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If we were to try to place TOURISM on this list it
would come fourth in our priorities. This means that only WHEN both the soil and
the plants are being properly managed, and only WHEN the animals are in proper
balance with the soil and the plants, should TOURISM be considered a priority at
all. This does not imply that tourism in a modern national park is not
important. Tourism IS important. What is DOES imply is that the proper
management of the soil, and of the plants and of the animals, is infinitely MORE
important that is tourism.
 Those NGOs who would have SANParks NOT cull
their excessive elephant population in Kruger National Park, therefore, and who
threaten tourism boycotts if they do so, are turning the whole natural resource
management priority list upside down. They are putting tourism and elephants at
the top of their priorities. So they are putting the cart before the horse. They
are also displaying their monumental ignorance.
I hope that this time round the public debate
will go in favour of SANParks. It is time for the ordinary nature-loving public
of South Africa to stand behind SANParks and to demand that common sense should,
this time, prevail. The country has, for far too long, buckled under the demands
and the threats of the animal rights brigade - which, elsewhere in the world, is
being ever more rapidly recognised as the biggest confidence industry the world
has ever known.
I would commend those who read this article to
bring it to the attention of our President, of our Minister of the Environment
and Tourism, and of his/her Member of Parliament. It is time our political
masters understood that ordinary members of the South African public are
concerned at the inordinate animal rights pressures that are being brought to
bear on SANParks to force them NOT to implement an essential elephant culling
programme.
What can the layman do to express his concern?
He can cut this article out of the newspaper and send it to our senior
politicians. If they get a huge pile of newspaper cuttings on their desk they
will understand that South Africans REALLY ARE concerned.
The elephant culling MUST go ahead in Kruger
National Park if SANParks is to have any chance of saving this country's
wildlife heritage. 
| Ron Thomson
Anyone who reads this dissertation is at liberty
to have it published wherever and whenever they can get a newspaper or a
magazine to accept it, or a radio or television station to broadcast it.
This message needs to be "spread around" if our wildlife
heritage is to be saved.
This article was compiled in accordance with the
philosophies expounded in Ron Thomson's latest book, " A Game
Warden's Report". |
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