Makgadikgadi salt pans are transformed almost beyond recognition with the seasonal change 

 from dry (left) to wet (right). The dry season lasts eight months, but when the rains come, the 

 land turns lush, and the earlier barrenness of the landscape becomes easy to forget. 



the fence evolved into a continuous cordon, made 

 up of two parallel fences and a roadway in between. 

 The fence on the wildlife side would be electrified; 

 the cattle-side fence would not. 



As government officials worked out the design of 

 the fence, the farmers' conflict with the wildlife spi- 

 raled out of control. Cattle continued to be killed, 

 and reports circulated that elephants were trampling 

 farm equipment and destroying crops. In the ten 

 months before the fence was completed, the de- 

 partment of wildlife received about 300 complaints 

 from villagers. The villagers retaliated with snares, 

 guns, and poisoned cow carcasses, ultimately killing 

 twelve of the park's forty lions. 



At the same time, the government was also try- 

 ing to reassure people concerned about how 

 the fence would affect migrating wildlife. In 1999 

 the department of wildlife took the unprecedented 

 step of commissioning an environmental-impact 

 study of a new fence in Makgadikgadi Park. The 

 study emphasized that the park animals had to have 

 access to water holes and that water would have to 

 be pumped for them during the dry season. It also 

 recommended that the fence have no jagged turns. 



Yet despite more than $160,000 invested in the 

 environmental study, the government disregarded 

 all three of its recommendations. Only a handful of 

 sources of pumped water were installed along the 

 dry Boteti. The government also added a few loops 

 and right angles to the fence at the last minute, ac- 

 cording to Craig Gibson, an independent consul- 

 tant at the Environmental Investigation Agency, an 

 organization based in London that investigates en- 

 vironmental crime. The loops and angles became 

 key factors in the zebra deaths. The wildlife became 

 confused by the unpredictable alignment, Gibson 

 explains — a confusion that often turned deadly. At 

 other points, the fence was constructed so close to 

 water holes that predators stampeded the zebras and 

 wildebeest into the fence. 



Why did the government ignore the report it 

 commissioned? Early in 2000 the director of the de- 

 partment of wildlife, together with a group of vil- 

 lage elders, took a helicopter ride over the Boteti 

 to determine the path of the fence. They had pre- 

 viously agreed on a "give and take" design in which 

 the fence would zigzag back and forth across the 

 riverbed, as the report recommended. That way, 

 some water holes would be on the villagers' side of 

 the fence, and others on the park (wildlife) side. 



But the elders convinced the government to alter 

 the design, leaving the greatest part of the Boteti 

 riverbed, with its underground water supply, outside 

 the boundaries of the park, out of reach of the wild- 

 life. Furthermore, the typical interaction between the 

 government and the villagers ceded even more un- 

 derground water to the villagers' livestock. A repre- 

 sentative from the department of wildlife would ar- 

 rive at a site to negotiate the exact location of the 

 fence. A villager would then learn that some part of 

 the riverbed near his land was to be on the park side 

 of the fence. The villager would plead with the offi- 

 cial: His ancestors were buried on that land. The land 

 had been in his family for generations. His neighbors 

 had unfairly gotten full riverbed access. And so, un- 

 armed with GPS data and sympathetic to the vil- 

 lagers' concerns, the representative would give in. 



In the end, tens of thousands of animals were left 

 almost without water. Only two watering holes were 

 available on their side of the fence during the dry 

 season. David Dugmore, the safari-camp owner with 

 a commercial interest in protecting wildlife, installed 

 a pump himself in a water hole near his camp. "Even 

 before the fence was up, I saw no effort being made 

 to supply these animals with water near my camp, 

 so I decided to do it myself," says Dugmore. 



But like many others living near the fence, Dug- 

 more has mixed feelings. "I don't like the idea of a 

 fence," he says. But he does allow that it was tough 

 without the fence for wildlife to compete with cat- 

 tle in the grazing areas on the park side of the 



52 NATURAL HISTORY June 2006 



