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

Past & Present, Feb, 1998 by William Beinart

Jackals can clearly adapt to the predominant food supply; however, the question of how adaptation took place must be raised and whether, as in the case of wild dogs, there were limits to this process. A historical study of animal behaviour which attempts to go beyond human perceptions of animals raises particular problems. Although Konrad Lorenz, a key figure in ethology, insisted that `without supernatural assistance, our fellow creatures can tell us the most beautiful stories', animals cannot easily speak for themselves and behaviour must be adduced from external manifestations recorded often incidentally in a wide variety of sources and settings.(33)

Natural historians of the early twentieth century, such as F. W. Fitzsimons, Director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, were less cautious than modern zoologists in using a range of anecdotal sources, including reports by farmers, and in suggesting a sequential history of animal behaviour. His short discussion of jackals is striking for its speculative ambition and vivid language, which most recent general classificatory books lack.(34) He was also clearly influenced by the ecological ideas which were gaining currency at the time. When carrion was plentiful, he suggested, this dominated jackals' diets. Like vultures, they were `Nature's Sanitary Corps', contributing towards the control of disease by clearing up corpses of all kinds very quickly. They co-existed with big cats and scavenged lion kills.

Fitzsimons argued that the jackal's diet shrunk with colonization. As herds of wild antelope were decimated by hunters blazing their way through the countryside, jackals adapted their behaviour to follow them, attracted by this new source of carrion. It is in this role that they were sometimes mentioned in the hunting sagas. Their characteristic howling bark, which `begins with a mournful wail, and ends with what might be construed into a cynical laugh', pierced the African nights.(35) Jackals were not known to attack humans, but they became a pest (like American coyotes, they developed a taste for leather goods). Their adaptability came into full play when both carrion and game diminished to such an extent that they began to depend more heavily on small livestock. In perhaps the fullest published discussion of jackal behaviour, N. J. van der Merwe developed and amended the idea that sheep-killing resulted largely from the decline in other foods.(36) Veld-burning, he argued, which destroyed many small mammals, was as harmful as hunting by settlers. An increase in the number of dogs, partly to control predators, also resulted in more competition for small mammals. Jackal predation tended to be worst during droughts, when other food sources diminished and sheep were weakened.

Fitzsimons may have seen too clear a sequence in these changes, resting as they do on the assumption that the jackal's adaptation consisted in a reluctant recourse to sheep as options narrowed. In southern Africa, predators had long before bridged the divide between wild and domesticated animals as a source of food, because it was one of the few new settler stock-farming frontiers where indigenous pastoralism was already established. Khoikhoi pastoral systems, going back two thousand years, were deeply influenced by the threat of predators, which `often attacked the stock enclosures at night'.(37) Cattle were guarded within a circle of huts while small kraals were made for calves and lambs to protect them against jackals.(38) Africans tended to kraal both large and small stock. Jackals were, in a sense, ready for colonial sheep -- most of which had been initially traded or taken from the Khoikhoi -- from the start. Nevertheless, records of sporadic rewards offered for skins are one indication that jackals were initially overshadowed as predators by larger species. In 1814, jackal skins, along with those of wild cats, were valued at 1 rixdaler, as compared to 25 rixdalers for leopard skins and 20 for hyena skins.(39) By the 1890s, wild dog skins fetched 15s., leopards 10s., jackals and caracals 7s. and baboons 2s. 6d.(40)