The problem with South Africa’s ‘problem animal’ guidelines

The Draft Guidelines for the Management of Damage-Causing Animals, published for public comment on 2 July, cover how wild animals may be trapped, poisoned, pursued with dogs, relocated or killed when they threaten livestock, crops, property or people. Submissions close on 2 August.

They’ve been presented as an interim measure. The difficulty, says wildlife legislation expert Professor Rob Slotow, is that the government has not explained what they’re interim to.

They also revive a policy process that’s been stalled for years. Draft national norms and standards were published in 2010 and again in 2016, but never finalised. The new document largely retains that earlier structure while changing its legal label from norms and standards to guidelines.

For Slotow, that is the central problem: “A minimum standard is a standard,” he said. “The document is written as minimum standard guidelines. So it doesn’t make sense.”

Norms and standards made under the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act (Nemba) create clear national requirements which are enforceable. Guidelines cannot be and are not enforceable. They may influence permit officials and can become enforceable if written into permit conditions, but they don’t automatically bind authorities or permit holders.

That leaves room for markedly different decisions between provinces. One authority might attach detailed conditions requiring a cage trap to be shaded and checked every 24 hours. Another might issue a permit without those safeguards.

“If it’s not stipulated in the permit, it’s not a condition and it’s not a requirement,” Slotow said. “These guidelines have no teeth.”

Commercial farming focus

The Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment’s own background document helps explain where the proposals come from. They focus heavily on black-backed jackal and caracal predation on sheep, goats and other livestock, noting estimates of formal livestock losses exceeding R3-billion a year.

They also record long-running problems: inconsistent provincial policies, weak monitoring, limited research, uncertainty about the effectiveness of predator control and the danger that poorly planned interventions may increase predator numbers or losses.

Slotow says this makes the guidelines useful, but within a much narrower context than their broad title suggests. Their real centre of gravity is commercial farming, particularly small-stock predation, as well as crop damage by animals such as baboons and porcupines.

“They’re good in the sense that they put in place a mechanism for people to understand what they need to do to apply for a permit,” he said. They also give provincial authorities a more standardised way to assess applications.

Non-lethal options, safeguards

The guidelines encourage landowners to prove that damage occurred, identify the animal responsible and show what preventive measures were attempted. They list non-lethal options such as kraals, fencing, protective collars, shepherding, guard animals, lights, alarms, GPS tracking and camera traps.

They also prescribe safeguards for more severe interventions. Cage traps should be shaded, designed to prevent injury and inspected at least daily. Leghold traps are described as a last resort and must have offset or padded jaws. Dogs may track or flush animals but may not kill them. Poison collars and poison-ejecting devices are subject to placement, warning and disposal requirements.

Slotow accepts that these provisions could reduce indiscriminate killing and suffering, but he argues that the harshest interventions are precisely those that require binding standards, not voluntary guidance.

Well-being, welfare stipulations absent

“If you’re putting a leghold trap out and you haven’t complied with all of these points, you are going to cause intentional suffering to an animal,” he said. “That’s a standard.”

A second major weakness is the complete absence of the words “well-being” and “welfare”.

The omission is not merely semantic. Nemba now includes the consideration of animal well-being among its requirements, and Slotow says the guidelines should expressly require decision-makers to consider the effect of an intervention on the animal concerned.

The draft instead speaks of reducing indiscriminate killing and suffering. Slotow describes this as reactive because it assumes that harmful intervention is already under consideration. A well-being approach should ask first how conflict can be prevented and whether adverse effects can be avoided altogether.

The document does place a duty on landowners to take reasonable preventive measures, but gives them little practical guidance about what prevention should look like in different landscapes and circumstances.

Rural communities

This is particularly important for communities bordering protected areas, Slotow says. Commercial landowners have a long history of applying for permits or calling on government for help. Rural communities affected by elephants, lions and other animals escaping from reserves are often less able to influence the process and generally cannot deal with the animals themselves.

The government’s background note mentions a separate Global Environment Facility project on broader human-wildlife conflict. Slotow believes that may be one reason the department has opted for an interim document while further research continues.

But an interim system should contain a clear process for learning, he says.

Incidents and permit decisions should be monitored consistently, results collated nationally and the guidelines revised in light of experience. The draft contains reporting provisions and a detailed incident form, but no clear pathway from interim guidance to final law.

Harder task postponed

There’s also an awkward gap around species. The background is dominated by livestock predators, while the guidelines are broad enough to apply to elephants and lions. Yet damage-causing elephants are already addressed under existing national elephant norms and standards, which the draft does not list among the relevant laws.

The result is a document that offers useful procedures but uncertain law, broad application but a narrow farming context and detailed rules for harsh control methods without making those rules compulsory.

Slotow’s verdict is not that the guidelines are worthless. They could improve permit applications, encourage evidence-based decisions and reduce some of the worst practices. But he says government must say what they are intended to become.

Without that, South Africa risks formalising an old draft as temporary guidance, while postponing the harder task of creating enforceable, preventive and well-being-centred law. DM