Kamanjab Update

Greetings Everyone:

First of all I would like to send a big shout out to the Huskers for playing so well against Missouri on Thursday! GO BIG RED!!!

MU is one team I really don’t care for anymore. I hope things keep going well for the Cornhuskers! Its been a long time coming since the Callahand days. What great news to hear in Namibia!

I also heard parts of Nebraska have received anywhere from 4 to 6 inches of snow! At this rate, seems like it could be a hard winter and safe to say there will be snow on the ground when I leave warm sunny Namibia… I may need to run to the coasts and acclimate once I return. Then slowly make my way back to Nebraska!

I do not want to think about snow for a long time! The weather here is just perfect!
Things are going well in Kamanjab with the surveys.

Being a Nebraska ranch kid, its totally crazy visiting farms that have registered pet cheetahs just walking around the front yard, or seeing huge yield signs warning you about elephants in the area. The large poaching problem and basic lack of police and court systems to deal with the problem adds another layer to the craziness.
Some farmers here are taking drastic measures to deal with poachers, some of it might be pushing legal limits [but I really haven’t detected much of a police presence anywhere in Outjo District -who can blame them], so you really have to be careful driving around the various farms sometimes.

But in one day I visited a farm with three pet cheetahs and another with about 30 elephants living in the river valley in front of this AMAING thatch grass hunting lodge.

When you see a large branch lying in the road because an elephant decided to leave it there, you look everywhere twice before you get out and move the large stick. The branch was the size of my waist requiring a lot of strength to move and is only a toothpick in the elephant’s eyes. This area has many trees and it’s surprising how well a desert elephant can hide in trees. They’re so quite too. My elephant senses were on high alert.



When one arrives on the cheetah farm, the farmhouse and machine sheds are all fenced to the point where cheetahs can’t get out and there is a huge sign warning you to “Don't Enter! Ring Bell!” A slight chill runs down your spine. Maybe that could be the cheetah dinner bell I thought?! lol







When I first arrived on this farm, I thought the cheetah I saw by the fence had a pin in the corner and it appeared to be fenced in, then I heard another cheetah “meow” and was walking toward me. I knew then they were just walking around with the farm workers and couldn’t believe it.



It took me about 10 minutes to get over how tame cheetahs can be and how they can live with humans so closely. The other dogs and cats on the farm had no issue with their big cat friends either.

I have some sweet video of the cheetah farm I visited I can’t wait to post, but it will have to wait till I’m back in the states. When I conducted the cheetah farm survey, one of the three pet cheetahs wanted in the house when I was asking questions and had its paws resting on the glass door looking right at me licking its mouth.

It was somewhat distracting but I made it through the survey. The cat clearly posed no threat, but it was sure acting hungry and made me think he was eyeing me for diner… lol I’m sure it was being protective or something like that because I was in the house.



Feeding time was an hour later and a tour group of 40+ people came to see them. Nearly 7,000 people visit this farm on an annual basis.

I thought to myself afterwards… only in Namibia and what a crazy assignment I have!
Farmers here have adapted with many dangerous animals since the wildlife populations have been returning and have found a nice mix of trophy hunting and livestock revenues. There has been a huge transition in land use, but a small diversified component of livestock will always be present to provide income diversity which I agree is smart planning.

Many still face certain predator problems, but trophy hunting usually offsets in a large way any loss of livestock or damages to fences I’ve found. When the farmers do not have local ownership and control, that’s when many told me there is no value in the animal, because then all they receive is damages from the predator. “That’s when you find people wanting to kill everything,” one farmer told me.
Many farmers do not agree with the predator/elephant management of other NGO’s and the Ministry of Environment and Tourism here at all. Many are pretty blunt about telling you about it too. “Many of the conservation groups we’ve seen come and visit us do nothing for the animals. They work against the animals,” as one farmer told me. “They’re too far removed from the issue.”

This farmer was reflecting about the time a Green Peace advocate visited the farm and said farmers don’t need to shoot lower powered shots at the elephants. “You can use a chili bomb gun, but you need to be 45 meters [150 feet] away from the elephant,” this person told him. The farmer later told me no one in their right mind would even stand 200-300 meters from these elephants in a moving backie truck.

We even had a talk about WWF and anti-hunting groups and I assured him we were not interested in taking away hunting rights at all and that hunting is a valued conservation and development tool here in Namibia and we have the communal lands trophy hunting data to back it up. Many of my colleagues have been professional hunters or currently hunt themselves I told him.

Commercial farmers in Namibia, aka private land farms, are use to having control of the majority of their resources and do not like certain aspects when cheetah skins can’t be exported to the USA by hunters, thus hurting their safari business because of CITES considering them an endangered animal. Many also complained about many cheetahs killing livestock and when there is less value in the cheetah there is little incentive for anyone to care for it. It’s a tough situation to say the least given my limited knowledge.

Or when the elephants can’t be dealt with because they’re on a “special list” thus not under the farm’s management and blame Etosha National Park causing them to migrate out. The farmers are in a tough place: they can’t stop the elephant damage and receive no compensation and have no local control because “MET manages them.” Trophy hunting the problem animal elephants in the past and pooling the fees and splitting it up to people claiming to have elephant damages proved to be hardly effective. What to do? What to do… what to do?

I’m still learning about the issue, but this is what I heard. Its not worth going into details right now, but the farmer’s claim with predators and elephants is -they want sole control of the animals, they don’t want to shoot everything, and they do see the value in wildlife because they control and own it, but there will be problems when their control is removed from the predators and elephants. 9 times out of 10 this is what I heard.

Still, the wildlife numbers farmers are reporting are strong across the board and have been increasing generally, unless you’re a kudu. There is little assistance by the government in this process, and they’re only consulted when the farmers go to take out hunting permits issued by the government based on your game count data. Because many of the farmers grew up on the land and hunted with their fathers, its easy for them to know how to manage for the wildlife, how much to take, and what to take. Many of the farm managers I interviewed are both cattle farmers and professional hunters who know how to shoot very well.

It’s probably safe to say at least a 1/3 of the kudu population has dropped off because of rabies and trophy hunts on this species are already being held back now. One farmer showed me a pile of 80 dead kudus and I about fell over from the smell.
But good rains, plenty of grass, and trophy hunting/management hunts have all been cited why wildlife has been increasing. So it’s hard to say farmers aren’t managing well on their own from what little data I’ve gathered so far.

Many of the younger generations coming back to the farms are opening up lodges, they’re all professional hunters, and they make a pretty penny selling hunts in the US, Middle East, and Europe. Many times if the farm was more livestock oriented I heard the elder tell me their sons and daughters were learning to be professional hunters and were interested in coming back to start lodges and sell hunts.
To date, I have conducted 40+ surveys in the Outjo District and I feel really good about the progress and what the results will do for the landowners and case study papers.

Sadly, Kamanjab is not much of a center for farmers and locals to meet, so my interviews have all been on the farm and require a little bit more driving and time. But I’m learning a lot from the Loxondonta Conservancy members and after sharing many stories and going through the interview it’s often tough to leave the farm. People here are so nice and the wives have fed me very well if I’m lucky enough to be close to lunchtime.

What is so impressive to me about the commercial farmers in these conservancies is their willingness to take control of local resources and manage collectively as a group. Of course there are a few politics between neighbors and ect. but its safe to say, generally and across the board the farmers here are sharing many concerns about the wildlife and want to manage for it properly as a collective conservancy movement, but they all tell you this is possible because they have revenue and wildlife rights when shooting the animal and selling the meat.

I’ll talk more about the survey experiences and results later. But I’m going to go crunch some poaching data real quick. I’m still blown away by the incidents and the fact that I’ve found 2 or 3 people I can think of now who actually caught a poacher and they received a punishment out of the 40+ I’ve done. There are also some rock paintings close to my place and I might go check them out.
I hope this finds everyone well. Many thanks for reading!

GO BIG RED!!!

Cheers,

A.E. Price