A KwaZulu-Natal farmer is fuming over the province’s rampant stock theft after a prize bull worth R70 000 was killed.
|||Durban - The killing of a prized bull worth about R70 000 and the discovery of another tied to a tree has left a KwaZulu-Natal farmer fuming over the province’s rampant stock theft.
Mooi River stock farmer Angus Williamson said he was left traumatised after making the discovery at the weekend.
He believed his second bull had been awaiting a similar fate as the one killed.
The dead bull had done well at the Royal Show last year and had been used as a stud in the herd.
Williamson said he realised the bulls were missing during a morning count on Saturday.
“I have 25 bulls, 280 cows and a number of sheep, so every morning we check if they are all there, and we realised the two were missing.”
He and his staff set out looking for the spoor and had followed it for about six hours when they came across the dead animal.
“The carcass was there and not very far; my other bull had been waiting its turn. It was the most painful thing to see,” he said.
“We also found eight other badly decomposed carcasses in the same area.”
Williamson said stock theft was at its worst, with the lives of commercial and subsistence farmers in danger every day.
”These stock thieves are professionals who understand the farming business, which makes it even harder to find our stolen stock,” he said.
“And if you dare go in their territory, you risk being shot at with an AK47.”
Williamson said what was more frustrating was that farmers were being killed for trying to find their stolen stock and producing food.
He said stock thieves were hardly, if ever, convicted in South Africa.
“If, in the last 20 years, there have been five recorded convictions of stock theft in Mooi River alone, I will start dancing. That is how bad the situation is and these thieves know it.”
Williamson said stock theft was a multimillion-rand crime involving syndicates, which was why the thieves did not hesitate to kill farmers.
Williamson said farmers spent a lot of money putting in place security measures, but stock thieves always found their way around them.
“We don’t feel safe and have to always be on guard. The state of the economy is also affecting us very badly and we can’t afford to lose stock to thieves.”
Williamson, who also breeds and sells bulls, said thieves did not realise that their actions were not only affecting the economy, but were costing people their jobs.
The spokesman for the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Agriculture and Environmental Affairs, Jeffrey Zikhali, said when stock theft syndicates interfered with commercial farmers, they were costing the economy millions of rand, including in lost jobs.
According to the National Stock Theft Forum, stock theft was costing the country more than R300 million a year.
For each theft from a commercial farm, there were three thefts from emerging farmers, it said.
Last month, the department launched its three-year animal identification campaign and set aside R32m to get it off the ground.
The campaign will involve branding cattle in every area affected by stock theft and would extend as far as the Mozambican border.
mpume.madlala@inl.co.za
Daily News