (my photo, near Outjo). These are placed near roads, where people often stop and quickly take cattle or other livestock from farms in the night.


The Namibian newspaper reported, recently, on a wave of livestock thefts on commercial farms near the airport, east of Windhoek. We visited one of these farms for a meat hunt, and while we were on the farm, their radio network for the Namatanga Conservancy was ablaze with traffic regarding sightings of cars that were suspected in recent thefts.
It is hard to prosecute poaching. Our hosts during the meat hunt described a person caught standing over a warthog on their farm during the last year. He was arrested, but declared innocent during his trial, because he claimed he had found the animal dead.


The photo (from The Namibian), above shows a calf that was found wandering a farm with a spear still stuck in its head. It was the victim of an attempted poaching--the farmers in the article noted that spears were one of the most common weapons used to kill animals, which are usually butchered on the site. This calf survived, but lost an eye. An accompanying photo showed the spear removed; it had a 7-8-inch blade, and hard to imagine how it did not kill the animal.



From a wildlife perspective, I took the above photo with my mobile phone at Etosha National Park, in their research office. It is a display of confiscated weapons used to poach wildlife on Etosha--many very recently. A variety of native snares and bows-and-arrows are shown. But, the amazing parts of the exhibit, to me, were the two homemade guns. The gun at right looks like an AK47, but is actually just wood carved to look like the AK47. I guess if you are a poacher, you want to look like a credible poacher?! On the top of the wood is a small metal tube in which a 0.22-caliber bullet is inserted. I really couldn't tell what kept the casing in place when it was fired.

The gun in the middle is a shotgun, constructed in similar fashion. A tube on top of a wooden stock in which a shotgun shell is inserted. In this case, the tube was a made from the leg of a school desk. The display noted that the gun had worked at least once to kill an oryx at close range in the National Park.