Leopards, Farmers Learning to Coexist

Park ranger Marius Brand bends down and examines a small pile of whitened droppings on the side of a sinuous mountain path. His tanned hands crumble the dried spoor, revealing a mix of fur, bone fragments and the tiny chewed hoof of a young antelope.

“It’s leopard,” he says.

For Brand and other rangers in South Africa’s rugged Cederberg Mountains wilderness area, droppings and tracks are usually the closest they get to one of Africa’s most elusive and shy big cats.

But the leopards are out there.

After years of persecution by man, mountain leopards are making a comeback in South Africa’s Western Cape province. Half the size of their more aggressive northern cousins, Savannah leopards, they are spreading out of national parks and coming into contact with farmers and livestock.

Many farmers see the reappearance of leopards as a threat to precious stock. Residents worry too, fearing attack by a creature whose claws and razor-sharp teeth can kill a man in an instant.

To ease relations between man and beast, local wildlife group Cape Nature Conservation runs an innovative project in the Cederberg area and surrounding farms, about 155 miles north of Cape Town.

The project aims to persuade farmers and their workers to live alongside the leopards--not hunt them.

When white settlers arrived in South Africa in the 17th century, leopards were treated as dangerous pests. Bounties were offered, and they were gradually pushed back to a handful of mountain strongholds.

To prevent a new bout of leopard hunting, Cape Nature Conservation urges farmers to report leopard sightings. If a leopard kills livestock, usually sheep or goats, then rangers from the park will come and deal with the problem.

“We kill problem leopards,” said Jaco van de Venter, another ranger. “That is the only way to do it.”

By destroying a leopard that takes stock, rangers hope to make space for another that still hunts its natural game of small deer and rodents.

Once a leopard begins taking farm animals, it will not return to its natural hunting patterns and rangers have no choice but to kill it, van de Venter said.

The rangers also ensure that the leopards killed are the ones who have been hunting stock, whereas an angry farmer may slaughter any leopard he comes across.

Forgoing inhumane leg traps, rangers usually tie poison-laced collars around the necks of goats and sheep. When a leopard bites the throat of one of the animals, it gets a lethal dose.

“It kills them on the spot,” van de Venter said.

Set up 10 years ago, the project has changed attitudes. In the late 1980s, farmers killed 25 to 30 leopards every year. Now rangers kill about four annually--though they suspect some farmers still lay illegal traps.

No estimates for the region’s leopard population exist. Because the animals range over hundreds of square miles and often move only at night, it is hard enough just to spot a leopard, let alone count them.

But the evidence of a growing population is strong. After an absence of many decades, leopards are being seen right on the borders of Cape Town. During the last 18 months, four have been run over by cars in mountain passes around the city.

The successful management of South Africa’s leopard population has attracted international attention.

Moaz Shawaf, co-founder of a leopard protection group in the United Arab Emirates, is on a three-month visit here. About 100 leopards are left in the Arabian peninsula, and fewer than 10 in the UAE.

“This project is one of the best in the world and we can learn a lot from it, “ he said. Leopards “are very adaptable, but if we don’t save them they will become extinct.”