The Elephant’s Best Friend

IN MAY 1985 I was in Botswana, flying north from the small bush community of Maun. The view from the Cessna 182 was of stark, Saharaesque scrub and sand with little sign of life. Soon a sharp, dark green line took shape on the horizon. What I was seeing was the effect of the livestock fence separating the Okavango area from the intensively grazed cattle lands of the south. I was viewing what has to be one of the most graphic illustrations of different sorts of habitat management anywhere: on one side, exploitation of the land for a type of livestock unsuited to it; on the other, flourishing native bush with a biota probably unsurpassed since Eden. That fence was held in place by the economic factor of sport hunting.

This illustrates a conservation concept which, though it has been applied very successfully, has scarcely been heard of in the outside world. The problem is that it was devised in Rhodesia and South Africa. Rhodesia is no more, and the idea that any good could come out of South Africa is only beginning to become speakable in polite society. The concept is the large-scale privatization of wildlife.

SW

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Stephen M. Weaver

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IN MAY 1985 I was in Botswana, flying north from the small bush community of Maun. The view from the Cessna 182 was of stark, Saharaesque scrub and sand with little sign of life. Soon a sharp, dark green line took shape on the horizon. What I was seeing was the effect of the livestock fence separating the Okavango area from the intensively grazed cattle lands of the south. I was viewing what has to be one of the most graphic illustrations of different sorts of habitat management anywhere: on one side, exploitation of the land for a type of livestock unsuited to it; on the other, flourishing native bush with a biota probably unsurpassed since Eden. That fence was held in place by the economic factor of sport hunting.

This illustrates a conservation concept which, though it has been applied very successfully, has scarcely been heard of in the outside world. The problem is that it was devised in Rhodesia and South Africa. Rhodesia is no more, and the idea that any good could come out of South Africa is only beginning to become speakable in polite society. The concept is the large-scale privatization of wildlife.