The Leopard & Its Endangered Species Ranking

A Public Guidance Position Statement

Subject: The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

The Leopard & Its Endangered Species Ranking 

A Southern African Point of View

This statement is a service to society. Its purpose is to create

a better informed world public about Africa and its wildlife.

 INTRODUCTION

In response to a petition received by the American US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), suggesting that the Service should reclassify the leopard’s status throughout its range, from ‘threatened’ to ‘endangered’, in terms of the American Endangered Species Act (ESA), on 20 December 2017 the Service issued a document (ID: FWS-HQ-WS-2016-0131-0742) entitled “Endangered and Threatened Species: 90-Day Findings for Five Species”. One of those species was the leopard.

This response has been sent to Ms.Janine Van Norman at FWS HQ as requested.

THE LEOPARD IN AFRICA 

The leopard (Panthera pardus) is probably the most wide-spread and successful big cat in the world. Throughout Africa south of the Sahara Desert, it occurs in every conceivable habitat; up to elevations of 5000 metres (Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania); and in rainfall areas of between 100 and 5000 mm (Mount Inyangani, Zimbabwe). They are independent of water. Whilst they compete well with other predators, in the absence of other big cats they are extraordinarily successful. Records show they still unobtrusively exist on the peripheries of several big cities in Africa where their prey base comprises domestic dogs and cats. They are primarily solitary and nocturnal by nature but often hunt during the day; and females are sometimes accompanied by their adult offspring.

Leopards will eat the foulest of rotten carrion, and they will kill wild game as big as an adult kudu, wildebeest, ostrich and hartebeest. Young of such species, however, are preferred. Their success in all regions can be attributed to the fact that they will catch and eat any animal upwards from the size of a mouse. Where dassies (hyraxes) occur they are a favoured food. On human occupied land, they become veteran domestic-stock killers, taking animals up to the size of a full grown ox; although sheep, goats and calves are the most common. They have a predilection for domestic dogs. When they know they are being hunted they become illusive, crafty and experts at avoiding detection.

In rural areas African villagers persecute leopards, killing them indiscriminately at every opportunity. These big cats are of no value to rural folk. On the contrary, they are a great liability because they become adept at killing domestic stock. Few rural Africans possess a firearm so they kill leopards with poisons and cable snares, which cause horrible and inhumane deaths. Most rural people in Africa, however, have no other choice. Furthermore, when a man is fighting for his survival in a harsh environment, and looking after the well-being of his domestic stock, how the leopard dies is of no consequence to him.

Commercial farmers in Africa, on whose domestic stock leopards also prey, kill them with poisons, too, and/or they trap and/or shoot them. And because it is illegal to kill a leopard in most parts of Africa, the farmers avoid conflict with the authorities by simply applying the “Triple-S Solution” to their perceived leopard problems: They “Shoot, Shovel and Shut-up”. They shoot them; they shovel them into a hole in the ground to cover up the evidence; and then they Shut-up.

Those who suffer regularly from stock-killing leopards, whether they be well-to-do farmers or poverty-stricken rural peasants, consider them to be a pest; and they shoot them, poison them, trap them, and kill them in many different ways without compunction. They will also kill leopards in pre-emptive defence of their cattle, sheep and goats, whenever and wherever their presence becomes known.

The vast majority of leopard deaths in Africa today, are the result of these kinds of killings. By comparison, the numbers of leopards killed by hunters is minuscule.

What is abundantly clear is that declaring leopards to be a so-called endangered species, and registering them, as such, on the American Endangered Species Act listings, will have not one iota of effect on the behaviour of indigenous rural villagers in Africa or well-to-do commercial farmers. They will still kill leopards, as they have always done, for the same reasons!

On the other hand, it has been the experience of professional hunters and wildlife managers that if they work with Africa’s rural folk, and with Africa’s commercial farmers, convincing them that it is in their own best interests not to kill leopards indiscriminately but to make them available as huntable trophies to the professional hunting industry, they can benefit greatly from their sale for a very high price. It takes a little bit of extra effort on their part to protect their livestock from predator attacks, but the dividends they can accrue from doing so, by them becoming part of the wildlife industry in this manner, is well worth the effort. And pre-emptive killings, which are the most damaging to local leopard populations, STOP. This approach works best for Africa’s leopards!

South Africa is currently experimenting with a new and constructive way of controlling the hunting of leopards involving, inter alia, dividing the country up into leopard-range blocks and allocating one huntable leopard per year per unit-block. The sizes of these blocks are variable and determined by the number of leopards each block contains. There is a good chance, therefore, that South Africa will find its own solution: to making leopard hunting sustainable and viable; to protect the leopard from indiscriminate killings; and the hunting community is working with the government in this regard. Collectively, they should be given the opportunity to take this domestic programme to its logical conclusion without having to suffer the impediment of having to also contend with unwanted and unwarranted legal restrictions imposed by foreign states.

IMPORTANT NOTATIONS:

1. You cannot manage wildlife by way of public referendums, and THAT is what a petition is. Public petitions have no scientific basis, they normally only express the personal and emotional opinions of a small segment of the public: people who have no knowledge about the management needs of the species concerned; who have no accountability for the consequences of their demands; and who take no cognizance of realities on the ground. I would have thought the FWS knew this!
2. On the other hand, petitions can be used as the excuse for an authority to make a political decision that the authority wants to make for reasons that have nothing to do with scientific wildlife management; and when that is the motivation for an authority to make a wildlife management decision, like declaring the African leopard to be a so-called ‘endangered species’, it becomes an indictment on the morality and scientific integrity of the authority concerned.
3. The authors of the petition in question are not identified. The TGA wishes to record, therefore, that if the people who drew up this petition are not representative of Africa’s leopard range states, the petition should be declared invalid and be discarded.
4. When every major national park in Africa contains a good leopard population that is SAFE and stable, there are NO grounds at all for believing that the leopard, as a species, is in anyway endangered. There is no justification, either, for believing that the species is even threatened.
5. What will endanger the leopard is if the FWS declares it to be an endangered species and denies American hunters the right to take their African leopard trophies back home to America, because THEN the species will become totally valueless to Africa’s people who will slaughter it at every opportunity. This would be another great indictment on the wisdom, the integrity and the science of the FWS, and on America itself.
6. The proposal to list the leopard as a so-called ‘endangered species’ implies that the FWS believes and accepts that every leopard population in creation is UNSAFE which is not true. Science based wildlife management practices should NOT be based on such false assumptions.
7. The TGA does not accept the apparent divine right of the FWS to enact domestic American laws that will adversely affect another country’s wildlife. We believe this is not only an arrogant assumption it is also another indictment on the Service’s professional integrity.
8. There is enough content in the correspondence covering this 90 day regulation, for any and all sane people to understand that the Service pays far greater heed to the anti-sustainable-wildlife-use (and anti-hunting) rhetoric of its domestic animal rights brigade than it ever does to the genuine wildlife management needs of the African range states, with respect to multiple species. And, in this respect, many progressive African states are getting restless.
9. The TGA reiterates that you cannot manage wild animals by public referendum. So, we believe that to have taken so much account of the content of a petition on a wildlife management issue as important as this one is, shows a level of naiveté (or disregard for biological facts) that is unbecoming of a so-called scientific authority (FWS) that purports to be a world leader in wildlife management affairs.
10. The TGA draws the FWS’s attention the fact that even CITES does not list the leopard as being endangered!

THE ENDANGERED SPECIES FALLACY

The Endangered Species concept is a fallacy. That makes the American ESA a false foundation for any kind of wildlife management deliberation or action.

To provide complete clarity on this statement, I must now, perforce, declare the TGA’s definitions of the terms species and population.

Species: A species is a group of animals that share the same physical and behavioural characteristics (they look and act alike) and which, when they breed, produce fertile off-spring with the same physical and behavioural characteristics.  

Population: A population is a group of animals of the same species, the   individuals of which interact with each other, in continuum, on a daily basis and whichy with other animals in the same group.

There are three categories of wild animal populations:

• SAFE Populations: These occur in healthy numbers that are breeding well. They are constantly expanding but have not yet exceeded the carrying capacity of their habitat. They do not, therefore, cause permanent damage to their habitats.
• UNSAFE Populations: These are low in number, declining, and the reasons for the decline cannot be reversed. Such populations face probable local extinction.
• EXCESSIVE Populations: Are those that exist in numbers that are in excess of the population’s habitat carrying capacity (or, theoretically, in the case of predators, their prey base). My understanding of the situation is that excessive predator populations do not exist because territorial imperatives cause the eviction of surplus animals by dominant animals in the population. This has the effect of protecting the population’s prey base.

Wild animals do not arrange themselves at the species level. They arrange themselves at the population level; and they can ONLY be managed at the population level, one by one. So any action to impose a management strategy on a wild animal species as a whole (as in this case, ‘throughout the leopard’s range’) is fundamentally wrong! As with all species, the statuses of individual leopard populations vary from SAFE to UNSAFE. And good and proper wildlife management practice dictates that conservation management should be applied to SAFE leopard populations and preservation management to UNSAFE leopard populations.

‘Conservation management’ implies consideration for ‘wise and sustainable use’ (as prescribed by the World Conservation Strategy 1980); and ‘preservation management’ implies ‘protection from all harm’. When preservation management is applied to both SAFE and UNSAFE populations at the same time, in the very doctrinaire manner that is being here proposed, that action represents the ‘MIS-management’ of all the leopard’s SAFE populations. And no conservation authority worth its salt should be guilty of applying MIS-management to any wild animal population.

MANKIND IN AFRICA:

Man is a dominant part of the animal kingdom and he is subject to the natural laws of nature. He is a vital and integral part of the earth’s food chains and food webs; and attempts by urban man to induce society into believing than modern man can and should be excluded from this reality, are ridiculous. Man requires the same things to survive that wild animals need to survive. He, therefore, competes with wild animals in the global survival stakes; and if society does not write this fact into its wildlife management equations, whatever man does to prevent the extinction of wild species today, will become of no consequence tomorrow. And because of Africa’s massive human population explosion, this reality is of particular importance to the continent.

United Nations figures indicate that in the year 1900, there were 95.9 million people living in Africa south of the Sahara Desert. By the year 2000, this number had grown to 622 million. This represents a 6.5x rate of increase in 100 years. If this is repeated during the current century, there will be over 4 billion people living in this same region of Africa by the year 2100. Africa’s wildlife managers are cognizant that this is the likely outcome and their wildlife management programmes take this probability into account. Africa would like to know if the FWS takes this probability into account too, when it makes its doctrinaire wildlife management demands on Africa, like declaring the leopard to be an endangered species?

SPECIES SURVIVAL IN AFRICA

The only plant and animal species that are assured of survival in Africa into posterity are crops like maize, spinach, cabbages, bananas and TAME animal ‘products of the land’, like cattle, sheep and goats. Why? Because these cultivated plants and domesticated animals are the only species that provide mankind in Africa with survival advantages. When survival stakes are all that a man in Africa has to think about, which will be the case by 2100, he will not grow beautiful flowers in his garden. He will grow maize, spinach, cabbages and bananas; and he will not want to protect elephants, buffaloes, lions and leopards. Not only are such wild animals of no value to him, because he can’t use them or sell them, they are actually a liability because they eat his crops and kill his domestic animals; and wild herbivores compete with his domestic animals for whatever grass and edible shrubs are available. In other words, man in Africa, at the turn of this century, will not tolerate any kind of survival competition.

For all these reasons most rural black people in Africa would rather see all wild animals killed. They have a hard enough time surviving themselves as it is, without having to compete with wild animals for a place in the sun. And that fact is going to grow ever more intense as this century advances.

Africa’s progressive wildlife managers are conscious of all these states of affairs and they want to add wild animals to the list of species that can help Africa’s people to survive. They want to make it possible for wild animals to contribute to the survival prospects of Africa’s rural people in a similar manner to the way that their cattle, sheep and goats do. And they recognise that this is the only way that Africa’s wildlife in going to survive into posterity.

Southern Africans see nothing wrong and whole lot right, with the idea of man living in symbiotic harmony with nature. This is what the IUCN’s (International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s) World Conservation Strategy (WCS) recommended in 1980. That same year, the whole world proclaimed the WCS to be the BLUEPRINT that would take man and nature, in symbiotic harmony, into posterity! Furthermore, every single sovereign state member of the IUCN obligated itself to model its National Conservation Strategy on the WCS template. All the states of southern Africa were amongst their number. So, the original South African National Conservation Strategy became an almost verbatim replica of the World Conservation Strategy.

The third objective of what the WCS calls living resource conservation states:                       

NB: To ensure the sustainable utilisation of species and ecosystems

(notably fish and other wildlife, forests and grazing lands) which support  millions of rural communities as well as major industries.

This principle is now enshrined in the new South African constitution. And the same is the case for all the other states of southern Africa.

The sovereign states of southern Africa, therefore, look forward to the FWS helping them, and not to hindering them, on their wildlife management journey into the future.   And they look forward to hearing that the Service has rejected this petition on the African leopard.