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Troops, rebels threaten hippos
06/11/2003 13:12 - (SA)
Burundi - Patrice Faye was up in arms when he called the radio station.
"They've killed another hippo, and it's up to you to tell people to stop this poaching," cried the Frenchman who has lived in Burundi for 25 years.
A decade of civil war as well as fighting in neighbouring Congo have decimated the once 300-strong herd of hippos whose habitat is the marshy Ruzizi River that flows from the northern end of Lake Tanganyika.
"Our official reports indicate that 81 hippos have been killed in the past five years," said Benoit Nzigidashira, a biodiversity researcher and UN consultant on a national plan to save the wildlife in this tiny central African nation.
"There is always hippo meat stashed away in the refrigerators of good restaurants in Bujumbura, and you will always get it if you ask for it," he said.
Faye, president of the Herpetological and Environmental Society of Burundi, makes the 10km trip three times a week from Bujumbura to the Ruzizi National Park to check on the hippos and crocodiles and encourage local residents to protect them.
"This year was very destructive as more than 20 hippos were killed and sold to businessmen and local people living near the lake," he said.
In August, the World Wildlife Fund warned that 300km to the north, only 1 300 hippos of the 29 000 recorded 30 years ago remained in and around Lake Edward, another in the chain of volcanic lakes that form the border of eastern Congo.
In Burundi, both rebels and government soldiers are to blame for the hippo poaching, but soldiers at a military checkpoint near the lake have turned it into a lucrative business, Nzigidashira said.
An adult male hippo that can weigh more than 1 000kg can fetch 1 million Burundi francs (about $1 000).
"Every month at least one hippo is reported killed near a military checkpoint, but many others are killed on the Congolese side of the lake or outside Bujumbura, but never reported," Faye said.
"Hippos that used to live in families of 12 to 20 members now live in groups of only four to six and are likely to disappear altogether if nothing is done to protect them," he said.
"We used to see hippos along the lakeshore during the day, but now they hide inside the small park."
- AP
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