STILL PROTECTED: Crocodiles have yet to be de-listed from stringent protection under the law.
SO it seems.
Just compare the relative importance of life – of a crocodile with that of a human being in the context of Sarawak law – and you’ll understand what I mean.
Many Sarawakians have a soft spot for the crocs as being essential to human society and regard the humans as being just ordinary mammals with better capability, perhaps, to fend for themselves. Humans need no law, therefore, to protect them from attacks by the crocodiles.
For example, our legislators have enacted a special law (Wild Life Protection Ordinance, 1998) to prevent human beings from killing the crocodiles. A licence to hunt the suspect of the murder of your favourite aunt is necessary, or else, you face a penalty – a double blow to anyone losing a relative to the croc and then having to engage a lawyer to defend him in court, charged with hunting crocodiles without a permit.
For the humans, however, no similar legislation has been thought necessary because the crocodiles are considered an endangered species while the people who live by the crocodile-infested rivers and depend on those rivers for their sources of income and food are not. A few of them get mauled by crocs from time to time, but is that any worse than deaths on the roads? Thus goes the rationale for not culling crocs. What’s the big fuss? After all they are just humans.
Those Sarawakians who rely on the rivers for fish and prawns have been advised by the politicians to be extra careful. Avoid the rivers while the roads are being planned or, if planned, are being built. Don’t worry, the government will build roads to your longhouses and villages. Water pipes will be laid so that you need not bathe in the river any more.
Build roads by all means, as many as possible. While those roads will take time to reach the villages and longhouses by the river, in the meantime, what do you suggest these people do – stop catching prawns or fish, stop farming across river or up or down it, stop washing clothes and bathing? Are we not saying, by implication, we would prefer that they avoid the rivers for all time?
It’s easier said than done, I think. There should be a better, practicable and cheaper solution for these people.
Crocodile management to minimise human-crocodile conflict
In October last year, there was an international conference with an inspiring theme ‘Human-Crocodile Coexistence: Win-Win Formula’. Held in Kuching, it was organised by Sarawak Forestry and was attended by the ‘Who’s Who’ in the crocodile-expert fraternity including the Crocodile Specialist Group, a worldwide network of biologists, wildlife managers, government officials, independent researchers, NGOs, farmers, traders, tanners, and fashion leaders.
Everybody was interested in preserving crocodiles but at the same time in making use of their skins and meat. Eat the cake and keep it, so to speak. The only delegates missing were the relatives of croc victims from Bako, Samarahan, Senang and Seblak.
After assessing the progress made by Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei in terms of crocodile management in each region since the first such conference was held in Kota Kinabalu the previous year, the general consensus of the workshop in Kuching, if I remember correctly, was to seek approval of the countries, signatories to the Cites (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), to make it legal for Sarawak to cull and sell the crocodile products. This could be done by de-listing estuarine crocodiles (Crocodylus porosus) from the protected class of wildlife to another category which allows for a proper management of the assets of the reptiles.
Now October 2011 has come and gone and yet there is no indication so far about the success or failure by the authorities to reclassify the Crocodylus porosus as a wildlife without stringent protection of the law. This de-listing of the beasts would enable the wildlife experts whose hands have been tied by Cites to handle the crocodiles more efficiently. Arm them with adequate funding and they will do the job well. Several of them are local-born specialists; send them for further training to get fresh ideas in Australia and the US, if necessary. They will do a good job of managing the crocodiles. Hear what they will say at the next conference. When?
Forestall attack
To forestall any attack on me by wildlife society members, I wish to make it clear that I’m only after their friend Crocodylus porosus, not even Tomistoma schleglii. I am on all fours with the society members with regard to the other, non-lethal flora and fauna as listed in the Schedules to the 1998 Ordinance. No quarrel there.
However, I will have a serious quarrel with anyone who insists on favouring the crocodiles, especially the man-eaters which enjoy freedom to catch human beings with impunity if and when they feel like doing so. I thought the law is made for man, not man for the law.
Society members should know and be more concerned about the future of most of the other wildlife and plants which are on the brink of extinction wherever forests are being cut down rapidly.
Don’t worry about the crocs so much. They are allowed to grow in size and in great numbers, posing a danger to other species such as the Homo sapiens whom we want to keep for as long as possible.
To me, crocodiles are useful only as scavengers of dead animals that float downriver, but dead dogs or cats should be properly buried, not thrown away indiscriminately. Even dead animals are not enough for the hungry crocs. They go for prawns and gobble up their rivals, our fishermen. The gobbler is protected by the Ordinance and the gobbled is not. That’s not fair, is it?
Other than their skin and meat (those who fancy it have assured me that it tastes like chicken), they are practically useless in other aspects. Perhaps, in this sense, a dead crocodile is more valuable than a dead fisherman!
To cull or not to cull
There is the controversy among several politicians: to cull or not to cull the reptiles.
The debate stops when the news from the river is good; it starts again when someone has been cruelly pulled down under – one voter less in the constituency.
Talking does nothing to minimise or even eradicate the human-crocodile conflict. The crocodiles do not talk about culling, they just cull you whenever they are hungry and they are forever hungry until they are culled.