The raging war between humans and wildlife

WILDLIFE, TOURISM

A call has been made to cease fire between humans and wildlife if nature is to be salvaged. The call was made during a workshop at Hotel Africana last week.

The cause of this raging war is the four legged ones (animals) destroying crops in people's gardens, wolfing livestock and killing people.

"This obviously leads to food shortage in homes and negatively impacts the livelihoods of people," stressed Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA)'s Dr. Adonia Bintoora.

"This has sparked off retaliatory killings, poaching, encroachment, deforestation, illegal grazing and habitat loss."

With forest encroached on, monkeyslike the one in UWEC are left with no habitat but to resort to gardens for survival.

Adding that, memories of the 11 lions killed in Queen Elizabeth National Park are still fresh.

It was noted that during the raging war, UWA staff and other conservation cadres have also lost lives and limbs while in the line of duty.

The raging war is as a result of lack of land use plans and controlling development strategies around the protected areas.

Participants identified the challenges as; rangers being overwhelmed by the job at hand, poor equipment, low funding at district level and lack of awareness among the communities in the neighborhood of protected areas.

"The way forward is promoting alternative livelihoods, raise public awareness, monitoring and evaluating performance periodically," said  Dr. Wilber Ahebwa, one of the UWA staff.

"This is the only way to salvage our biodiversity, contain humans and animals in harmony."