(Posted 22nd January 2025)
Courtesy of African Elephant News and Mongabay
At Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park, violent enforcement of wildlife laws leaves broken families behind and damages the relationship between conservation authorities and local communities, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo.
In October 2023, Mukpo visited the massive park, home to various wildlife including elephants, lions, hippos and leopards, to investigate human-wildlife conflicts and heard of accounts of rangers shooting and killing — rather than arresting — suspected subsistence poachers, even when the individuals were unarmed or ready to surrender.
In one incident, Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) rangers reportedly shot at a group of men armed with spears who had entered the park illegally to hunt a hippo. The shooting killed 49-year-old Tadeo Bwambale, who had allegedly raised his hands and attempted to surrender.
All hunting inside Queen Elizabeth is strictly prohibited. Despite this, some nearby communities regularly enter the park to hunt antelopes and hippos to consume and sell locally, largely driven by poverty and a tradition of hunting, Mukpo found.
UWA rangers told Mongabay that when they see a suspected poacher in the park, they act to arrest him, investigate and take the matter to a court of law.
However, interviews with residents of local communities, including widows in the town of Kitabu, suggest that UWA rangers have summarily killed or injured several suspected bushmeat poachers encountered in the park.
In one town Mongabay visited, there were so many deaths that former poachers set up a school to help educate the surviving children of those who’d been killed in the park.
One ranger told Mongabay that while he has some sympathy for poachers driven by poverty, his job is to enforce the park’s laws and protect its animals.
UWA has adopted a militarized approach to conservation, working closely with the Ugandan military. Some experts told Mongabay that the rangers’ training is better suited for combat than for dealing with members of local communities found in national parks. Others argued that for Uganda’s parks, recovering from intense waves of wildlife poaching, some with armed rebel groups still operating within them, military-style measures are essential.
Poaching for ivory decimated elephant populations in Queen Elizabeth to a few hundred in the 1970s. The numbers have since rebounded to about 4,000 by 2018. While reasons for this increase are varied, the park’s warden told Mongabay that efforts to break up trafficking networks and hunt down hardcore criminals was key.
Today, elephant poaching is rare in the park and most poachers rangers encounter “tend to be poor, local, and after bushmeat instead,” Mukpo writes.
The reported killings at Queen Elizabeth highlight a cycle of violence in modern wildlife conservation, Mukpo adds. While protecting some species needs strict law enforcement, the accompanying violence can worsen distrust between local communities and conservation authorities.
