EFFORTPOST Drama 10 - 15 years ago when South African farmers exploded finch swarms to cull their pestlike populations from causing famine.

Greetings Dramastrags

Holy hells the last 3 weeks have been heck on earth, I actually had to work at work . Anyways I wanted to talk about drama in safrica which regularly happened on and off in South Africa's rural community and the animal-rights-activists of South Africa which frequently came to blows at various times over the decades.

It's a fun "non-political" political tale of dramatardations, because everyone involved was always completely 11/10 at the emotional level.

So CONTEXT:

Basically there are lots of pests and problem animals naturally occurring in Southern Africa, with regards to destruction of crops or herds of farmers. Examples:

https://anchorenvironmental.co.za/sites/default/files/2018-11/PREDSA eBook 2018.pdf

The humble fox preys on sheep lambs, cattle calves, or even wild game infants, and causes immense financial destruction to the farmer, or duress for the herd, as usually the domestic or wild herds are not capable of escaping. There's at least 5 species of the buggers where I come from.

Among them are the Redjacket jackal

, and the Aardwolf or Earthwolf jackal (looks like a hyena!)

Among the usual Savanah foxes, is the Rooikat or Red Cat, a very large lynx native to southern africa, and about the size of a large dog. They are extremely nimble and fences, including electrical fences don't do shit to prevent them from migrating where they wish.

Then there are jackals which are no harm to livestock whatsoever as they prey on birds, bird eggs and insects, but many farmers mistake them for Red jackals and kill them at night: these are the silwerjakkals/silverjackal

or Backoorjackals (literally translated bowl-eared-jackal )

Then crops threatened by animals are tarentale (Guineafowls) and vlakvarke (southern african warthogs)

So with so many native animals which can cause destruction to herds and crops, farmers tend to be less than animal lovers regarding wild animals which pose a direct threat to their herds, their livelihoods and their pets. Additionally most farmers here, both boer and black tends to be on the conservative side of culture and social beliefs.

I mention this, because on the farmlands of the Free State, Kwazulu-Natal, Limpopo and other rural regions of South Africa, the concept of veganism and animal rights are pretty scarce. To have a vegetarian diet is highly abnormal even today, and most certainly was an abberration 20 years ago. Outside of cities, this liberal adjacent thinking isn't very common on the ground level, especially amongst poor whites, and even more so amongst poor shanty town blacks in places like the Free State, it's not uncommon to see multiple dogs chained to a kennel with a 2 meter rope along every street in a black township; white farmers would regularly use beartraps against foxes; animal rights are not on the forefront of thought here as it is predominantly amongst the West.

I mention this background so that you guys can comprehend the worldviews of farmers here, and how they would clash against Animal-rights-activists from cities, and the Western Cape, regarding the issue of pest control, specifically pest control in a humane fashion.

Just like Isreal-Palestine, there tends to be a 2-3 year spate between farmers and Animal-rights-activists in the newest "scandal" regarding the less than friendly manner in which a specific pest had been dealt with in the rural regions in South Africa - example:

Many farmers dealt with foxes using various poisons, a controversial culling and pest-control method. Because, although poison is effective at killing foxes who prey on sheep, lamps and wild game, it is an indiscriminate killer, causing strong collateral damage to adjacent species which cause no harm to crops, and are themselves keystone species to that ecosystem they live in. Examples are owls which prey on both animals and dead carrion - because what happens is that the foxes die successfully from the poison bait, but then their corpses are still infused with the poison, which is ingested by the owl preying on them in turn.

Predictably, the owls perish, and the whole ecosystem can collapse, as the field owls are an important regulator of other pests like field mice, which in turn can cause substantially more damage to crops, seed stores, to the homes of rural people as their populations explode without the owls to keep them in check, you guys get the idea.

Animal-rights-activists and ecologists campaigned to get the most egregious poisons banned/limited by farmers successfully in the early 2000s, particularly since vultures (one of the most absolute keystone-species of the entire Savannah) were being affected.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8068749

In this case, the drama was muted, as most farmers agreed with the animal-rights-activists and ecologists, that wanton and irresponsible use of poisons wasn't such an ayoba idea.

I cant find sources for these very specific occurrences, as i learned all I knew by physical newspapers that don't exist anymore, and real world books

FINCHES:

But by far the most nuclear drama involving spats between farmers using "inhumane" methods of culling pests which threaten their crops, and animal-rights-activists, is the matter of vinke/finches .

https://www.landbou.com/landbou/nuus/vinke-pes-sentraal-sa-20170914

Of all the pests and diseases and threats to crops and livestock, the greatest is the humble vink/finch in South Africa. The 4 most common are the cut-throat, the scaly-feathered, red-headed and the cuckoo finch.

https://southafrica.co.za/finches.html

But Afrika itself has like 74 species of the birds, so trying to remember them all isn't important. But pretty much the lot tends to be a major threat to crops. Because although they are tiny organisms, they congregate into truly vast flocks of several thousands. Like locust swarms, these flocks can congregate in flocks of as many 20 000 individuals at once, and devour a hectare of maize, mielies, corn and wheat in about a day, they are ravenous little frickers and their groupings can come randomly.

Compared to the vlakvarke (southern african warthogs) and tarentale (Guineafowls), which regularly eat up maize/mielie crops, they are a much more proportional threat. Warthogs and tarentale can be a nuiscence but seldom eat enough to threaten crops on the scale of finches, and some farmers tolerate them easily as they are delicacies of meat.

Many farmers would invite friends to hunt Warthogs and tarentale, or even allow their farmhands to hunt/entrap them for food freely. But since finches are birds, and thus not contained by fences, and congregate in such colossal locust-like swarms, they are pretty much never welkom on a farmer's land.

COMBATTING THE FINCH MENACE:

Now over the many decades there had been various attempts to combat finches. Shooting them with .22 caliber small firearms, and wimbuks air guns, which fire an iron pellet or small bullet specifically meant for birds or bats. Farmhands and the sons of farmers were send out with a bag pellets/air-bullets and paid by the sack-full of birds.

https://xtremeairguns.co.za/product-tag/wimbuks

Yet even with unlimited ammunition, the finches/vinke was so swarmed that culling them via individually hunting was always a pointless endeavor, and also even the smallest cheapest caliber bullets/pellets weren't free as not all hunts, stalkings and shots were successful.

https://www.landbou.com/landbou/nuus/vinke-pes-sentraal-sa-20170914

Special snares with seeds worked well but too little effect on the large populations, also birds learned about the traps and would subsequently avoid them; also there were too many adjacent maize lands filled with food for them to risk into snare traps, and lastly the open fields of the Free State made disguising the snares much harder.

https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA03794369_2697

These are techniques all the way back from the 1980s still used today by rural black peeps who deem the effort of catching like 50 finches for one pie worth the time.

The Ashuta trap apparently originated all the way from places like Subsaharen Afrika (Niger Nigeria), and migrated alongside the many migrating peoples southward into SA alongside groups like the Matabeles and Zulus. Still used today.

All these traps have variable success, and are hard to track and keep at a constant r*pe of culling the darn finches, thus they were not a reliable method of population control or keeping the finches from devouring the crops of a farm. And since the objective of killing finches was to prevent them BEFORE they consumed all of the wheat and maize, the waiting game of snares were less than useful for stopping the flying rats.

TRANSLATION FROM ARTICLE:

https://www.landbou.com/landbou/nuus/vinke-pes-sentraal-sa-20170914

Translation to English:

"Finches plague various regions of Southern africa, and the Department of agriculture, forestry and fisheries states that they struggle to combat the finches."

Mnr. Colen Burke, a resource-conservationist inspector, says that (the provinces) of North-West, Free State and Northern Cape are currently plagued by finch swarms.

They come by Delaryville, Litchenburg, Bultfontein, Reitz, Bothaville, Kroonstad, and all along the Orange River in the Northern Cape they occur naturally.

In the Bultfontein-region we are prohibited from using explosives, because the birds travel/migrate towards and around water-sources. We (the department) have asked the local farmers to utilize the burning of tyres, to smoke out the finch swarms, so that they may migrate towards regions in which they are not a plague, and may flourish in peace.

(Burning tires to smokes out finches. How fricking r-slurred )

Mister Hemran Meiring, the region-representative for Vrystaat-Landbou (Free State-Angriculture) in Bultfontein, stated that farmers have tried driving away the birds via burning tires, as the bird swarms cause great damage.

They (the farmers) had initially thought the vinke/finches eat approximately 0,2 gram per bird of maize per day, but have determined their calculations to have been inaccurate, and that the birds eat in reality about 0,4 grams of crop per day per bird, which cause immense financial damages.

The Department of Agriculture will investigate other methods of combatting the finches, and have considered glufostaat on reeds. (I have no idea wtf this means )

BOMBING BIRDS YANK STYLE:

About 20 years ago, some galaxy brained chemical-engineer and pyrotechnicists had the bright idea to use explosives to blow up the birds. Finches behave similar to Tarentale/Guineafowls in that they congregate at night into trees to sleep, usually the same place, especially if its a row or orchard of trees. Thus, they would arrive at night and swarm the a whole row of trees, almost to the comical extent of bending down those trees with their combined weight like a saterday cartoon.

Using large quantities of Petrol bombs, detonated with explosives, these galaxy brained fools would blowup a whole row of trees, and killed several thousand birds with one stone (trigger)

And holy shit it worked! In the early 2000s, all over Free State and other provinces, a series of petrol bombings took place to blow up several flocks of finches as they rested at night in their havens, all in one convenient spot, as a prime easy target for pyromaniacs and foaming farmers.

The petrol-bombings became so famous and frequent, that farmers and pyrotechnicists would invite the local town people to come and view the spectacle! I'm not pooping you. In the boring rural landscapes this was the event of the year, and several hundred people would arrive per petrol-bombing to watch an entire treeline disappear in a wall of flame which hopefully killed enough finches that their flock size would have decreased beyond the point of being a bankruptcy financial threat to the farmer in question's crops.

https://northernnatalnews.co.za/146089/farmers-burn-birds-alive

"Every year, thousands of tons of wheat, millet and sorghum is lost as a result of millions of finches devouring crops of both commercial and subsistence farmers. It is estimated that there are 1.5 billion of these birds in southern Africa alone, and flocks ranging from 1 million to 5 million have been recorded. A flock of 5 million can consume 50 tons of grain a day.

Farmers in the Standerton area have taken the war to the birds, attacking them where they sleep at night. Farmers are fire bombing the trees and thickets they rest in at night, according to the Standerton Advertiser. Nightly explosions ripple through farmland as farmers take on these feathered pests"

ARTICLE OVERWIEVING THE CONTINEND-WIDE PROBLEM OF FINCHES:

https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2009/08/19

======(from The New Humanitarian article)

JOHANNESBURG

For thousands of years, subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa have been at the mercy of the voracious Red-billed Quelea bird (THE FINCH); sky-blackening flocks of the tiny “feathered locust” still decimate fields across the continent.

"Its main characteristic is that it occurs in extremely big numbers," Clive Elliot told IRIN. This retired quelea expert spent the better part of his 31-year career at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) trying to help farmers and governments in Africa cope with the pest. Nomadic super-colonies can grow to millions of birds, making quelea not only the most abundant bird in the world but also the most destructive.

Small bird, HUGE damage:

Although they prefer the seeds of wild grasses to those of cultivated crops, their huge numbers make them a constant threat to fields of sorghum, wheat, barley, millet and rice. The average quelea bird eats around 10 grams of grain per day - roughly half its body weight - so a flock of two million can devour as much as 20 tons of grain in a single day.

With an estimated adult breeding population of at least 1.5 billion, FAO estimates the agricultural losses attributable to the quelea in excess of US$50 million annually.

Irrepressible:

Quelea populations are notoriously robust; millions of birds are killed every year, but "reducing their numbers is highly problematic - they are highly mobile, have few natural predators and breed extremely fast. Man has been unable to make a serious impact despite the arsenal of weapons available," Elliot said.

"A new population can swiftly move into an area you just killed out ... [and] because they breed three times per year, with an average of three eggs per clutch, one pair of quelea birds can produce up to nine offspring annually."

The birds are long-distance migrants with a range covering well over 10 million sq km of Africa's semi-arid, bush, grassland and savannah regions. "It's a pest in many different African countries, stretching from South Africa, north through countries like Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia, and all the way across the Sahel to Mauritania," said Elliot.

Intensive farming and an increase in cereal crop production throughout the continent resulted in an explosion in their numbers; according to some estimates quelea populations have increased anywhere from 10 to 100 times since the 1970s.

Since the beginning of 2009 relief agencies in Africa have reported quelea bird swarms with a direct impact on food security in Kenya in January, in Zimbabwe in April, in Malawi and Tanzania in May, in Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe in June, and in Namibia and Tanzania in July.

It is difficult to invest in national eradication programmes because flocks have no respect for national boundaries, and "The destruction is patchy - at a national level a country loses only up to 5 percent [of crops], but for the individual farmer whose entire crop is wiped out that is little comfort," Elliot commented.

Beyond control:

The most common way of controlling the pest is by large-scale spraying of infested areas, "usually with a chemical called Fenthion - also known as quelea-tox - where they breed or roost" said Elliot. "Another way is blowing them up - finding places where they concentrate and using fire bombs or dynamite." In some areas the use of flamethrowers on roosts had also been tried, but with little success.

According to the Natural Resources Institute, a UK-based development group, some 170 control operations are executed in South Africa each year, killing 50 million birds on average.

But, according to the Encyclopaedia of Pest Management, "Despite the annual destruction of millions of quelea birds by use of pesticides, damage has continued to increase annually." Besides being only marginally effective, Elliot noted that modern control methods also often had serious negative environmental consequences.

Most small-scale farmers have no access to aircraft, fuel, chemicals, dynamite or flamethrowers, and have instead relied on age-old traditional methods that are more effective, and certainly more environmentally friendly, but hugely time-consuming.

"The traditional way of control is mainly through bird-scaring. People go into the fields when their grain crop is vulnerable, using anything from catapults to banging and noisemaking - quite effective in the majority of cases," Elliot noted.

"One person can protect a hectare but it's very hard work," because the crops are vulnerable from dawn until dusk and could need protection for a whole month, he said. If you can't beat them, eat them.

More recent discussions about quelea bird pest control have turned towards predicting breeding based on weather patterns, deterrence mechanisms like netting, boosting natural predators, and even the development of a quelea virus.

Harvesting the birds as a natural resource might mean "two birds with one stone", Elliot suggested. "We have been trying to develop systems to catch the birds and turn them into food for people - they would make a great source of protein."

==========(END OF ARTICLE)

ANIMAL RIGHTS COMPLAINTS OF PETROL BOMBINGS:

https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/08/23/ripe-abuse/human-rights-conditions-south-africas-fruit-and-wine-industries

https://www.undp.org/zimbabwe/blog/tomorrow-war-controlling-quelea-swarms-and-ultimately-africas-future

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261219418303004

The petrol-bombing of finches has several issues.

The 1st is that it doesn't outright kill all finches, and sometimes only mains or mortally wounds hundreds if not thousands of birds per explosion. Finches have been found burned and singed several kilometers away from petrol-bombing sites, proving that they had not been killed outright, but mortally wounded, only to succumb to a gruesome and painful death, after a long flight away from the detonation site at the resting treelines, meaning the birds suffered before the final moments. This agitated animal-rights-groups who have considerable pull in our government to ban or regulate petrol-bombing of finches.

Other problems, is that not only finches tend to be killed by a petrol-bomb. At the bombing site, always there are armed men with hunting rifles and pistols standing in wait for the bombs to conclude their explosion, because afterwards, they would drive through the treeline, to go and kill all the mortally burned foxes, tarentale, steenboks, hares and other critters that have been unintentionally, but unavoidably caught in the explosion, to spare them of their suffering. This further aggravated tensions between vegans/liberals/animal-rights-activists and SA farmers, whom are more concerned about their financial ruin at the hands of these feathered pests, than having concern for their individual suffering from the imperfect petrol-bombing culling method.

Once again most of this drama is between news paper and live forums, so i cant find good online sources to further back myself up.

Anyways I personally witnessed such a petrol bombing when i was like 10 years old, and have vivid memories of it. Today there is still ongoing debates regarding the use of Petrol-bombing to cull the Finch swarm plague, and many farmers petrol-bomb in "secret" to not notify anyone that they are destroying a problem swarm devouring their shit. The modern ANC government has also loosened the restrictions on petrol bombing in the past decade as food security in places like the Free State are sometimes threatened by a rogue swarm.

But the corruption, and ineffective governance and communication between national departments and local municipalities also adds to the legal confusion and deceisive ruling on whether petrol-bombing is humane, should be allowed, and consequently lots of sneed and bitching between the two factions continue in this limbo of legality

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