The night of the jackal: sheep, pastures and predators in the Cape - South Africa

Past & Present, Feb, 1998 by William Beinart

Fitzsimons thought that they had learnt to take ostrich eggs from nests and crack them by knocking them together or against a wall. The import of this is plain when it is recalled that ostriches were second only to sheep in the early twentieth century Cape as a source of agricultural export commodities. (It is likely that this was also a far older pattern of behaviour.) `Every farmer and every farmhand can tell of some sagacious feat of the jackhal', P. J. du Toit, later Secretary of Agriculture, wrote in 1904, `and if conversation round a cup of coffee is in danger of exhaustion, it can at once be revived by raising the jackal question'.(60)

Because of their reputation, jackals may have been blamed more than they deserved for stock losses -- in particular for killing sheep rather than scavenging those which had died from disease and drought. Both jackals and stock thieves may have been blamed when the carelessness of farmers or shepherds (or hungry domestic dogs) were the problem. Settlers applied to the jackal a language which made it a symbol of the uncontrolled threat of nature -- a robber, vrijbuiter (freebooter), or pirate of the veld -- signifying the link between property and the capacity to shape nature. Bushmen bands who raided settlers' livestock in the eighteenth century had been similarly branded. But there is no doubt that jackals, if also a metaphor for malign powers, took many sheep and lambs. They tended to kill by biting from underneath the throat and, if the corpse was found soon enough, farmers felt sure that they could distinguish the telltale marks.

III

METHODS OF EXTERMINATION: TRAPPING AND POISONING

The jackal was hunted and killed by Khoikhoi, Africans and settlers to protect their flocks. The Khoikhoi had eaten it; some African people made use of its pelt. Although there was an occasional market for skins, settlers killed it primarily as vermin -- broadly defined to include most animals which preyed on stock. The term used for vermin in Dutch/Afrikaans, ongedierte, expressed accurately the idea of a non-animal or de-animalized creature which could be treated differently. Jackals were exempt from the hunting restrictions elaborated during the nineteenth century and consolidated in the Cape's Game Law Amendment Act of 1886. As already noted, they sporadically attracted a bounty.

Shooting jackals was always difficult because they became nocturnal; other strategies of attack included poison, traps and dogs. Lairs became a major target, especially during the main breeding season in spring (August to October), also an important lambing season, when jackals were most active as predators. Jackals usually raise their litters in burrows, but tend not to dig their own; they adapt termite, meerkat and more particularly aardvark burrows. It was not difficult for experienced trackers to spot lairs, in that debris would be left near the entrance, but this did not mean they were easy targets. Adults do not live long with cubs in the burrow and, if spotted, bitches are known to move their cubs some distance at night. Jackals were thought to be expert at protecting themselves against fox terriers sent down to hound them out: cubs apparently retreated down side tunnels and blocked them temporarily with earth. Sometimes jackals shared the burrow with porcupines which helped in defence. As a last resort, farmers occasionally used dynamite.