​This year we have experienced above-average rains over the entire Kalahari thanks to La Niña. On the back of last year’s drought, this was initially a welcome change. Unfortunately, when it rains, it pours, and farms around our field camp have received three times the average annual rainfall, and we still have a couple of months remaining in our wet season. The water table has been so inundated that we actually had fountains of water spurting up from the limestone rock in several areas on our farm — a sight none of us have ever seen before! 
 
Our camp was cut off from the nearest town due to flooding on the roads and even the Trans Kalahari Highway, which links our three sites, has been underwater for several weeks. Sadly, the torrential rain also flooded both our Education Centre and staff camp, causing approximately $4,000 in damage to buildings, roofs and equipment. This unusual flooding has also had impact on the local community. Local tourism operators in our area, barely afloat due to the pandemic, have now had to close their businesses because of the flooding, further exacerbating their financial woes.
 
We are worried that if these increasing effects of climate change continue, the flooding experienced will significantly kill off grass and plant life to the point where it may be equally as damaging as the drought. Thankfully our recent upgrades to the solar system at our camp have meant that we haven’t experienced any power outages despite the number of cloudy days. The Ghanzi camp staff are now looking forward to some rain-free days in which they can start the repairs to the damaged infrastructure.  

The pandemic has caused numerous challenges for all of our teams but none more than our Education team. When the Government schools reopened in June 2020 after a two-month closure over lockdown, they split classes in half and implemented a morning and afternoon session roster in order to meet social distancing requirements in their classrooms. This meant that teachers and students did not have time left in the day to allow us to visit and engage students on conservation. Thankfully, many of the private schools did not have this concern, with smaller class sizes meaning that they could continue with their regular class times. Thanks to the strict COVID protocols adhered to by these schools, we were able to safely visit Pioneer Academy and Matshwane International Schools in March this year to share our posters with them and to talk to the children about conservation. Under normal circumstances, we would engage with a large group of students all at once, but with assemblies cancelled and large groups disallowed, our Education staff went class to class for more intimate chats about wildlife in Botswana and why it’s all of our responsibility to protect the environment. Although the focus of these talks was to show students how leopards differ from cheetahs, the amazing questions from the students and stories about their interactions with wildlife allowed the sessions to adapt based on the children’s interests and needs. 
 
Speaking with children from Pioneer Academy in Ghanzi is always a particularly illuminating experience — as their farming community suffers greatly from human-wildlife conflict and these children have often been directly exposed to confrontations between large carnivores and farmers. On this particular visit, we heard many stories of farmers trapping cheetahs and leopards in cages before moving them off the farms in what we refer to as “translocation”. This allowed our team to discuss the pros and cons of this approach with students and help them to understand the value of protecting livestock from carnivores so that livestock are protected from all carnivores. We discussed livestock guarding dogs and corralling animals at night to prevent attacks, so that livestock and carnivores can share the same spaces without problems. Students who gave particularly inspired answers to questions received CCB stickers to take home with them — a particular favourite of all the students.
 
We’ve noted that engaging with children from farming communities has the ability to incite positive change in a few ways. Not only are we helping students to understand the incredible wildlife that Botswana has, but we’re helping cultivate a passion and a love for that wildlife. We are also helping to nurture the next generation of farmers, business owners and policy makers that have great respect and empathy for wildlife. More importantly, the lessons that they receive at school get taken home with them and get shared with their families. These are families that are living directly with large carnivores and whose actions are instrumental to the survival of these threatened species. Our hope is that the messages these students take home to their families help encourage farmers to take proactive measures to protect their livestock from predation rather than simply reacting to attacks once they’ve occurred. It is through these preventative measures, such as using livestock guarding dogs, that farmers in these areas are starting to experience real, long-term, positive change in the carnivore-livestock dynamics on their farms. 

Recent research published from Botswana has highlighted what most conservationists have suspected for many years: when building interventions for community-based conservation efforts, these activities will be more effective if strong consultation and buy-in is done with the relevant communities and stakeholders. This has always been our approach with our newest programme – Communities for Conservation. Knowing the vital importance our target villages have in the key wildlife areas they are located, CCB has been involved with these communities for almost a decade. Excitingly, more and more organisations are realizing the importance of these vast wildlife areas and are coming on board to help foster coexistence and sustainable conservation in these areas. Using our newly developed Human Wildlife Conflict Strategy for the region, we have been able to join forces to facilitate real, sustainable change. But with so many new stakeholders and so many exciting new activities on the cards, it’s been important for us to continue to engage with the villages in question to bounce ideas and see where their priorities lie. 
 
At the end of March, our teams met up with stakeholders from relevant organisations and community members in the villages of Bere and Kacgae to discuss the ways forward with our upcoming activities and partnerships. In the pipeline for this year, we will be facilitating a natural and cultural resource review with Kalahari Wildlands Trust to help us pave the way for numerous sustainable resource projects. This will enable locals to benefit from natural resources, such as veld products, and cultural tourism developments, such as camp sites, and providing San cultural tours and experiences. We’re also teaming up with Kalahari Wildlands Trust to bolster craft development in the area; and during these recent meetings we were able to get local women signed up for the skills-sharing workshops that will be held in the next few months. 
 
Another exciting development for the area is a partnership between CCB and the Lion Recovery Fund, which has provided the funding for us to trial a Conservation Performance Payment pilot study for the region, which is prone to human-lion conflict. The new system will monitor wildlife numbers in the area around settlements and reward communities when wildlife numbers are maintained, livestock movements controlled and for the location of cheetah marking trees or wild dog denning sites. This concept rewards environmental conservation through positive reinforcement, giving community members incentives to coexist with carnivores and to minimize environmentally-damaging practices, such as poaching or overgrazing livestock in these Wildlife Management Areas.
 
After our extensive meetings with the communities last month, they are as excited as we are to be mapping such a positive and sustainable way forward for the people of the western Kalahari. We know that with their support and commitment to protecting these wild places, cheetahs, lions and other wildlife can flourish in this important wildlife area.

For over a decade, CCB has been championing local, Tswana landrace dogs as livestock guarding dogs (LGDs) in Botswana. After ten years of intensive studying, we have produced two scientific papers that show just how effective these tenacious little pups are at protecting livestock herds and reducing human-wildlife conflict. Data from our first study of 200 LGDs being used in Botswana showed that Tswana LGDs were cheaper and better behaved than their purebred counterparts and could save a farmer on average $1,300 every year in the livestock losses they prevented. Data from the 81 Tswana LGDs placed by CCB’s placement programme since 2013 was even more impressive. Farmers that received LGDs from us experienced at least an 85% reduction in livestock losses.  Furthermore, these LGDs helped to improve the attitudes of farmers towards carnivores like cheetahs within only a year of the LGDs being placed on their farms. With retaliatory killings of cheetahs by disgruntled livestock farmers being one of the biggest threats to their survival in southern Africa, this data has huge ramifications for cheetahs and other large carnivores’ conservation in the region, and beyond. 
 
The concept of using local dogs instead of imported breeds could be implemented in any rural farming communities the world over. Local landrace dogs are usually hardier, generally more adept at avoiding local dangers, such as snakes, and more resilient to local diseases and parasites and therefore usually live longer lives. This combination means that not only are landrace dogs (if present in an area) more readily available but they are also an affordable and effective choice of livestock guarding dog as they tend to be a cheaper alternative to imported purebreds. For many years, CCB has been promoting landrace dogs as alternatives, yet some farmers were still reluctant to try this technique. With a glutton of data to now show how positive an impact they can have on farms, with minimal financial outlay, these brave little dogs are now getting the recognition that they deserve. They say that every dog has its day, and for the understated Tswana dogs, today is definitely their day.