The large number of animals is due to mass relocations largely to mitigate human-wildlife conflict. The rainy season as mostly ended for this reporting period and the dry season has set in, but most areas have still maintained enough vegetation and water to sustain wildlife. However, as the dry season continued some areas did see a slight increase in poaching and human – wildlife conflict cases.

During this reporting period, there were 49 poaching incidents and 19 human-wildlife conflict cases. The majority of these cases were snare injuries (32) as well as 8 spear injuries, 8 arrow injuries and a postmortem of an elephant with human involvement though the direct method was not clear. 19 of the poaching cases involved elephants, 5 snared, 7 spears and 6 arrowed. 16 of the elephants were all treated successfully whilst, sadly, 2 succumbed to their injuries and 1 was given a guarded prognosis.

Of the human-wildlife conflict cases, there were 7 rescue cases of 19 elephants that fell into deep sided wells dug by humans which were labour intensive operations taking many hours to extract them. 8 lions that were preying on livestock were also relocated whilst another one was poisoned, confirmed by a post-mortem. There was also the mass drive of 713 zebras and 38 elands that had strayed into the private farmland leading to human-wildlife conflict, as well as postmortem of a crocodile killed due to HWC, 2 zebras hit by vehicles, another with a panga wound, a giraffe entangled in a rubber ring and another that was stuck in a fence.

Of all the cases there was a 67% success rate, and only 5% poaching and 2% HWC death rate