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Rewilding Mozambique – funded in part by trophy hunting
Call it Noah’s Ark on lorries. Dozens of trucks rolled over the Zimbabwe savanna carrying elephants, giraffe, African buffalo, zebras, and numerous other large iconic mammals. Driving more than 600km of dusty roadway, the trucks will deliver their wild loads to a new home: Zinave national park in Mozambique. The animals are a donation from Mozambique’s Sango Wildlife Conservancy – a gift that the owner, Wilfried Pabst, says would not be possible without funds from controversial trophy hunting.
“In remote places and countries with a weak tourism industry and a high unemployment rate, it is very difficult – or almost impossible – to run a conservancy like Sango without income from sustainable utilisation,” Pabst said.
“Sustainable utilisation” means the use of wildlife for hunting or trophy hunting. Pabst, who purchased Sango in 1993 and opened its doors 10 years later, says that trophy hunting provides approximately 60% of the revenue required to keep Sango running every year. Another 30% comes out of the German businessman’s own pockets.
While Sango does welcome non-hunting tourists, Pabst says it is not possible to attract enough in this remote area to equal the revenue made by trophy hunters willing to travel to pay tens of thousands of dollars to shoot iconic megafauna, includingNile crocodiles, elephants and lions.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2sRippe
Hong Kong activists urge restaurants to remove shark fin soup from menus
Dozens of activists protested on 10 June outside the flagship restaurant of Maxim's Group in Hong Kong against the selling of shark fin soup in its restaurants’ menus.
The protesters, a number of whom were children, wore finless shark costumes splattered with red paint and chanted, “When the buying stops, the killing can too”. Photos of their demonstration were shared on Twitter.
Hong Kong is the world’s center in shark fin trade, accounting for about half of the global shark fin trade every year. The demand for shark fin soup at Chinese banquets is behind the finning of 73 million of sharks every year. Currently around a quarter of the world's shark and ray species are threatened with extinction.
While a survey in 2015 indicated that 94 percent of the respondents did not want to consume the threatened species, local restaurants have refused to take the luxurious dish off their menus. In most cases, consumers are compelled to choose the restaurants’ set menus for their wedding or festival banquets, which usually include shark fin soup. As indicated in the Hong Kong Shark Foundation’s survey, which covered 375 Chinese restaurants in the city, 98 percent had shark fin soup on their 2016 Lunar New Year menus.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2sQOYDW
Tigers at risk of poaching over sharing locations on social media
BHOPAL: The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has asked the field directors of tiger reserves in Madhya Pradesh and other states to take steps to prevent circulation of pictures and video footages of tiger movements on WhatsApp groups and Facebook. Advising the process to be stopped with immediate effect, NTCA letter has brought back in focus 'Cyber poaching' of tigers.
Tiger death toll in Madhya Pradesh in the last 14 months has gone up to 43 which includes 14 since J ..
The circular issued by Dr Vaibhav C Mathur, NTCA's assistant inspector general of forests on Saturday expressed concern on sharing pictures of tigers and their camera traps along with locations of tiger reserves on social networking sites.
"This information has the potential to be used for committing wildlife crimes," the letter said.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2sSlrtq
Ten more elephants poisoned by poachers in Zimbabwe
Ten elephants, including a mother and her young calf, have been found poisoned in and around Zimbabwe’s premier game reserve, Hwange national park. Six of the animals died in the south of the park last week; some had their tusks hacked off. The others were found outside the northern sector of the park in state forestry land.
Park rangers responded quickly. A bucket of poison was found near the gruesome scene in the north and three arrests were made over the weekend. One of those arrested was found in possession of ivory.
The first known case of elephant poisoning in Zimbabwe was a single massacre of over 100 elephants in Hwange national park in 2013. Since then it has become a common means of poaching – not only in Hwange but throughout the country’s protected areas, including the Zambezi valley and Gonarezhou national park.
It’s not just elephants that are dying. Predators and scavengers such lions, hyenas, jackals and vultures endure a slow and agonising death after eating poisoned flesh, while other animals such as antelope and zebra have been killed by drinking from contaminated buckets, waterholes and salt licks.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2sScxMz
If we stopped poaching tomorrow, elephants would still be in big trouble
It is the dead of night. The day’s red-dust heat has given way to a cooling breeze. A hundred frogs chirp urgently. Tim and his crew are preparing for another stealth raid. Their mission is highly dangerous and now there’s a new threat: armed men are following them.
This is the scene repeated nightly on the eastern fringes of Amboseli national park in Kenya, close to the border with Tanzania. Tim is an elephant who, along with a group of up to 12 other males, has developed a taste for the tomatoes and maize growing on local farms on the outskirts of the park. The armed men are park rangers who have been tasked with keeping him from the crops – and saving his life.
The nocturnal game of cat and elephant is just one example of a much bigger problem playing out across Africa and Asia. It is the sharp end of an existential conflict between people and wildlife for land, food and water. It is also a departure from the traditional story of elephant conservation, which presents the big threat to the world’s largest land animal as ivory poachers and the trinket-buyers in Chinese bazaars. The ivory trade has had a significant impact, for sure, but habitat destruction caused by human population growth and development is a far more pervasive threat.
“Poaching attracts a lot of media attention, but it’s only part of a big picture,” says Julian Blanc of the UN Environment Programme in Nairobi, Kenya. “If we somehow stopped poaching tomorrow, elephants would still be in big trouble.” Habitat loss in Africa threatens many other species too, from giraffes to geckos.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2rMFZ2L
Donald Trump administration ends measure to protect endangered sea animals getting caught in fishing nets
Donald Trump’s administration has thrown out a proposal for the protection of endangered whales and sea turtles, even though it was suggested by the fishing industry.
If too many protected species were being caught, the measure would have stopped fishing with drift nets off America's west coast for as many as two seasons.
But the National Marine Fisheries Service said it was not needed.
It would have have had “a much more substantial [economical] impact on the fleet” than originally anticipated, said spokesman, Michael Milstein.
Full story at http://ind.pn/2rMYHat
Prepared by @SydesJokes
Original post from: http://Blog.CrowdifyClub.com/