Land n Sand June 2013 | Page 43

Twenty minutes down the trail we entered what looked like a post-apocalyptic scene from a movie, with vegetation burned down to the ground and an eerie feeling of lifelessness. All along the route were small heaps of abalone shells, with their meat removed to lighten and compress the load. Judging by the shells, the poachers clearly had no respect for the size of the catch. Some shells were as small as a bar of wax. There were also wrecks of stolen cars hidden deep in the bushes, where they were slowly stripped and the parts sold. The burned down bush was the second strategy employed by the officials to counter the opposition’s competitiveness strengthened by the bush trails. The simplest way to eliminate the new advantage was to burn it to the ground, expose their movements and, thus, re-employ the effectiveness of the aerial surveillance and the ground patrols. This exercise proved rather contradictory to their initial ‘conservationist’ approach of banning vehicles form the beaches in order to save the birdlife, then destroying invaluable flora and the thousands of occupying land animals, not to mention the aggravation of soil erosion. Clearly the battle was not of conserving the marine or land resources but to control the accumulation of wealth under an uncontrolled and untaxed industry. the poacher trails