Brazil plans mass buffalo kill for environment

October 18, 2000
Web posted at: 11:34 AM EDT (1534 GMT)

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) -- Brazil will 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 on Tuesday.

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 killed in a bid to halt decades of damage to the region's environment.

Government agency Ibama said 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 been in vain.

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"Ibama should authorize, 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 buffalo out of the reserve would be difficult because many areas are prone to flooding and to airlift them out would be too expensive, it added.

"This is not a matter of abandoned animals. These buffalo are wild...and their presence in a biological reserve area has to be restricted," said Francisco de Assis, acting coordinator at Ibama's fauna department.

"Buffalo are very big, they can be aggressive and a wild buffalo is no joke," he told Reuters. "We reached the conclusion that they had to be brought under control."

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 pose a serious threat to the region's environment.

The roaming animals had driven away the reserve's native species of fauna such as jaguars and stags and also threatened rivers and streams, Ibama 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 -- and probably use the meat from the slaughter to feed people living within the Cerrado.

"The kill will be carried out by people authorized by Ibama and accompanied by Ibama experts, and within the law -- that is, a kill for (animal) control purposes," said de Assis.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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