Poverty – and unemployment – is the root cause of poaching and crime. The most important long term solution to poaching in South Africa is to eliminate poverty in all those communities that harbour poachers. This will be easier to do in the case of Kruger National Park, however, than it will be on isolated game ranches in commercial farming areas.
The tremendous African population explosion – doubling every 20 to 30 years – will lead to more poaching for survival which will become a “far more important problem than the poaching of rhinos for their horns.
“Aghast though we might be, therefore, at the present level of rhino poaching for their horns, we have to understand that this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
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The whale-killing ship, Reinefangst – photo: Erwin VermeulenYou can’t say Spitsbergen is unspoiled. The massacres perpetrated by the Dutch and other European countries since the 17th century made sure that even now the once plentiful Bowhead whale is rarely spotted among these islands in the Arctic. There are beaches here, full of the bleached and weathered skulls and bones of hundreds of slaughtered belugas, and the walrus was almost hunted to local extinction. Still it is the scenic beauty and remaining wildlife that today attracts thousands of tourists to these snow-covered peaks jutting from the cold waters.
First Light Productions 