Witch doctors are suspected of murdering over 100 vultures at South Africa’s most well-known safari area for use in black magic potions.
When vultures started to hover above a poisoned buffalo in the Kruger National Park, it wasn’t long before they swooped down for a feast on the sick animal.
As the scavengers started to clean the corpse, the deadly poison entered the birds’ bodies, causing them to collapse in droves and perish in pain around the half-eaten buffalo.
After wolfing the poisoned flesh, a lone hyena that had moved in for its part of the kill was discovered dead amid the massive pile of vultures scattered about the buffalo.
The illicit trade in vulture body parts, particularly heads, sharply curved beaks, and talons called as’muti,’ is turning them into potions and endangering their survival.
On Thursday, rangers on patrol discovered the horrifying mass poisoning at the Punda Maria main gate and rescued 20 critically injured vultures behind a fence abutting a nearby settlement.
The Endangered Wildlife Trust hurried them in a rangers station wagon to a neighboring rehabilitation center for emergency care.
Two similar poisonings occurred in the Kruger National Park last year, and at the same time as the last major poisoning, 50 vultures were poisoned over the Botswana border in Chobe.
SANParks Acting Chief Inspector Hapiloe Sello stated, ‘This heinous conduct shows the ever-present threat of unscrupulous humans poisoning animals.’
The location has been roped off for further examination, and the bodies have been destroyed to ensure that no future poisonings occur. We still have 20 birds alive.
‘Initial indications are that the corpses were taken for their body parts, and SANParks can confirm that we have brought this issue to police for a thorough inquiry,’ said the agency.
‘Rangers on patrol discovered a buffalo corpse that seemed to be poisoned with poison, as well as over 100 dead vultures and a hyena that dined off the carcass.’
‘Poisonings of this size, considering the crucial importance of vultures worldwide, put this critically endangered species at risk of extinction,’ she warned.
Traditional healers or witch-doctors believe that vulture body parts may bestow clairvoyant skills, boost intellect, and cure fatal ailments on individuals who consume their concoctions.
They also believe that the’muti’ may provide people who purchase it the capacity to please the ancestors, and the vulture-based concoctions have been pushed to locals as a treatment for Covid.
Many superstitious people think the vulture has psychic abilities and that’muti’ created from vulture brains may help predict the future and even win the lottery.
‘Vultures were collected for use in traditional medicine by poisoning them in protected areas like KNP,’ according to a study report published in the Journal of Raptor Research last year.
Vultures are said to cost between R300 (£15) and R1500 (£75) for the complete bird.
Hapiloe Sello, Acting Chief Inspector of SANParks, is shown.
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Hapiloe Sello, Acting Chief Inspector of SANParks, is shown.
According to researchers who talked with 51 traditional healers in Mpumulanga Province alone, they employ 800 vultures every year, but the amount would be far higher throughout the continent.
With just 270,000 White Backed Vultures surviving, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has classified them as a critically endangered species.
They are sluggish breeders, laying just one egg per year, and with the present pace of poaching for witchcraft, it is projected that they will become extinct within 45 years.
The ferocious scavengers can weigh up to 9 pounds, are 3.5 feet long, and have a 7-foot wingspan. Their vision is 20 times greater than humans’ and they can see 8 times as far.
Their hooked and strong beaks can pull a kg of flesh off a dead animal in a minute and swallow it within a minute, and they will eat until they are so full that they are sometimes unable to take off again for hours.
They fly up to 8,000 feet seeking for dead or dying animals on the savannah below, and a committee of vultures will calmly wait in trees for an animal to die for 36 hours.
The deadliest occurrence of vulture poisoning on record occurred in Botswana in 2019, when three elephants were poisoned and 537 vultures perished after eating their lethal remnants.