Carnivores poisoned by herdsmen in Ugandan game park

Jul 26, 2007, 17:39 GMT

Kampala - Dozens of large carnivorous animals, including lions, leopards and hyenas, are dying due to poisoning by herdsmen occupying part of Uganda's second largest game park, wildlife officials said Thursday.

Thousands of Basongora tribesmen who are grazing cattle in an area of about 300 square kilometres in the Queen Elizabeth National Park in western Uganda are killing off the carnivores to protect their herds from attacks, officials confirmed.

'The Basongora are occupying parts of the park and the hyenas attack their cattle in the night. The pastoralists are acting in self-defence and are poisoning the hyenas and lions. The animals are dying,' the head of the state-owned Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), Moses Mapesa, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

'We are worried but it is a question of urging the government to quickly implement the ministerial committee and relocate these herdsmen.'

Ecologists earlier expressed worries that the estimated 10,000 tribesmen who moved into the park from the Democratic Republic of Congo with tens of thousands of cattle would help spread foot and mouth disease among the wild animals in the park.

The government in June appointed a ministerial committee to help relocate the landless herdsmen but they have not yet been evacuated from the park which is a destination for tourists intent on seeing big game including elephants, buffaloes, hippos, water bucks and lions.

Mapesa said he did not have figures for the number of animals poisoned, but according to a government newspaper, The New Vision, the number of lions, hyenas and leopards has gone down drastically since the Basongora herdsmen entered the park in March 2006.

'Over 80 per cent of the hyenas have been killed and all leopards along the Nyamusagani river have been poisoned. We have lost at least 11 lions in the last 15 months,' the English-language daily quoted a veterinarian at the state-owned Makerere University, Ludwig Siefert, as saying.

The lion population in the park decreased from 94 in 1999 to 39 today and the damage done in the last 15 months will take 20 years to reverse, the newspaper reported in its Thursday edition.

Last weekend, Siefert's team, which monitors wild animals in the park, found three carcasses of hyenas in the area taken over by the Basongora. An autopsy established that they had been poisoned by furadan, an agro-chemical.