Until now, our new young male cheetah Mochozi has been given only dead food. In an effort to determine his hunting skills, it was decided to put a live lunch in his enclosure. I took a rabbit from our cage and entered Mochozi’s den. My heart was beating out of my chest and I was moist with anxious sweat. I was certainly far more nervous than this rabbit, who had no idea the fate which I was delivering him into. After whispering a quick prayer of thanks to my little furry rodent friend (a blessing for him to return in his next life at the top of the food chain), I dropped him 30 feet in front of a cheetah lying in wait low in the grass. I hid behind a bush and watched the drama unfold. Nothing for 10 minutes. Then suddenly a rush from the cat and the chase was on. He gave it a nice ride but succumbed after about 3 minutes of bush scramble. The awful thing about a young motherless predator is that they don’t have polished hunting skills developed. It seemed more of a toy than a meal to the cat and he played with it as a house cat would play with a mouse. The quick killing bite did not come. He wounded it, batted it a few times, let it go, and recaught it. Eventually I saw it hanging lifeless from the cheetah’s mouth. Watching animals suffer is still (and probably always will be) difficult for me.
No higher honor exists than martyrdom. Laying down your life so that another may live is the ultimate sacrifice. But playing god is not a role I’m comfortable with. I put that rabbit in a situation where it had no chance of survival. A fenced enclosure with a lurking predator. Animal captivity was never in the original blue print for the planet and transgresses the natural order of the wild. I left wishing an invisible hand of karma would swoop down on me and impale me onto the tusk of an elephant. I guess I AM a bunnyhugger.
Later in the day, I attended a lecture (weekly discussions at Mokolodi with varying nature topics by expert guests) regarding veld products. These are naturally occurring substance harvested from the bushveld. The scientist making the presentation was focused on one particular plant called “Hoodia”. It’s an indigenous plant whose roots have medicinal properties. It looks like a cactus although cacti are only found in the Americas. When dried, crushed, and powdered, the root suppresses hunger & thirst by stimulating the hypothalamus gland with an agent found inside. San hunters (the original Kalahari bushmen) used it on long hunting trips to suppress their need for food. It doesn’t have the bad side effects of other amphetamines (or good if you like your electronica thumped at 5am and require the assistance of recreational chemistry) and obviously is totally natural. US pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, who grew large & firm on dosing the flaccidity of men with Viagra, paid $20 million for the rights to patent this potential gold mine of a drug. But along came the spider, an environmental watchdog group who brought a breach of intellectual property lawsuit against them on behalf of the San for capitalizing on their indigenous knowledge of medicinal properties without proper compensation. Bless their hippie hearts! The San Bushmen now receive 8% of revenue from exports.
The San have inhabited Southern Africa for 30,000 years and were traditionally were hunter-gatherers who traveled in small family bands. They are a purely nomadic society following the wildlife, water, & edible plants. They exist without chiefs or leadership (individualism is promoted) and they have no possessions, neither animals nor crops. Everything they need for daily existence is carried with them. Early Europeans in Southern Africa called them Bushmen, which stuck for several centuries. The Batswana still generally refer to them with the derogatory Basarwa, “people from the sticks” (hillbillies!). “San” is now more common and acceptable, despite the rumor that the name originates from words meaning “wild people who can’t farm”. The San now call themselves “Ncoakhoe”, the Red People, from the color of the earth (rednecks!).
These are the notorious clickers. Their language is based on dental & palatal clicks and there are 3 types: ! is the palatal click made by pulling the tongue away from the roof of the mouth; X is the lateral click formed by pulling the tongue away from the upper right teeth; and C is a dental click made when the tongue is pulled from the upper front teeth. For example, Xade is not pronounced ex-ade nor zade.
Of the remaining 50,000 or so San, most live in the Kalahari of Botswana, some live in Namibia, and the rest are scattered throughout Southern Africa. Of these, about 2000 still live traditionally by hunting & gathering. The remainder work on cattle farms or languish in squalid liquor-plagued settlements with no opportunity to better their livelihood. Undeservingly, they have a reputation of being cattle thieves and as such, are heaped at the bottom of the social ladder. This pattern of poverty, already trailblazed by Australia’s Aborigines & Native Americans, seems all too familiar with “first peoples”. Sadly, the Botswana gov’t is not sympathetic to their cause, mainly due to racism, prejudice, and the fact that they are economically insignificant.
A contentious political issue which received lots of international attention was the forced relocation in 1998 of some San from their traditional territories in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Many were shifted against their will to settlements outside the reserve which have little or no water or permanent buildings. They were advised that failure to move out would result in less gov’t money for health care and schools. Some of them, desperate and hungry in this unfamiliar land, have resorted to subsistence hunting back in the Kalahari Game Reserve. They are now seen as poachers, even though that is their ancestral homeland which they have hunted on for thousands of years.
Officially, this action was justified by the gov’t because of the need to support wildlife development & tourism and to rescue them from their primitive ways and integrate them into modern society. Unofficially (ie. the truth of the matter), diamond deposits have been discovered on their traditional homeland within the reserve and played the key role in moving them. Shifty governments worldwide have a wonderful aptitude for subverting anyone or anything that gets in the way of what they want. American Indians happened to occupy prized Park Place property, a lot of which eventually became national park land. Yellowstone, Yosemite, deserts of Utah, Arizona, & New Mexico, the Cascades in Washington, Lake Tahoe, etc. “Hey You Red Fellas, follow me. I know of some prime land in tucked away corners of South Dakota and Oklahoma, that you can set up your tee pee’s on. We’ll organize a liquor store and a casino for you and then just call us if you need us. So long, suckers.”
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