Poaching / Anti-poaching

One of our tasks during the mission was anti-poaching which for our part consist of observing for injured animals and find and remove snares.


(Unfortunately we did not have the time to look for snares but the group before us had found and removed 50 snares)

Hwange National Park is Zimbabwe’s largest game reserve, but due to economic hardships in the country, the number of animals being snared for food by local people living on the boundary of the Park has increased dramatically.

Snaring is a very ancient method of hunting, whereby wire nooses are set on game trails leading to water, high up in trees to trap giraffe, around communal middens or dung-piles to target territorial antelopes such as dikdik and in freshly burnt grasslands where fresh green shoots attract large numbers of herbivores.

Sometimes extended brush fences are created to funnel animals into gaps riddled with snares, where they are trapped in large numbers. Snares are made of metal wires, often taken from burst tyres found on main roads, from abandoned telephone lines, fashioned also from nylon fishing line or rope, vegetable fibres, and for the larger species, steel winch cables. These cruel devices are non-selective in that a wire snare set for a small antelope can cause the slow and agonizing death of an elephant as the noose tightens and cuts deeper and deeper into a limb or trunk, sometimes severing it entirely.