Stop Wildlife Poisoning

Category: Pesticides | Date: Jun 16 2008 | By: Martin Odino

I’ve been reading about wildlife poisoning in Africa and can’t help feeling that we need to do something really urgently. After our Stop Wildlife Poisoning workshop we issued a press release and were surprised to read that the Kenyan officials as well as pesticide producing/marketing company were denying the dangers of these toxic chemicals, and were abdicating their role in dealing with the misuse of these chemicals for poisoning wildlife. Even our Wildlife Authority, the Kenya Wildlife Service are ignoring the issue. Dr Leakeys call for a ban on Furadan has attracted some interest in the bloggosphere, but how serious does it have to get for the authorities to take action? Until we have only one lion left? One vulture? We can’t, it’s stupid, ignorant and totally ineffective to wait. We have to take action.

So, what are we doing?

1. We created a Stop Wildlife Poisoning Task Force which prepare a strategic action plan that will address the legal and policy issues, enforcement, education and awareness, as well as conservation and wildlife conflict issues. We are taking this issue to the highest level of government folks!

2. We need to raise funds so that we can have one person dedicated to coordinating this work. We currently have a small grant from IFAW that will enable us to conduct some work, and I have already made a donation of $300 towards this cause. We need to raise another $6,000 to keep this project alive until the end of the year. This will enable us to focus on gathering data and writing grant proposals so that like the Endangered Wildlife Trust in South Africa whose poison campaign which is supported by The Tony and Lisette Lewis Foundation has funded the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Poison Working Group (PWG), we can attract regular support apart from the blog.

Please make a donation today to enable the Stop Poisoning Wildlife Task Force to get to work on ending the poisoning of wildlife in East Africa.

Thank you