Page 59 of Sheltering Instinct

“Sure, that’s fine with me. What is the subject of the brain picking?” Gwen asked.

“As you may know, our emergency food stores are being depleted at an unprecedented rate. Everyone is hoping that with the rain, we’ll recover and start rebuilding the reserves back to where they were. In the meantime, we need to cull our wild herds.”

“That bad?” Goose asked.

“Worse,” Enrico said. “The international news found out that a cull is planned.”

“What are we talking here?” Reaper asked.

“Around seven hundred animals in all.” Enrico put the vehicle in drive and started toward the highway. “These are round numbers: eighty elephants, thirty hippos, then impalas, about three hundred zebra, and another hundred of elands. The culled animals will come from five different parks for butchering, then be turned into biltong, a kind of dried meat from this region that’s a bit like jerky and distributed to the people.”

“We knew about that,” Gwen said. “The reserves emptying so quickly and the upcoming cull is what spurred WorldCares to send us in and see what we think might happen with the drought. Our headquarters is worried that culling the animals will put significant pressure on your tourist economy. When jobs go away, hunger follows.”

“It’s a different world here,” Enrico said. “When Westerners hear about the cull, some things will be easier for them to accept; the buffalos will be okay. “

“Impalas,” Goose said. “They’ll think of the car, not the animal.”

“I couldn’t tell you what an eland is,” Gwen said, reaching for the shoulder seams on her shirt and shifting them back and forth until it fell smoothly over her chest.

“Why would increasing the food supply create economic pressures?” Iris asked.

“One of the problems is that people often don't read anything beyond a headline,” Enrico said. “And the explanation will be the buried lede. In the United States, we’re taught that wildlife in Africa is endangered and should be preserved. That took hold in a big way in the eighties and ninetieswhen researchers shared their findings on elephant psychology, proving they’re sentient beings with complex emotional lives.”

“I remember doing fundraising to protect the wild elephants. There was the fear that they were dying out,” Goose said. “Being from a tiny island in the Caribbean, the idea of animals as large as an elephant really caught hold of my imagination as a boy.”

“Exactly, sentiments changed, and that has profound ramifications. Take Zimbabwe as an example,” Enrico said. “Depending on tourist money to help protect their animals and help their economy, they benefited from the concern over animal extinction. People wanted to see elephants before they went the way of the dodo. Around forty years ago, Zimbabwe stopped culling their elephants. Right now, they have over ahundred thousandelephants, and their ecosystem can only sustain half that.”

“What do you do with a surplus of fiftythousandelephants?” Iris asked. “Seems there wouldn’t be enough food for them to forage or water to drink.”

“They're encroaching into human spaces, which pits the farmers against the elephants, each trying to survive. It's a big problem with no easy answer.”

“We have that situation on the East Coast in the United States,” Craig said. “Not elephants, deer. There's not enough food or water or space to roam. The deer end up too close to humans, causing accidents on the roads. The government arranges for rifle hunters in the country and bow hunters in the suburbs to come in and cull the herds. My hunt club participated in that regularly. We got to join in the sport of hunting. The butchers distributed the deer meat to needy families. It feeds the people, and the deer can survive because there’s enough food, water, and space.”

“Yes,” Enrico agreed. “The numbers are figured out in an office as data points. Go here. Kill this number. Distribute them there, right? But people become very emotional about the idea of culling African wild animals.”

“Strong feelings without the benefit of a lived experience,” Goose said. “It’s a balancing act.”

“And this is the dilemma,” Enrico turned onto the highway headed east of Etosha Park. “We have three main industries: mining, fishing, and tourism. Tourism is king. Now, the animals are dying. The people have little food. The supplies are depleted, and the government has decided that, like the deer that Craig was talking about, we need to cull the herds in order for everyone to survive. You’re exactly right, Goose. It’s a balancing act. If the tourists believe we’re exploiting the animals rather than caring for them, Namibia could develop a reputation for bad stewardship when, in fact, this is not the case. The risk is that the tourists would find another country to visit.”

“Sometimes treating them well,” Craig said, “means culling them in a systematic and careful manner. It’s hard to get that across when you’re talking about elephants and hippos.”

“It's a difficult set of circumstances,” Levi acknowledged.

“Rain is the answer,” Enrico slowed to a stop as a wildebeest moseyed across the road.

“At the vineyard, too, we’re hoping for rain,” Craig said. “That might turn things around.”

“Over Africa right now, there’s a new weather system. It might be promising,” Tess offered. “It's nothing we've seen before.”

“Ever?” Levi asked.

“Never,” Tess pulled in a deep breath. “We're going to have to get used to the idea that what used to be predictable, like the start of the Namibian monsoon, isn’t going to be as straightforward anymore.”

Craig looked over his shoulder at Gwen. “That new system could mean rain here in Namibia soon?”

Gwen shrugged. “Hard to tell. The spaghetti lines look like they trace farther north.”

“North like Angola, then?” Iris asked.

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