Brazil plans mass buffalo kill to help environment
© 2000 Reuters Limited
October 18, 2000
RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazil plans to slaughter thousands of wild buffalo that are trampling the delicate ecosystem of one of the world's richest tropical savannahs, the government's environment agency said yesterday.
Some 15,000 buffalo roaming across the Cerrado, an area of Western Europe-sized highlands and open woodland south of Brazil's Amazon forests, will be hunted down and killed in a bid to halt decades of damage to the region's environment.
Government agency Ibama said its various attempts over the years to remove the buffalo from a sector of the Cerrado, the Guapore Biological Reserve in southwestern Brazil near the Bolivian border, had all been in vain.
"Ibama should authorise, later this year, the eradication of the animals in order to contain the damage which they have caused the environment for four decades," the agency said.
"In the view of specialists, hunting is the most appropriate method from both the economic and environmental points of view," it said in a statement.
Driving the buffalo out of the reserve would be difficult as many of its areas were prone to flooding and to airlift them out by helicopter would be too expensive, it added. Ibama officials could not be immediately contacted for comment.
The buffalo escaped from one of the government's experimental breeding farms some 30 years ago and invaded the Cerrado, where they quickly bred out of control and now posed a serious threat to the region's environment, Ibama said.
The roaming animals had driven away the reserve's native species of fauna such as jaguars and stags and also threatened rivers and streams, it said. The animals are scattered over an area of 1.2 million acres (500,000 hectares).
Second only to tropical rainforests in plant diversity, the Cerrado is one of the world's oldest but most threatened wildernesses, extending over a quarter of Brazil's continental territory and home to some 5 percent of the planet's fauna.
Ibama, along with the state government of Rondonia where the Guapore Reserve is located, would sign an agreement with a private hunters' club to carry out the buffalo kill over a five-year period.
The meat produced from the buffalo slaughter could be fed to people living within the Cerrado, it said.