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

Environmental History, Jul 1998 by van Sittert, Lance

To lend support to their case for state assistance, stock farmers estimated their total losses to carnivora at i.6 million per annum.'9 Rather than compensation, they wanted the state to provide a monetary incentive for the rural population, regardless of class or type of farming, to kill wild animals. As Frost complained, "unfortunately many parts of the colony do very little towards the destruction of these wild animals, and as you free your own place-as we do in our part constantly-they come in again, sometimes almost in troops." A precedent for bounties existed in the Cape and other British colonies, particularly Australia, and the colonial state duly obliged. The Divisional Council Act of 1889 gave those bodies the option of levying a dog tax for vermin extermination purposes; Parliament voted 500 to the same end, dispensing it in grants to the growing number of wild animal poisoning clubs in the colony.20 The colonial state's ambition was moderated by cost and by the notion of a balance of nature. "It seems to me," said the under secretary for agriculture, "that we should look, in our work, not to the total extermination of these animals but rather to holding them in check, and preserving a certain balance, so that by a moderate annual expenditure we may be able to establish and maintain a sort of modus vivendi between the depredations of vermin and the farming interest, doing, of course, all that we can by a reasonable expenditure." In the face of farmer demands for vermin genocide, he cautioned, "It must not be forgotten that the total destruction of vermin might and probably would mean upsetting the balance of nature to such an extent that we would be inundated by other plagues." The previous two decades of colonial rule had provided numerous examples that supported this contention, with explosions of locusts, mice, ants, termites, hyraxes, finches, springhares, and baboons all being attributed to the extermination of predators. By the turn of the century, however, the bounty system had become an integral part of state agricultural policy, and the official journal could contend that the "constant battling which must be maintained for the repression of all kinds of noxious animals we term vermin, is one of the necessities for successful farming in all countries, and especially in those which are newly settled and sparsely populated."21

"Our Much Dreaded Foe" The definition of "vermin" was determined solely by farmer malice. The fledgling discipline of natural history was preoccupied with taxonomy and classification. It depended on farmers in the same way that its metropolitan counterpart relied on big-game hunters for information on the behavior and habits of the various species being studied.= As one farmer noted, the "habits of the jackal have probably received, from farmers in general, more attention than has been bestowed by that observant body of men on any other of our wild animals, including even our noble game. Every farmer and every farmhand can tell of some sagacious feat of the jackal, and if conversation around a cup of coffee is in danger of exhaustion, it can at once be revived by raising the jackal question." This "folk" biology was often confused and contradictory, reflecting both regional variations and personal prejudice. "In reading the different reports of the Magistrates," complained the MLA for van Ryhnsdorp, "I find that they have different names for the same species [of jackal]."23