The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (ZimParks) has warned the public against eating untested game meat.
Zimparks spokesperson Tinashe Farawo said wild animals may be infected with anthrax, foot and mouth or other diseases and eating meat from infected animals puts the health of people at risk.
Farawo also revealed that Zimparks’s efforts to counter poaching and scale up conservation efforts are bearing fruit as the number of poached animals is declining. He said:
We’re doing everything in our power to address the poaching problem. We’ve gone down from as high as 400 in 2014/15 to as low as 20. The numbers are going down.
The area where we were having problems was the Hwange-Matetsi block. Last year, we never lost a single elephant due to poaching.
If you go to areas like Bubi and many others where we have rhinos, at some point, we were losing rhinos almost every day but the numbers are going down.
We’ve employed policies such as the shoot to kill. If you’re found within a protected area with a rhino, it’s non-negotiable because you become an enemy.
All those things have assisted in making sure we deal with poaching.
We’ve also been having problems with communities in terms of poaching for food but we continue to educate our communities not to consume untested meat because most of these animals have anthrax, foot and mouth and many other diseases.
If the meat is not tested, they risk getting those diseases.
Meanwhile, a 250 000 Euro fund is set to be released to support communities living within the Greater Mapungubwe Transfrontier Conservation Area (GMTCA).
The funds are meant to assist communities that live around parks as they are encouraged to conserve wildlife and also to manage human-wildlife conflict.