"Keeping the enemy at bay": The extermination of wild carnivora in the Cape Colony, 1889-1910

Environmental History, Jul 1998 by van Sittert, Lance

Fraud inflated the official body count, and attempts to curb it exacerbated underreporting as suppliers responded to constantly changing prices and methods of proof. Persistent rumors of fraud jeopardized continued government funding for the bounty system, which was financed by a discretionary vote on the estimates of the Department of Agriculture and thus vulnerable to annual revision by Parliament.

Opponents of the bounty claimed that vermin extermination was an intrinsically sound farming practice that did not require additional incentive in the form of a state subsidy; they also argued that the bounty established a dangerous "blank check" precedent for the public subsidization of farmers' losses. To counter these criticisms, the WAPC congress explored the possibility of compulsory dog, land, and stock taxes to finance the bounty, and regulations to compel land companies and other absentee landlords to exterminate, rather than breed, vermin. The WAPCs parliamentary representatives, however, shied away from such unpopular measures and instead placated opponents by tinkering with the bounty rates and methods of proof. The advent of the public bounty in 1895 thinned the ranks of the WAPCs as farmers took their proofs directly to magistrates and as divisional councils cut or discontinued their subsidies. As a result, the WAPC movement shrank back to its original Midlands constituency; despite sustained efforts, the WAPC congress failed to expand the clubs beyond this region before the end of the colonial period. Its membership of progressive sheep farmers and parliamentarians still exerted some influence on both the government and the Department of Agriculture, but the South African War and the financial constraints of the postwar depression further disorganized and marginalized the bounty lobby. Discredited by fraud, the bounty was demolished by fencing. "Fencing the Jackal Out" An 1883 Act "To Regulate the Erection and Maintenance of Dividing Fences" compelled neighbors to share the cost of boundary fencing in proclaimed divisions or wards (field-cornetcies), and an 1891 amendment extended this requirement to the inhabitants of native locations. The Fencing Act was enthusiastically proclaimed across the Midlands in the i88os, spread gradually westward over the next decade, and culminated in the 19oos in the fencing-in of native locations by settler farmers in the Northern and Eastern Cape. As the area of wire-fenced land in the colony tripled from 4.1 million morgen in 1891 to 12.5 million in 1904, vermin-proof fencing was touted as the new solution to the problem of wild carnivores.43