On the 6th of February the trust's first dedicated anti-poaching patrol walked its first ten kilometres along the southern fence-line of a private reserve adjoining the dome. They came back at sundown with seventeen snares.
That number is not unusual. What was unusual is what kind of snares they were.
A wire snare is the cheapest tool in any poacher's kit. Two strands of fencing wire, one slip-knot, an anchor point — usually a tree, sometimes a rock, often just a tent peg hammered into clay. They are set on game paths, at the height of the target animal's neck. They are illegal. They kill indiscriminately — duiker, kudu, warthog, occasionally a leopard or a serval, occasionally a young calf or a herd dog. They are also slow. An animal in a snare can take two or three days to die.
In the first hundred days the patrol has now walked 642 kilometres of fence-line and drainage corridor. They have recovered 284 snares. Twelve of those held animals; nine of those animals were dead by the time we found them. Two were saved. The rest — duiker, mostly — were buried where they fell.
The eleven survivors break down like this: three duiker (released same day, all three radio-collared and tracked), one young kudu cow (released after 36 hours of hydration support, no longer being tracked), one porcupine (released within the hour), one black-backed jackal (released same day), one bush pig (deceased in transit), and three leopards. Two of the three leopards were adults; both were rehabilitated and released within ten weeks. The third was Mavi.
The shape of the data tells us two things.
First, the snare density is concentrating along the southern and south-eastern fence-lines, where the dome meets active livestock farms. This is not random. This is people walking in from a known direction. We have shared the heat-map with SAPS Stock Theft Unit and with two neighbouring farms. We are not making the heat-map public.
Second, the snares we are pulling now are heavier-gauge than the ones we were pulling in 2023. Heavier wire means the people setting them are no longer targeting small antelope for bushmeat. They are targeting larger game.
This is the part of the dispatch where conservation reports usually pivot to hope. We can offer some. The patrol pace is sustainable. The intel-sharing with SAPS is functional. The neighbouring farmers, who were initially wary, are walking with us now. Two of them have donated a vehicle and a fuel card between them.
But the honest version is this: a quiet patrol is not a good patrol. A patrol that walks ten kilometres and finds nothing means either (a) nobody is hunting that line, or (b) somebody hunted it on Monday and we walked it on Friday. The metric we want — the only metric that matters — is animals not snared. That metric is invisible by design.
If you would like to fund a fuel card, a fence-line walk, or the next generation of snare-detection dogs we're hoping to bring in this year, find us at the contact form. We will write back personally.