Fencing - a question of defence and advance

Fencing - a question of defence and advance

This is not an article on sabres and swords but rather the common wire fence; three-strand, barbed, electrified, elephant proof and any other. In today's Africa and the advent of so-called Peace Parks and transfrontier conservation, more fences it seems are coming down than going up and with good reason. The removal of these fences will begin to redress the imbalances created in the past. Large mammal migrations receive much of the press in this regard, but smaller mammals and people are of course affected and the seemingly age old question of man versus animal rears its inevitable head.

Man versus animal

We can see now that it doesn't always have to boil down to man versus animal, but this is of course the way things began. First the arrival of, and reason for, fences need to be established. Barbed wire and pasture fencing owes its development to the need to protect livestock from marauding predators and potential rustlers, as well as the evolution of rotational grazing as a farming technique. In much the same way as the American west was tamed more with barbed wire than the six-shooter, so the South African interior was carved up under a European system of land ownership that saw different farms being separated by wire fences and indigenous peoples being marginalized and alienated. Like the Bison of the prairies, populations of large mammals such as Springbok and Black Wildebeest of course crashed, populations of livestock such as Sheep and Cattle rose to replace them and predators large and small were heavily persecuted to the point of local extinctions.

Animal versus man?

This fencing-off of property in South Africa occurred mainly in the Cape Colony and only slowly extended north as the British sought to bring the region under their control. Nonetheless it was enough that by the late 1800's the endemic Bontebok, Black Wildebeest and Mountain Zebra had been reduced in number to a few hundred or less each and the Bluebuck and the Quagga had become extinct. By 1920 Elephants in this area had been decimated through ivory hunting and numbered only seven individuals in the Knysna forests and about 20 in the so-called Addo Bush. The realisation of this massive destruction brought about a shift. Suddenly it was important to protect animals from people and not the other way round. The first and most famous fence for this purpose was the Armstrong fence built around the Addo National Park in 1954. It was constructed of railway sleepers and elevator cable and the proud boast was that it was ‘Elephant proof'. It might be boasted too that the fence was in fact the ultimate saviour of Addo Elephant population, which in less than 30 years grew from 18 to more than 100. Similar successes were achieved with the Bontebok, Black Wildebeest and Mountain Zebra, but fences were also built to prevent the spread of disease between domestic and wild animals and were often built without a proper understanding of either the species or the ecosystem that they enclosed. The Kruger Park is an example and the 1960's fencing of its western boundary resulted in severe mortality of Blue Wildebeest and the cessation of an age-old migration route.

This oversight is not just confined to the past and continues in Botswana today where the notorious veterinary fences prevent the spresuch as like Blue Wildebeest, Burchell's Zebra and Buffalo.

Mutual benefit

Fortunately it is not all gloom and doom. The overwhelming movement in African conservation today is to remove fences and expand conservation areas to include migration routes and maximum biodiversity. People benefit as rural communities neighbouring reserves are targeted for development and upliftment. This is a trend that is not restricted to governments and conservation agencies but is also being mirrored in the creation of smaller conservancies and biospheres on privately owned land such as &Beyond's Phinda Private Game Reserve.

-Chris Roche-

Posted: Other by CC Africa, Date: 21 November 2006