Foreword to the Game Guard Management Course

Transcription

1 1 Module # 1 Component # 1 Foreword to the Game Guard Management Course The challenges faced by rangers and conservation managers in Africa was made explicit when I was in conversation with a Protected Area Manager in the USA. We were on the topic of wildlife management when I enquired about what percentage of the budget did he dedicate to game security annually? His response was, as I expected, To be honest, it is not something that I have had to consider before. In Africa, we boast a wealth of natural resources beyond that of any other continent. Unfortunately due to globalisation, these resources have become more accessible for consumption. At the same time, the local traditional subsistence harvester is being transformed into a transnational commercial trader. The stakes are getting higher and the conservation margins are getting thinner. With this comes new demands in terms of the skills that are required by rangers in order to service these issues. Conservation management is objective-led and requires adaptive management to be applied in order to achieve them. Nowadays, however, there is no way that game can be protected without the dedicated services of game guards or field rangers. With the multitude of changes being experienced in the sector, some old principles stay the same. These principles have been a part of the

2 2 Game Rangers Association of Africa since its inception in One of these principles speaks to the necessity of employing the right person for the job. These rangers and game guards should operate with pride, and with a passion for their profession whilst promoting best management practices in ensuring the conservation of our natural heritage. A game guard, as highlighted in this course, is not a security guard. Nor can he be from a purist military background. An appreciation and understanding of conservation needs to be at the forefront upon which the other skills are loaded. This Course will certainly be a great asset, as it supports one of the objectives of the Game Rangers Association of Africa (GRAA) which is to ensure that game guards are appropriately and professionally trained and equipped to carry out their primary responsibility of maintaining the integrity of wilderness areas, protected areas and other natural areas in which they work. The GRAA, as a longstanding community with a code of practice for rangers, both present and past, will continue to service the interests of game guards in order to ensure the highest standards and credibility of the profession. Dr Ian Player, the patron of the GRAA, says that no truer words have been spoken when he quotes the following from the late Nick Steele (former Game Ranger in the imfolozi and Hluhluwe Game Reserves and director of the Department of Nature Conservation KwaZulu), Wildlife conservation is the most noble cause in the world today. We all need to embrace the values of a game guard and elevate the profession to the level where it truly receives the recognition and support that it deserves. Otherwise, who else will take up the fight to ensure that the roar of the African lion is heard by the children of our children s children, forever? Chris Galliers Chairman Game Rangers Association of Africa

3 3 Dedication This work is dedicated to the game guards, field rangers, game scouts, community rangers and all other field staff who dedicate themselves to the operational protection of our magnificent fauna. They are often poorly supported, ill equipped and inadequately armed for the war against the wellfunded poaching syndicates that indiscriminately strip our national parks, nature reserves, nature conservancies and game ranches of their valuable wildlife resources. These game guards form a courageous thin line of protection against a tide of senseless waste, greed and corruption and many have lost their lives in doing so. Hopefully these basic guidelines will help, in some small way, to lighten their load.

4 4 Acknowledgements Firstly, I thank my wife Madeline for her unwavering support and patience. She typed and edited these pages from my illegible scrawl in between all her other pressing administrative and production demands that are the requirements of our consulting business. My rough notes must be seen to fully appreciate her contribution to this course. A great number of people had a hand in the contents of this course. The cumulative experience of my colleagues way back when we saw fit to establish and train game guards are recorded in these pages. My collaborators selflessly gave time and input into something that we all believed in and endeavoured to institute. Those that I have not mentioned by name must please forgive me, may they all be very proud of their contribution to game guard establishment and training. Peter Burdett was my chief collaborator and it was he that largely steered our ideas about the standard of game guard management and training. He was also the co-author of our original manuals and guidelines, the major source for this course. Many field men were responsible for the good standard of our game guard training, voluntarily giving up their time and investing great effort to do so. I particularly, want to, acknowledge the outstanding input and dedication of Peter Burdett, Rory Allerdice, Mike King, Frikkie Rosseau and Tim de Jongh in helping to make these training courses the success that they were. I also want to acknowledge the support that we got back then (1970 s 1990 s) from senior officials, particularly Niel van Wyk, the late Dan van Schoor and the late Kobus Jooste, and more recently, from Fanie Bekker. Without their continuous support and encouragement, our progress with the game guard training and management programme would not have been possible. My biggest concern was getting somebody to actually publish what I consider to be rather dry and uninteresting instruction material. After making a few enquiries, I was about to give up on the idea when a few of my friends and colleagues convinced me to persevere. I thank Gert Erasmus, Div De Villiers, Rory Allardice, Anton Schmidt and Wallie Stroebel for their support.

5 5 I was reading a wonderful book of conservation stories written by a colleague of my days in the Eastern Cape region, when it dawned on me that the format of this particular book would be just right for my Game Guard Management course. The book was The Poacher and other hunting, fishing and conservation stories by Div De Villiers (which, by the way, is a must-read). I immediately contacted the publisher, Barbara Mueller of New Voices Publishing and never looked back. I am thankful and grateful for Barbara s encouragement and professionalism; it has been a pleasure getting the course done, rather than the painful experience that I had initially expected. Div De Villiers kindly gave me permission to use a couple of inserts from his excellent book of short stories The Poacher and other hunting, fishing and conservation stories. These inserts have added considerable colour to the Components that they introduce. Div. also helped with the proof reading of the manuscript and provided some great ideas, particularly on the issue of gender. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Mrs Nola Steele and her sons, Warren and Vaughn Steele, the family of the late Mr Nick Steele, for permitting me to use quotations from Mr Steele s books as introduction to many of the Components in this course. Nick Steele was a game ranger, a naturalist, a pioneer, a horseman and an author and his colourful writing brings humour, history and the authority of long field experience into this course. Nick Steele had a strong belief in the important role that game guards had to play, and still have to play, in conservation and his books are full of admiration and respect for the game guards that he worked with, saying that they worked at the coal face of conservation. Nick introduced the use of horses for patrolling into some of the Zululand game reserves in the 1950 s and 1960 s and proved them to be very effective for antipoaching work. His knowledge and appreciation of horses, as described in his book Take a horse into the wilderness was the sole instruction guideline for my own use of horses for game guard patrolling in the 1970 s and 1980 s. Nick Steele was something of a mentor to many of us in nature conservation; through his excellent and inspiring books we were guided and motivated in our tasks of nature reserve management, law enforcement and game guard management. Nick pioneered the nature conservancy concept on private land in 1975, producing the first farm patrol plan which promoted the use of trained game guard units to provide security for a number of farms. This initiative boomed and by the late 1980 s there were hundreds of conservancies all over the country.

6 6 From his days as a game ranger in the Zululand reserves to his days as Director of the Bureau of Natural Resources, Nick Steele was a tireless campaigner for the preservation of a strong wilderness ethic in conservation. It was thus as game ranger, horseman, wilderness campaigner, the architect of conservancies and conservation organisation leader that nick Steele made his mark as a singular pioneer conservationist and mentor to so many game guards, rangers and conservators that followed in his footsteps. It is thus a great honour to be permitted to illustrate this course with some of the stories and experiences that Nick Steele recorded about his life and the game guards that he worked with. Nick died at the age of 63 in 1997, and his passing was a great loss to the conservation of nature and the preservation of the wilderness of South Africa.

7 7 The Background to this Course In the 1970 s and 1980 s, a small group of field staff from the Provincial Nature Conservation Department in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, put together a very respectable annual game guard training course. This developed out of necessity due to escalating poaching and the introduction of both white and black rhino into nature reserves, national parks and game ranches in the region. The courses were a month long and the instructors were dedicated volunteers from the nature reserves of the Eastern Cape. In those days, military training was compulsory for all white South African boys after schooling and we were consequently very lucky to have ready and able instructors with infantry, parachute battalion, intelligence, artillery and air force backgrounds, some of which had been operational in the Border wars of South Africa where they fought against the Russian and Cuban communist-backed insurgents that came across our borders from Angola, Rhodesia and Mozambique. We thus had ready instructors with training and skills in firearm and firearm handling, patrolling, deployment and debriefing, survival and anti-insurgent operations, who were also trained, and experienced, in the many skills required to manage game reserves and deal with law enforcement in and outside of conservation areas. As I have said, it was a very respectable training course and we managed to provide good basic training for twenty five to thirty five game guard trainees from provincial nature reserves, southern national parks, the Ciskei conservation department, local authority nature reserves and private game reserves and ranches every year. We were also willingly supported by the Police Training College in Graaff-Reinet, who supplied firearms and firearm handling instruction during some of the courses. We continued with these training courses for approximately ten years, which means that we provided basic training for roughly 300 game guards.

8 8 The post-basic training fate of these trainees became our later concern and after conducting a broad-based survey, we came to the conclusion that if the supervisors or managers of the game guards were not also suitably trained, or at least instructed in what the basic standards of game guard management are, the standards were always likely to be poor. The truth was that if the supervisor did not have the time, the background or the immediate need for effective security - the game guard unit would eventually suffer the consequences and cease to exist. In response, we then prepared A manager s guide to game guard leadership in 1993 (authors Ken Coetzee and Peter Burdett) to assist and motivate the reserve managers of the Eastern and Western Cape in the application of the necessary game guard management standards. It was this manual that then became the foundation for this course and it was the sudden escalation in rhino poaching on formal conservation areas and private game ranches since 2010 that has hurried it into publication for wider use, in the hope that it will play some small part in the protection of our valuable wildlife resources.