Mr Borrell’s African Tales: Commentary on Brendan Borrell's articles on conservation in South Africa by Adam Welz

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There’s a longstanding tradition of foreigners authoritatively telling not-entirely-accurate stories about Africa after travelling there. It seems that Africa, intense, vibrant and often troubled as it is, is often not quite exotic or ‘primitive’ enough for some overseas tourists, particularly those who like going public with tales of their trips: a little overstatement, a few tweaks of the facts, some judgemental, perhaps even sordid inferences seem to be the basic ingredients of many accounts of African excursions.

It was that way long before that famous journalistic bullshitter of Victorian times, John Rowlands (aka Henry Morton Stanley) made his way through the jungles of the Congo basin in the 1870s, and it’s clearly still that way today; Brendan Borrell’s triptych of tales about wildlife conservation in southern Africa, published last week on slate.com, are delightful contemporary examples of this custom.

I should probably cast his nonsensical nonnative musings off into the cybervoid with a click and a wry smile, but I just can’t. Borrell has written so inaccurately, so tritely and with such hubris about things that I care about that I feel the need to address a few of his (surprisingly) many errors before they go forth and multiply across the web, as these things tend to do.

The first tale in Borrell’s triad concerns ostrich farming in Oudtshoorn, a small town in southern South Africa which is the ostrich farming capital of the world. Here he speculates that “ostrich farming may be healthy for the environment… as a sustainable source of animal protein.” Modern domestic animal farming causes huge ecological harm and displaces wild species. “Could farming ostriches and other game animals be the solution?” he wonders.

It’s a good question, but one he fails to answer, and no wonder, because Borrell, despite his Ph.d in biology from Berkeley, has failed to pick up the most well-known biological fact about the vast valley that he’s standing in; the area that he calls “a semi-desert plucked of all but the hardiest vegetation” is the Klein (or ‘Little’) Karoo, part of the most botanically-diverse semi-arid area on the planet, the Conservation International Hotspot known as the Succulent Karoo, in which are found more species of plants per acre than in any other dryish part of the world. (Borral mistakenly calls the Klein Karoo Co-operative, the umbrella institution for the ostrich producers of the area, the ‘Klein Karoo’. The Klein Karoo is actually the name of the semi-desert region around Oudtshoorn.)

The Klein Karoo is home to enormous numbers of (mostly small) succulent plant species. Many of these are endemic to the area, in other words they are found nowhere else. By failing to notice this basic fact, Borrell also fails to notice the massive threat that intensive ostrich farming poses to the wild species of the area, and how ecologically damaging much of Oudtshoorn’s ostrich farming is.

When ostriches are confined in small paddocks at high density they destroy all the natural vegetation within the fenceline in a few weeks. They then trample the soil until it’s almost as hard as concrete, preventing what little rain does fall from penetrating. The result is a biological wasteland that takes decades to re-grow anything close to its natural plant cover after ostriches are removed. Moreover, some of the plant species in the Klein Karoo have tiny natural ranges of only a few acres – a single ostrich farm can cause species to go extinct.

Borrell also mysteriously misses that the ostriches being raised in Oudtshoorn are not native to South Africa. They are hybrids of various African forms including the famed so-called Barbary Ostrich, a type of ostrich from the southern Sudan that was considered to have superior feathers to the native South African type. (Any ostrich farm-owner could have told him this, but it seems he never spoke to one.) They’re fed on processed pellet food, made in nearby factories from feed-crops artificially irrigated by scarce local water resources. The ostriches around Oudtshoorn are as much ‘game animals’ or ‘wildlife’ as buffalo-cow hybrids raised in factory farms in the US are – Borrell’s conclusion that “the ostrich business seems to be a prime example of making native wildlife pay for itself” is thus nonsense.

In his second article Borrell takes us to the northern part of South Africa, to the relatively small Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve, where he goes to look at an African Wild Dog conservation project. The project is suffering serious challenges – the dogs in the reserve are in constant danger of dying out and the reserve, like many others in the wild dog conservation network, is only large enough for one pack, and male dogs have to be annually (and expensively) rotated through different reserves to prevent packs from becoming inbred. In addition, African Wild Dogs are highly vulnerable to human persecution and disease.

Wild dog conservation is obviously difficult, and the managers of the project at Venetia are having a hard time of it. Instead of showing some understanding of their difficulties, however, Borrell authoritatively tells us that “this whole exercise struck me as one of the most pointless conservation efforts imaginable”. Why, he asks, do conservationists rather not spend their time and money conserving wild dogs in neighbouring Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where 700 of the beasts roam, instead of futzing around with what he calls this “horribly inefficient” project in South Africa?

Indeed, he expansively opines, this kind of conservation “localism” has “harmed conservation efforts around the globe”. Citing a study, Borrell says that “more than half” of the $1.5 billion spent by international conservation groups in 2002 went to habitat protection in one country, the USA, alone, proof that buying up and managing natural habitats for conservation is far more expensive in ‘developed’ countries than poorer ones. Also, environmental laws are better enforced in rich countries, so we should be drilling for oil in Alaska’s ANWR rather than the rainforests of Ecuador or the Niger Delta because it’ll be less damaging in the ‘first-world’ countries.

Borrell’s grand theory: We should be doing conservation in the poor, cheap countries instead of wasting our money in the rich ones.

For example, he says, South Africa is an economic powerhouse with an economy 22 times the size of sparsely-populated Botswana, making the latter an ideal destination for conservation cash. “Namibia and Mozambique, two more of the poorest countries on the continent, would also be good targets for animal-protection dollars”, he confidently tells us.

Maybe Borrell should have done a basic fact check before firing up his computer: By the most important measure of wealth, per-capita income, Botswana is actually one of the richest countries in Africa, more highly-ranked than South Africa. Botswana is also already a conservation leader, with a far higher percentage of its wildland already conserved than South Africa. Borrell has missed the mark on this one.

More fundamentally, Borrell’s proposition that conservation should happen in underdeveloped countries ignores one of the simplest observations that one can make about nature: no animal or plant can live everywhere on Earth. You can’t conserve a wild Polar Bear in the jungles of Ecuador. Likewise, there are thousands of species in South Africa that can’t live in Botswana because the climate, or the soil, or the ecosystems needed to support them simply aren’t there. If an animal occurs naturally in a rich country it should be conserved there.

Also, a basic principle of conservation is not to put all your eggs in one basket – you don’t want all the African Wild Dogs on the planet to be in one area (or even in one country) because all it takes is one disease outbreak, one fire or one bad government policy and you’ve lost them all. You want to spread your risk across the landscape. This is oftentimes difficult and costly, and because conservation often plays last fiddle to other landuses such as farming, mining and human settlement, conservationists often have to operate in too-small areas that aren’t ideal for the endangered species they’re trying to save from extinction. That’s just how it is, and it’s churlish of Borrell to bash hardworking wild dog protectors for working in a difficult situation.

The last in Borrell’s trio of tall stories sees him weilding sweeping generalizations and foggy innuendo while expertly dodging accurate facts and sensible conclusions about the vast Kruger National Park and the difficult issues around race in South Africa. (Too difficult, it turns out, but I suppose this is to be expected from someone for whom a simple two-syllable name in a foreign language presents an insurmountable challenge: yes, it’s Numbi, not Pumbi, Mr. Borrell.)

Borrell tells an inexact ‘white people vs black people’ tale of Kruger’s founding, of how what is today the vast National Park “was once the domain of hunter-gatherers”, from which, by the 1950s, “locals” (blacks?) had been banished and were not even allowed to enter as visitors. Even the black souvenir-sellers in the Park, he says, “were beaten and chased away”. Today, he says, the park employs only 4,000 people, “but more than 2 million others now live along its boundaries” – which might lead readers to believe that the 2 million ‘along’ the Park’s boundaries are the descendants of the hunter-gatherers that lost their homeland, and have a reasonable right to return. (What does living ‘along’ Kruger’s boundary mean anyway – is that within one or a hundred miles of the fence? Someone with Borrell’s scientific pedigree could consider defining this for his readers.)

What is missing for Borrell’s version of history is that the hunter-gatherers (so-called Khoisan people, related to the famed ‘Bushmen’ of the Kalahari) that used to make what is now the Kruger National Park their home were evicted centuries, if not millennia before the park was established by animal-herding and crop-growing people migrating down from northeast Africa. It is the descendents of the latter, not hunter-gatherers, that were booted out of Kruger in the last century – along with some white and Indian residents of the area. (I can find no historical evidence that souvenir-sellers were actually beaten at Skukuza – does Borrell have any or was it just a good line for the story?)

A huge percentage of the people living near Kruger are actually relatively recent migrants from Mozambique – hundreds of thousands fled that country to South Africa via the Park during Mozambique’s horrific civil war in the 1970s and 80s (a war that was part-funded and supported by the American government). Others were brought from elsewhere in South Africa and dumped in the old apartheid ‘homeland’ of Gazankulu (near the southestern part of Kruger). Borrell also does not seem to realize that some of the current land claims being made on Kruger are clearly fraudulent or opportunistic, as different groups of people are claiming the same areas as their tribal or clan ‘homelands’.

Borrell also speculates that the recent upsurge in rhino poaching in Kruger has to do with the 2 million poor South Africans massing along its borders – some basic reporting would have revealed that it’s actually being driven by professional Mozambican poachers working for Chinese intermediaries, also based in Mozambique, but why let the facts get in the way of some good handwaving, eh, Mr. Borrell?

In other words not nearly all of the people living near Kruger have a legitimate claim to the Park’s land and are threatening its existence – Borrell has exaggerated the situation. Unwilling to make the effort to understand local history, he also misses the progress that’s been made in uplifting communities around the Park in the post-apartheid era. There is still poverty around Kruger, but many more villages now have electricity, telephones, and water pumps than when I first travelled through the area twenty years ago.

Borrell’s most poignant image of black suffering in the shadow of Kruger-the-white-vacationland is built around the black security guard he encounters as he enters the park. The guard, after offering information to make his visit more pleasant, asks Borrell “you don’t have any food in the car, do you?”. The guard then “placed the palm of his hand on his stomach”, at which Borrell “knew what he meant”.

Hmm.

Why does Borrell not just come out and say that the gate guard was being paid so little that he was starving? Is it because he never actually found out what his salary was, or because no-one that works in Kruger is actually paid so little that they are actually starving? Or, just perhaps, because he’s a naïve foreigner who got suckered into a paying a little food-bribe and is ashamed to admit it?

Borrel also can’t resist telling Kruger’s management how they should be interacting with communities. He cites “52 communal natural resource management programs” in Namibia, where nearby communities have a share in the resources generated by conservation areas, that have “already” been set up in that country, as if South Africa is way behind the curve, and that South Africa might “finally be on the verge of updating its separate-but-equal approach to conservation”. In the next sentence we learn that the Makuleke community lodged a land claim back in 1995 on land in the northern part of Kruger and now receive profits from tourism in that area.

Huh?

If the arrangement with the Makulekes has been operating for years how can the country be “on the verge” of updating its approach? Anyhow, Borrell’s blithe approach to history means he misses the pioneering work done by Ian Player, Qumbu Ntombela and others to spread benefits from conservation areas to nearby communities in South Africa as far back as the 1960s. South Africans have been involved in communal natural resource management for decades, and they sure as heck don’t need a traveling intellectual lightweight like Borrell to tell them how to do it.

As if this was not enough, Borrell delivers a mortal blow to his credibility by misunderstanding apartheid-era racial categories and using mishandled statistics to bolster the credibility of his views. In an effort to justify his headline “Watching Wildlife With White People”, Borrell tells us that 94% of the Kruger Park’s visitors are speakers of what he calls the “white languages”, English and Afrikaans, thus implying that 94% of the Park’s visitors are white South Africans.

Oops.

People were forced into four main race categories in the apartheid era – “Black” (for pure-blooded ‘black’ Africans), “White”, “Coloured” (for mixed-race/indefinite race people) and “Indian” (for ethnically South Asian people) – not just “Black” and “White”. Almost all “Coloured” and “Indian” people speak English or Afrikaans in the home, so some of Borrel’s 94% must be from these previously-disadvantaged groups. Also, since more than 20% of Kruger’s visitors have come from foreign countries in recent years, 94% of visitors cannot possibly be from any South African race group, no matter how you define it. For someone claiming a doctorate in science from a top American university to be making elementary school-level errors in arithmetic is, well, not good.

He could simply have told us that most of the tourists he saw in Kruger were white – as were most of the tourists I saw in Acadia National Park, Maine, USA, a few weeks ago – and left it at that.

To finish off: There are sadly yet more errors in Borrel’s articles, but I don’t have the energy to address them all. Suffice it to say that these stories are little more than misleading tales from a tourist, not responsible reporting. Our profession and our planet deserve better, and I hope Mr. Borrell gets it right next time.

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Full disclosure: I have previously done research on African Fish-Eagles for the Birds of Prey Working Group of the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), a division of the EWT that has no authority over or close connection to the wild dog project mentioned in Borrell’s articles.

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Adam Welz is a South African environmental writer and filmmaker currently living in New York.

Well Done Adam.

I had to use a calculator to work out when I first visited the Karoo and then the Kruger National Park as a child, when I visited as a teen., when I visited with my kids, and my latest trips as a Grandfather. So, I am a pensioner now, but born and bred in South Africa, and know many of the corners to which you refer. I want you to know that you have my support, and sadly, I know you will have the support of many of my ilk, but who will not contribute to this forum,simply because they are unaware of the stand you have made.

Please be encouraged to continue.

Regards,

Malcolm.

Welz makes a number of claims in his attempt to attack me and debunk my South Africa series, but little of what he writes actually contradicts anything in my essays. Some of his complaints are irrelevant. Some are silly. And a few are wrong.

First off, he takes me task for giving a free pass to the ostrich industry and claims that I've missed two key points: that the farmed ostriches are not truly "native" to South Africa and that they damage the landscape. Although ostriches from Sudan to the Cape probably belong to a single species, Struthio camelis, in an earlier draft, I had pointed out potential problems of raising semi-domesticated wildlife in the same geographic region as their native cousins, which could spread disease and distort the natural gene pool. Those are fair points to make, but considering my verdict on ostrich farming, which Welz apparently missed, they didn't seem to add much to the story: "Because the farm's 10,000 birds are raised on traditional feedstock and the rangeland is largely cleared of the Karoo's native scrub, the dusty farm isn't quite the ecological nirvana I was hoping for." I chose to highlight ostrich farms rather than other game farms because they represent the most well-developed native ranching industries -- not because they are the pinnacle of eco-friendliness.

In my essay on wild dogs, I considered the relative cost-efficiency of conservation in different countries, taking aim in particular at expensive species-centric (rather than land-centric) conservation projects. While protecting wild dogs in large reserves like Kruger and Hluhluwe Umfolozi may be a reasonable goal I questioned the philosophy behind throwing a majority of the cash at other tiny reserves scattered around the country. While Welz is correct that you can't preserve a Polar Bear in Ecuador, you will no doubt protect a lot more species there. But since we are talking about dogs, you can preserve them in either Botswana or South Africa so why waste money on a lost cause? Botswana does have a slightly higher per capita gross domestic product than SA, as Welz points out, that's not the important metric. First off, one-third of that GDP is coming from diamond mining operations (some on public land), and some estimates put unemployment at 40%. More important are the figures I cite: the country has half the land area of SA, but has just 5% the population, and with such a tiny national economy it is ripe to be exploited by an outside influence, be it a mining conglomerate or a conservation organization. Which would you choose?

Finally, Welz is correct in describing Kruger's complicated human history, which I breezed over in a single paragraph. During the reporting that Welz implies I never did, I met immigrants from Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, and I also have no illusions about the "legitimacy" of all the land claims on Kruger or neighboring ranches. Welz criticizes me for adding to my personal observations of seeing white faces with the only published Kruger visitation data I could find that characterizes visitors using language as a proxy for race. (And, yes, "locals" were apparently beaten at Skukuza, p. 193, http://bit.ly/4Eh5t).

It's true that tribalism, nepotism, and outright corruption all threaten to disrupt the seeming order created by the apartheid system—and the potential for stable, productive, rural communities living in harmony with the park. As for the larger point of my essay, I'm not sure what it is exactly that Welz has a beef (ostrich?) with. Does he believe that the absence of black visitors at Kruger is healthy? And that the park(s) he loved as a child under apartheid can keep functioning the same way?

The western approach to conservation has never worked in the developing world, and national parks have a habit of shrinking year by year – on paper and in reality. Despite the fact that local whites (and blacks) like to blame Mozambicans (and Swazis) for poaching, many of the poachers have been caught living on trust land around Kruger. Communities would not tolerate such activities if they felt Kruger (or neighboring ranches) were providing significant economic benefits. Welz wants to claim that South Africa is somehow ahead of its time with its conservancies, but that is simply not the case. It has a few moderately successful programs, but it has been more of a follower than a leader. (And the Makuluke's contract with Kruger is promising but hardly a success story http://bit.ly/u9IM4).

Welz holds Ian Player up as an exemplar of spreading the benefits from conservation areas to communities, but he fails to mention that Player had a role in removing people from the Ndumu Game Reserve in Zululand – a fact he felt guilty for later in life (http://bit.ly/j1sb1). I know I felt guilty visiting Kruger, and I cannot understand how Welz does not share the sentiment.

Confronted with my accusations, Brendan Borrell now defends himself with further innuendo. His target this time is not conservation in South Africa, but me. This is to be expected – I pulled a few punches in my response to his work, and he’s likely not pleased by my comments. In an effort to shift the debate away from my critique, he’s calling my morality into question.

Borrell has attempted to portray me as a white South African racist, pining for the apartheid past where things were supposedly ordered (as if!) and only white people were allowed to be tourists in the Kruger National Park. He asks, “I'm not sure what it is exactly that Welz has a beef (ostrich?) with. Does he believe that the absence of black visitors at Kruger is healthy? And that the park(s) he loved as a child under apartheid can keep functioning the same way?” and “I know I felt guilty visiting Kruger, and I cannot understand how Welz does not share the sentiment.”

I’m not going to detail my personal history to the internet, but it would be interesting to inquire into his thinly-veiled assumptions about so-called ‘white’ and ‘black’ South Africans, what we should be doing, thinking and feeling guilty about.

My beef about Borrell’s work is that he draws unjustified conclusions from too little evidence and makes damaging accusations via the use of innuendo instead of presenting clear conclusions based on thoroughly researched evidence. I made that obvious, but he has continued in this vein.

For example, I said nothing about the absence of black visitors to Kruger being healthy or unhealthy, and I traveled to very few national parks as a child. Most of my wildlife-watching was done on farms, city lots, or obscure low-ranked municipal nature reserves nearer to the city I grew up in. Most of my experience of the area around Kruger came via trips in the 1980s as a teenager to Manyeleti, a nature reserve on the border of Kruger. (Interestingly, Manyeleti was open to people classified as ‘Black’ under the apartheid system and was commonly known as the ‘Black Kruger’.) So the implication that I’m longing for a return to childhood vacations in segregated national parks is nonsense, and more than a little insulting.

I’m mystified by Borrell’s back-handed accusation that I am somehow morally deficient for not feeling guilty like him about visiting Kruger, since I said nothing about feelings around visiting Kruger. Perhaps Borrell just likes to feel guilty, and wants someone to join him?

The implication from his story is that he feels guilty about taking a wildlife vacation on land that was occupied by forcibly removed black people. He seems to feel guilty that he (and ‘white people’) are vacationing while black people work, possibly for starvation wages (he still hasn’t clarified the incident with the black gate guard who asked him for food, no matter that his account makes the multi-racial managers of Kruger look like slave-drivers, a serious aspersion to cast on people without more evidence than Borrell has provided).

The history of modern South Africa, like the history of the USA, contains intense conflict between European settlers and people who preceded them. In the case of the USA, European settlers were more effective genocidalists than their counterparts in southern Africa, managing to almost totally wipe out the American Indians they encountered here and also rearrange land occupation patterns more completely. Does Borrell feel guilty about visiting Yellowstone, Acadia, or Yosemite with hordes of white people? Heck, does he feel guilty about living in Brooklyn?

If he does, then how does that guilt serve him? How does it enable him to find a way forward in the current situation?

I don’t feel guilty when I visit Kruger – I feel enormously privileged. There are few places in the world where locals and foreigners driving regular vehicles can have up-close encounters with extraordinary wildlife (e.g. http://bit.ly/4nIYwq) without having to fork out a king’s ransom like they must in the safari lodges in Botswana and many other African countries. Kruger is, in my opinion, part of the global heritage.

But I am often saddened that so few poorer South Africans get to experience the wonders of the African bush, and wild nature definitely needs more friends. I publicly challenged the former head of the South African National Parks for not advertising their program to provide free park entrance to poor community groups. It frustrates me that ongoing corruption, beaurocratic incompetence and conflict are getting in the way of some of Kruger’s benefits flowing to surrounding communities. This is something that Borrell did not delve into – perhaps because it would have shown that not all ‘black’ people are defenseless victims of the ‘white’ conservation administration, which is, anyhow, not very ‘white’ anymore?

I encourage my friends in mainstream, historically white conservation nonprofits to reach out to poor communities, which, increasingly, they are doing – with some heartening results. More and more historically disadvantaged people are making a living off wildlife tourism every year in South Africa – they need more foreign visitors to be spending their dollars in our parks, not more guilt-stricken stay-at-homes. Polishing his moral credentials by implying that conservation efforts in South Africa are dominated by racist incompetents may make Borrell feel better, but it lifts no one out of poverty.

Yes, Kruger faces enormous challenges – as does wildlife conservation in general. Yes, South Africa has a recent history of state-enforced racial segregation and discrimination has left its legacy in the vacation habits of South Africans. This is not news. Every visitor sees this. By getting hung up on apartheid-era racial hooks he misses a huge chunk of what’s really going on, the interesting problems and opportunities that lie beneath the surface. For instance, if poverty stops poor black people from visiting Kruger, what is it that dissuades the millions of middle- and upper-class black people from visiting? Borrell, by assuming that it’s all about money, neglects to explore other options.

South Africa, with its obvious extremes of wealth and poverty, its blatant superimposition of the grotesquely violent on the sublimely beautiful and its often glibly presented recent history often overwhelms the first-time visitor and provides a focused outlet for their subconscious joys and pains, and in Borrell’s case, their guilt.

The challenge is to go deeper and learn more. It’s easy to have answers to racism in cosmopolitan New York City, and avoid confronting the types of poverty and violence that’s experienced by millions in the ‘developing’ world. Dealing with a recent legacy of hardcore racial segregation and every form of racism one can imagine, as thinking South Africans do every minute of every day, leads one to a more textured understanding of these things, and makes one a little less likely to fling arrogant, absolutist Borrell-like judgments around after a brief tour in a country.

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A few more comments for the dedicated reader:

1) I have no idea what Borrell means when he says that “The western approach to conservation has never worked in the developing world, and national parks have a habit of shrinking year by year – on paper and in reality” in reference to southern Africa. Firstly, which of the approaches to conservation practiced in the west is ‘the’ approach? And where is the evidence that national parks are shrinking in any southern African country bar Zimbabwe, which has recently suffered a near-complete economic and political meltdown?
2) I did not say that Borrell had given a ‘free pass’ to the ostrich industry. I said that, by failing to notice how extraordinarily biodiverse the Klein Karoo is (http://bit.ly/kOWeJ ), he fails to tell his readers accurately about the massive threat that intensive ostrich farming poses to the wild species of the area. Borrell’s description of the Klein Karoo as a “semi-desert plucked of all but the hardiest vegetation” is like an art writer describing the Louvre as a ‘mediocre art museum looted of all but the crudest painting’. His conclusion that an ostrich farm “isn't quite the ecological nirvana I was hoping for” is like saying that an art-theft gang ‘isn’t quite the bastion of fair dealing I was expecting’.
3) I also said that he had mistaken the ostrich industry for ranching with native wildlife, thus making his points moot, i.e. of no practical significance to fulfilling the mission he claims to have set out on in southern Africa, which was “to learn about the challenges of [nature] preservation in our collective homeland”. I repeat: The ostriches being raised in concentrated feedlot operations around Oudtshoorn are synthetic (as in, human-made) hybrids of very obviously different forms of ostrich, each of which is physically and behaviorally different in the natural state, from very different parts of Africa. http://bit.ly/WLbjN describes the early hybridization efforts. Nothing about the way ostriches are farmed intensively in Oudtshoorn conserves the wild forms of ostriches, or conserves the natural habitat around Oudtshoorn. If Borrell wants to call the concentrated feedlotting of an animal that has been intensively bred to maximize its productivity of meat, leather and feathers “native wildlife paying for itself” I’m afraid we can discuss this point no further.
4) Borrell’s confused response to my criticisms of his wild dog essay belie the essay’s weakness. He tries to move the goalposts by claiming that he was taking aim at expensive ‘species-centric’ rather than ‘land-centric’ conservation projects, but a look at his original story makes it clear that he makes no such distinction there – he criticizes the expensive conservation of land and habitat in the United States, not species. Anyhow, it’s an odd distinction and one that makes no sense, because you can’t conserve a species outside a zoo or a lab without conserving its habitat, and wildlife conservation is about conserving species any way you cut it.
5) Additionally, where is the evidence that the conservation of wild dogs in small reserves is, in Borrell’s words, a “lost cause”? When did ‘difficult’ become ‘impossible’? It is illustrative of Borrell’s arrogance that he thinks he can make such a clear judgment after demonstrating that he understands very little of the fundamental basis of conservation theory and being in a place for only a couple of days.
6) Wild dogs, by Borrell’s own account, have vanished from large protected areas – the Maasai Mara in Kenya, for example – and are now extinct in the majority of countries they once occurred in. Because of this species’ extreme vulnerability to disease etc., I think it makes a lot of sense to have as many populations of the animals as possible spread through the landscape, even if they are in small reserves and even if this is expensive. Borrell might think that conserving them in a handful of larger reserves is more cost-effective, which is an opinion that he might want to bring to the table. However, he cut off all possibility for a civilized debate by calling the project of a group of hardworking conservationists a “one of the most pointless conservation efforts imaginable.” If he did not expect to get caring peoples’ hackles up with this one, he should have.

Nice critique Mr. Welz. This is the strength of the internet. The Author's response was little more than a face saving exercise. Hopefully he learned something. I certainly did.