African animals

Giraffes in Botswana - May 2009

Years ago, before Diana and I were married, we went off in my little Vauxhall – you have to be quite old to remember them – to spend a few days in Wankie game reserve. (That was before Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, when Wankie became Hwangie, but that’s beside the point, as is the fact that my mother was horrified: we WEREN’T married!)

Not long after we entered the reserve we looked up to see, regarding us quizzically over the top of some quite large acacias, the heads of two giraffes, quite close to us. Nothing extraordinary, but the picture is indelibly printed in  my memory. Big eyes, long noses, jaws rhythmically chewing the cud. Graceful necks and astonishing legs. How did all that evolve? They were just the first of the wonderful animals we saw, some of them very close to the car – like the lioness lounging a few metres from the road side, not interested in us or the large herd of buffalo on the other side of water held back by an earth dam.  We watched elephant drinking and splashing about in another dam, in the evening, so close that I rather nervously turned the car so we could move away if they came TOO close. In between times there were all the usual beautiful antelope – impala, kudu, spectacular sable and the little ones, duiker and stembuck. Warthogs, running with their ridiculous tales in the air, were amusing then, and remained so to us over other visits to African wildlife parks, over many years.

You can still go to Africa and see the charismatic megafauna, the birds and antelope, hippos and crocodiles in the rivers but, as human populations increase rapidly, wildlife numbers are crashing across the continent. The reasons are well known: poaching, habitat destruction, direct competition between humans and animals – people who depend for their survival on crops and domestic animals don’t take kindly to either being eaten by wild animals – and all sorts of ecological imbalances. And it’s not just wildlife that is suffering from the impact of rampant human reproduction; across vast areas rural Africa ecosystems are being irreversibly damaged – trees are cut, overgrazing destroys vegetation, soil erosion eats away at the topsoil. There are all sorts of well-meaning, and undoubtedly valuable, programs and groups concerned with halting the degradation and loss of wildlife, but we seldom see any attempt to come to grips with the fundamental, underlying problem: too many people.

Shock; horror! Politically incorrect to an alarming degree! What am I saying? That there should be mass culling of humans? Well, of course not, but it does seem that any discussions of African populations in international forums are circumscribed by furious assertions about racism from the African politicians. This accusation is a throwback to the 1960s, when many African countries were struggling to get rid of colonial rule by various Europeans, but it’s irrelevant now. You can’t solve problems unless you face up to them and pretending that the human population explosion across Africa isn’t a problem is sheer stupidity. If Africans are to enjoy reasonable standards of living they have to stop having so many babies. They can’t expect to achieve the profligate and unsustainable standards we in ‘the west’ indulge in, but they can certainly aspire to better than most of them now have.

The usual answer to this question of population control is that there must be economic development, and a focus on the education of women. Then the women will want, and be able, to control their own fertility. But that’s a whole different discussion. I guess the point I want to make here is a more philosophical one: why do we humans think our priorities and requirements for living take precedence over every other biological organism? As part of this attitude we assume it’s unquestionable that the earth’s resources should be exploited to meet our needs, and also frequently make assertions that we should not set limits on the resources that may need to be expended to save a single human life. That’s absurd. But what are the limits, and what determines them? This seems to be a philosophical black hole into which most attempts at rational discussion of the fundamental human dilemma caused by our success as a species disappear.

It’s hard to see solutions. And African animals are only one symptom of the problems. There will be wonderful animals wandering around Africa, doing their thing, for years yet, but I’m not sure my grandchildren could go to that continent and find more than traces of the superbly complex and rich environments that were there not so very long ago. Sad, sad, business.  They have as much right to their time on this planet as we do, but their date with extinction is being brought forward rapidly.

Go well

Joe