The decline of the Kalahari wildebeest

Abstract

In the 1980s international publicity was given to the deaths of thousands of wildebeest in southern Botswana. The cause was their drought-induced migrations being prevented by the cordon fences erected to protect cattle from disease. While the mortalities may have accounted for 90 per cent of the wildebeest population since 1979, archive records from the 1920s and 1940s show that the decline started much earlier. Wildebeest were once so numerous in the southern Kalahari that local farmers regarded them as a menace, competing with cattle for grazing and transmitting malignant catarrh. Extermination programmes reduced the wildebeest population to such an extent that by 1961 the Botswana Government classified it as a game animal to be hunted only by licence. © 1992, Fauna and Flora International. All rights reserved.