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Game Guard Management Course
Module # 1 – Component # 1
Foreword to the
Game Guard Management
Course
The challenges faced by rangers and conservation managers in Africa was made
explicit when I was in conversation with a Protected Area Manager in the USA.
We were on the topic of wildlife management when I enquired about what
percentage of the budget did he dedicate to game security annually? His
response was, as I expected, “To be honest, it is not something that I have had
to consider before.”
In Africa, we boast a wealth of natural resources beyond that of any other
continent. Unfortunately due to globalisation, these resources have become
more accessible for consumption.
At the same time, the local traditional
subsistence harvester is being transformed into a transnational commercial
trader. The stakes are getting higher and the conservation margins are getting
thinner. With this comes new demands in terms of the skills that are required
by rangers in order to service these issues.
Conservation management is objective-led and requires adaptive management
to be applied in order to achieve them. Nowadays, however, there is no way
that game can be protected without the dedicated services of game guards or
field rangers. With the multitude of changes being experienced in the sector,
some old principles stay the same. These principles have been a part of the
Foreword to the Game Guard Management Course
© Ken Coetzee &
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Game Guard Management Course
Game Rangers Association of Africa since its inception in 1970. One of these
principles speaks to the necessity of employing the right person for the job.
These rangers and game guards should operate with pride, and with a passion
for their profession whilst promoting best management practices in ensuring the
conservation of our natural heritage.
A game guard, as highlighted in this course, is not a security guard. Nor can he
be from a purist military background.
An appreciation and understanding of
conservation needs to be at the forefront upon which the other skills are loaded.
This Course will certainly be a great asset, as it supports one of the objectives of
the Game Rangers
Association of Africa (GRAA) which is to ensure that game guards are
appropriately and professionally trained and equipped to carry out their primary
responsibility of maintaining the integrity of wilderness areas, protected areas
and other natural areas in which they work.
The GRAA, as a longstanding community with a code of practice for rangers,
both present and past, will continue to service the interests of game guards in
order to ensure the highest standards and credibility of the profession.
Dr Ian Player, the patron of the GRAA, says that no truer words have been
spoken when he quotes the following from the late Nick Steele (former Game
Ranger in the iMfolozi and Hluhluwe Game Reserves and director of the
Department of Nature Conservation KwaZulu),
“Wildlife conservation is the most noble cause in the world today”. We all need
to embrace the values of a game guard and elevate the profession to the level
where it truly receives the recognition and support that it deserves. Otherwise,
who else will take up the fight to ensure that the roar of the African lion is heard
by the children of our children’s children, forever?
Chris Galliers
Chairman
Game Rangers Association of Africa
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Dedication
This work is dedicated to the game guards, field rangers, game scouts,
community rangers and all other field staff who dedicate themselves to the
operational protection of our magnificent fauna. They are often poorly
supported, ill equipped and inadequately armed for the war against the wellfunded poaching syndicates that indiscriminately strip our national parks, nature
reserves, nature conservancies and game ranches of their valuable wildlife
resources.
These game guards form a courageous thin line of protection against a tide of
senseless waste, greed and corruption and many have lost their lives in doing
so. Hopefully these basic guidelines will help, in some small way, to lighten their
load.
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Acknowledgements
Firstly, I thank my wife Madeline for her unwavering support and patience. She
typed and edited these pages from my illegible scrawl in between all her other
pressing administrative and production demands that are the requirements of
our consulting business. My rough notes must be seen to fully appreciate her
contribution to this course.
A great number of people had a hand in the contents of this course. The
cumulative experience of my colleagues way back when we saw fit to establish
and train game guards are recorded in these pages.
My collaborators selflessly gave time and input into something that we all
believed in and endeavoured to institute. Those that I have not mentioned by
name must please forgive me, may they all be very proud of their contribution to
game guard establishment and training.
Peter Burdett was my chief collaborator and it was he that largely “steered” our
ideas about the standard of game guard management and training. He was also
the co-author of our original manuals and guidelines, the major source for this
course.
Many field men were responsible for the good standard of our game guard
training, voluntarily giving up their time and investing great effort to do so. I
particularly, want to, acknowledge the outstanding input and dedication of Peter
Burdett, Rory Allerdice, Mike King, Frikkie Rosseau and Tim de Jongh in helping
to make these training courses the success that they were.
I also want to acknowledge the support that we got back then (1970’s – 1990’s)
from senior officials, particularly Niel van Wyk, the late Dan van Schoor and the
late Kobus Jooste, and more recently, from Fanie Bekker.
Without their
continuous support and encouragement, our progress with the game guard
training and management programme would not have been possible.
My biggest concern was getting somebody to actually publish what I consider to
be rather dry and uninteresting instruction material. After making a few
enquiries, I was about to give up on the idea when a few of my friends and
colleagues convinced me to persevere. I thank Gert Erasmus, Div De Villiers,
Rory Allardice, Anton Schmidt and Wallie Stroebel for their support.
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I was reading a wonderful book of conservation stories written by a colleague of
my days in the Eastern Cape region, when it dawned on me that the format of
this particular book would be just right for my “Game Guard Management”
course. The book was “The Poacher and other hunting, fishing and conservation
stories” by Div De Villiers (which, by the way, is a must-read). I immediately
contacted the publisher, Barbara Mueller of New Voices Publishing and never
looked back.
I am thankful and grateful for Barbara’s encouragement and
professionalism; it has been a pleasure getting the course done, rather than the
painful experience that I had initially expected.
Div De Villiers kindly gave me permission to use a couple of “inserts” from his
excellent book of short stories “The Poacher and other hunting, fishing and
conservation stories”.
These inserts have added considerable colour to the
Components that they introduce. Div. also helped with the proof reading of the
manuscript and provided some great ideas, particularly on the issue of gender.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Mrs Nola Steele and her sons, Warren
and Vaughn Steele, the family of the late Mr Nick Steele, for permitting me to
use quotations from Mr Steele’s books as introduction to many of the
Components in this course.
Nick Steele was a game ranger, a naturalist, a pioneer, a horseman and an
author and his colourful writing brings humour, history and the authority of long
field experience into this course.
Nick Steele had a strong belief in the important role that game guards had to
play, and still have to play, in conservation and his books are full of admiration
and respect for the game guards that he worked with, saying that they “worked
at the coal face of conservation.”
Nick introduced the use of horses for patrolling into some of the Zululand game
reserves in the 1950’s and 1960’s and proved them to be very effective for antipoaching work. His knowledge and appreciation of horses, as described in his
book “Take a horse into the wilderness” was the sole instruction guideline for my
own use of horses for game guard patrolling in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Nick Steele was something of a mentor to many of us in nature conservation;
through his excellent and inspiring books we were guided and motivated in our
tasks of nature reserve management, law enforcement and game guard
management.
Nick pioneered the nature conservancy concept on private land in 1975,
producing the first farm patrol plan which promoted the use of trained game
guard units to provide security for a number of farms. This initiative boomed and
by the late 1980’s there were hundreds of conservancies all over the country.
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From his days as a game ranger in the Zululand reserves to his days as Director
of the Bureau of Natural Resources, Nick Steele was a tireless campaigner for
the preservation of a strong wilderness ethic in conservation.
It was thus as game ranger, horseman, wilderness campaigner, the architect of
conservancies and conservation organisation leader that nick Steele made his
mark as a singular pioneer conservationist and mentor to so many game guards,
rangers and conservators that followed in his footsteps.
It is thus a great honour to be permitted to illustrate this course with some of
the stories and experiences that Nick Steele recorded about his life and the
game guards that he worked with. Nick died at the age of 63 in 1997, and his
passing was a great loss to the conservation of nature and the preservation of
the wilderness of South Africa.
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The Background to this
Course
In the 1970’s and 1980’s, a small group of field staff from the Provincial Nature
Conservation Department in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, put together a very
respectable annual game guard training course.
This developed out of necessity due to escalating poaching and the introduction
of both white and black rhino into nature reserves, national parks and game
ranches in the region.
The courses were a month long and the instructors were dedicated volunteers
from the nature reserves of the Eastern Cape. In those days, military training
was compulsory for all white South African boys after schooling and we were
consequently very lucky to have ready and able instructors with infantry,
parachute battalion, intelligence, artillery and air force backgrounds, some of
which had been operational in the “Border wars” of South Africa where they
fought against the Russian and Cuban communist-backed insurgents that came
across our borders from Angola, Rhodesia and Mozambique.
We thus had ready instructors with training and skills in firearm and firearm
handling, patrolling, deployment and debriefing, survival and anti-insurgent
operations, who were also trained, and experienced, in the many skills required
to manage game reserves and deal with law enforcement in and outside of
conservation areas. As I have said, it was a very respectable training course and
we managed to provide good basic training for twenty five to thirty five game
guard trainees from provincial nature reserves, southern national parks, the
Ciskei conservation department, local authority nature reserves and private
game reserves and ranches every year.
We were also willingly supported by the Police Training College in Graaff-Reinet,
who supplied firearms and firearm handling instruction during some of the
courses. We continued with these training courses for approximately ten years,
which means that we provided basic training for roughly 300 game guards.
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The post-basic training fate of these trainees became our later concern and after
conducting a broad-based survey, we came to the conclusion that if the
supervisors or managers of the game guards were not also suitably trained, or
at least instructed in what the basic standards of game guard management are,
the standards were always likely to be poor. The truth was that if the supervisor
did not have the time, the background or the immediate need for effective
security - the game guard unit would eventually suffer the consequences and
cease to exist.
In response, we then prepared “A manager’s guide to game guard leadership” in
1993 (authors Ken Coetzee and Peter Burdett) to assist and motivate the
reserve managers of the Eastern and Western Cape in the application of the
necessary game guard management standards. It was this manual that then
became the foundation for this course and it was the sudden escalation in rhino
poaching on formal conservation areas and private game ranches since 2010
that has hurried it into publication for wider use, in the hope that it will play
some small part in the protection of our valuable wildlife resources.
Foreword to the Game Guard Management Course
© Ken Coetzee &