African Wildlife and Environment Issue 65

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GENERAL

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Your opinion is highly valued and welcome. Please send your feedback, letters, comments and suggestions to editor@wessa.co.za

A WARM WELCOME BACK TO THE AFRICAN WILDLIFE MAGAZINE

Dear Editor Welcome back to the old format which I prefer. I had a full set of African Wildlife from 1946, and have passed these on to John Green so that he can put them to good use. More power to your editorial pen and I enjoyed Eugene Moll’s contribution. Yours, Peter Steyn not do with our wildlife. CITES is ineffectual and is heavily influenced by western animal rights NGOs. They offer no hope to Africans that we can manage our own wildlife resources in such a way that land under wildlife can be economically competitive with land under livestock and crops. By taking away the rights of Africans to sell their wildlife products for the best prices, CITES is undermining the very principles of sustainable use laid out in the IUCN World Conservation Strategy. The bottom line is that full proprietorship of wildlife resources must vest with landowners, whether private or communal, they must be free to trade their products without undue official (or CITES) interference, and the state must protect such landowners from those who who steal their goods, as is the case with all other law-abiding citizens of the country. Unless we can aspire to and achieve this state of affairs, wildlife in Africa has a grim future. Yours, Ed Bokman

Dear Dr Ledger, How wonderful it is to hold this magazine in my seventy year old hands again! Look forward to supporting it as WESSA continues forward on its impactful journey. Warm regards, Diana Reekie Dear Editor Congratulations to the Editorial team for bringing African Wildlife & Environment 64 to life- it is an interesting read. While it is good to learn in the articles by Chris Galliers and Morgan Griffiths that WESSA supports trophy hunting as a valuable land-use option, the rather weak arguments against trade in wildlife products is disappointing. Make no mistake, the demand for ivory and rhino horn in the populous countries of Asia is very strong, and those who supply the markets are very well organised. Prohibition has never worked, and the streets of Chicago were turned into a criminal battle-ground by well-armed and organised illegal liquor traders. Today, when South Africans can freely buy liquor in their supermarkets, the notion of ‘Prohibition’ of this practice would violate our Constitution! The eastern and western borders of the Kruger National Park are today governed by wealthy criminals dealing in ‘prohibited’ goods, and they are stealing the money that should be going to the legitimate owners of rhinos and elephants in Southern Africa. Talk of ‘demand-reduction’ is fallacious, as is the propaganda that the once-off sales of ivory by southern African countries triggered increased bouts of elephant poaching. The evidence for this is very weak, and has been exaggerated by the animal rights movement, determined to dictate to Africans what we may

THE PROPIERTORSHIP OF WILDLIFE RESOURCES

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