322 Sport hunting of elephant in Zimbabwe: a case study of Kanyurira Ward in Guruve district(WWF) report (Taylor 1998), only 151 out of the 249 households met this
residence requirement. Officially, therefore, only 61% of households were
considered to be wildlife managers who qualified for benefits. Since dividends
are paid to households, not individuals, a second requirement is that all
members must be married. The constitution further excludes from membership
those who are divorced, so as not to provide an incentive for households to
split up in order to gain two shares instead of one.Wildlife management activities
The main wildlife management activities include land use planning, fence
maintenance, setting of hunting quotas, and the monitoring of wildlife and
safari hunting. These activities are carried out by locally employed personnel
on behalf of households in the community.
Land use planning is important for laying the ground rules for activities in
particular areas. In Kanyurira’s first land use plan, developed in 1989, the
ward allocated an area of 18 km^2 on the banks of the Angwa River for settlement
and agricultural activities, the remainder of the ward being used for wildlife
production. The plan was conceived locally and submitted to the council. The
high population growth rate (23%), however, has seen pressure build up within
the fenced area, causing the depletion of soil fertility. As a result, 26 households
decided to move outside the electric fence; a move that necessitated a revision
of the land use plan (Dzomba 1998). The newly settled area is about 8 km^2 in
extent and is unlikely to substantially affect the ward’s income from wildlife,
as approximately 95% of the ward remains as wildlife habitat for sport hunting.
Future land use in the ward will be driven both by the capacity of the ward to
manage immigration and population growth and by the extent to which the
productivity of the available arable land can be maintained.
The role of the game guards is to monitor safari hunting and enforce local
level natural resource by-laws relating to wildlife. Game guards also monitor
wildlife populations for quota setting purposes. The hunting quota represents
an estimate of the number of animals that can be sustainably harvested from
a particular wildlife population (Taylor 1998). Because more than 90% of wildlife
revenue is earned from sport hunting, the objective of the quota is to estimate
the number of animals that can be safely harvested without diminishing the
sustainability of sport hunting in the future. Consequently, the quotas for
sport hunting, expressed as an ‘off-take’ percentage, are usually well below
the net growth rate of the population. The off-take of elephant, for example,
is between 0.5 and 0.75% per annum, while the growth rate is about 5% per
annum. Because the number of animals on the quota directly affects the income
earned, quota setting has become a pivotal activity under CAMPFIRE (Taylor
2001). A participatory quota setting methodology has been developed, which
allows qualitative and quantitative data inputs from all stakeholders.
Since 1996, the Kanyurira Ward game scouts, in conjunction with WWF and
the Ward Wildlife Committee, have been developing a systematic, locally based
ground-counting programme. Each month pairs of game scouts traverse a set
of predefined transects and record the numbers seen per unit of time on
patrol (elephants/effective patrol time); the numbers seen per unit of time18sporthunting.P65 322 22/12/2004, 11:05