Game ranching - the 'improbable' industry

Roelof Bezuidenhout reviews a paper dealing with the rise of game ranching in South Africa, and discovers that the industry developed despite prevailing beliefs that it would destroy the farming of livestock.

- Roelof Bezuidenhout

Game ranchers have grown used to criticism from livestock farmers who accuse them of harbouring predators, politicians who say keeping wildlife is elitist and unproductive, and conservation purists who want to tell them which species they may farm with.

In the first half of the 20th century, agricultural and game departments believed that for modern agriculture to prosper, Africa’s game should be exterminated to make way for livestock. It took two Fulbright scholars from the US to change this, according to a 2008 paper, ‘Wilding the farm or farming the wild? The evolution of scientific game ranching in South Africa from the 1960s to the present’, by Prof Jane Carruthers, then of the University of South Africa.

Raymond Dasmann had been studying the Redwood forests of California, and Archie Mossman had been working on wildlife problems in Alaska. They were invited by Reay Smithers, then director of the Rhodesia National Museums, to investigate whether wildlife on land belonging to Ian and Alan Henderson, covering 54 000ha in the Rhodesian lowveld, could coexist with cattle and be ranched in a similar manner. Working between 1959 and 1961, their mission was to save “some part of the magnificent wild fauna of tropical Africa”.

Until they arrived, it was accepted that wild animals and domestic livestock should be separated because they competed with each other for grazing and because transmittable wildlife diseases threatened the health of stock.