From my Hide: Some good news, and some bad…

I READ somewhere the other day that the current situation is almost as though Africa’s wildlife was being sucked up by a giant vacuum cleaner.

‘Ain’t that the truth!’ as they say. The number of rhinos poached for their horns in South Africa alone this year was 1,020 the other day, over a month short of the year’s end.

Most of those have been killed in the Kruger National Park. Anyone will tell you that these statistics are unsustainable and that we, actually the world, are losing our rhinos.

Africa is losing its elephants at a rate of about 30,000 a year, another completely unsustainable statistic. And it’s not just in Africa. Just this past week two critically endangered Sumatran elephants were killed on that Indonesian island, just for their ivory. Both rhino horn and ivory poaching is to feed the market in China and South East Asia.

On a lighter note, one of the world’s most endangered mammals, a pangolin, was recently seized in suburban Cape Town, way out of its natural habitat.

Cape Nature officials did their homework and the pangolin, obviously originally destined for the illegal wildlife trade, was flown to a secret location in its real territory, which is dry bushveld, and released – a remarkable piece of co-operation between Cape Nature, the African Pangolin Group in Pretoria, the Free Me Rehabilitation Centre and the Bateleurs, a group of pilot volunteers who fly wildlife missions.

More pangolin news is that earlier this year a Chinese boat that ran aground in the Philippines was found to contain ten tons of frozen pangolins representing thousands of the animals. Pangolins are found throughout much of the Far East and in Africa, and are much favoured as a snack by the Chinese and for traditional medicine.

And finally the good news, just for Christmas, and I must say our monkeys have a lot to learn. A report to hand tells the story of a monkey in Simla, a town in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, which sat in the trees scattering rupee notes onto the eager crowds below.

He swung from tree to tree, scattering money to all and sundry until he disappeared into the jungle, having firmly launched his personal wealth redistribution programme.

Investigations eventually established that our generous monkey had snatched the bag full of notes from a building site in the town, the 10,000 rupees (that’s about R1,770), were the wages of the construction workers. The reaction of the workers is not recorded, but I bet they weren’t pro-monkey.

On that note there is nothing more for me to say other than to wish you all a blessed Christmas. Have a wonderful time, enjoy the holidays, may your stockings be full, but give a thought to what this time of the year is all about. Cheers and Merry Christmas!

Sources: The Mercury, savetheelephants.org News Service, Cape Times and The Week: the Best of the British and Foreign Media.