GOATS DO ROAM, AND BIOBOUNDARY PREDATOR DETERRENTS KEEP THEM SAFE

Our BioBoundary experiments at livestock enclosures have previously shown that BioBoundary deterrents, based on predators’ chemical signals, protect livestock by keeping predators away.  But nearly all predator attacks happen when animals are out grazing, and using BioBoundary chemical signals at overnight kraals does not protect these free-ranging livestock.

Adapting our BioBoundary deterrents to protect livestock while they are grazing has the potential to revolutionize how all sectors of the livestock industry protect their animals from predators, and to move lethal control from default option to last resort.

We recently had an opportunity to test BioBoundary deterrents on free-ranging goats at a cattle-post not far out of Maun. The owner had reported losing 28 goats to predators over a period of one month; nearly every day when the goats came home from feeding in the bush, one would be missing, and a search would discover a carcass that a predator had fed on. In northern Botswana an average goat is worth about US$60, and the minimum wage in the rural areas is around US$110 per month; predators at this cattle-post were destroying a month’s wages roughly every two days and had already wiped out the equivalent of the average annual income of a farm labourer.

The owner’s tolerance was understandably at an end, and lethal measures against the predators would be a typical next response. BioBoundary Research Assistant Johane Masene negotiated a two-day grace period with the owner while Dr Peter Apps rushed to build deterrent-dispensing collars for the goats, using low-cost, locally available materials. The collars weighed less than 40g each and contained less than 1g of a single chemical compound, that Dr Apps had identified from predator urine in Wild Entrust’s BPC BioBoundary laboratory. Using controlled-release technology developed in the BioBoundary lab, the goat collars emitted a few millionths of a gram of deterrent per hour into the air, with a barely detectable odour that the goats took no notice of.

With help from the farmers, Johane and Peter put collars on 24 goats, about a third of the flock.  All the goats were released to forage as usual, but this time they all came back. In fact, there were no losses to predators for 16 days, until an uncollared goat was killed by a leopard, and four days later the leopard killed another uncollared goat.  Johane returned to the cattle-post to remove the collars so that Peter could recharge them with deterrent, - this time adding a second component of predator urine to 12 of them. Johane re-equipped the goats with the collars the next day and the predation stopped again. Three months on and the goats have been safe ever since.

In just the first month of the three months that the goats have been wearing them, the BioBoundary deterrent collars saved more than 20 goats with market value of P16 000 (about USD1250) and diffused the owner’s motivation to kill the predators.

No other non-lethal intervention reduces predation on livestock as quickly and effectively as our BioBoundary deterrents did in this case. It is noteworthy that not every goat needed to wear a deterrent collar for the entire flock to be protected from predators. Deterrent collars on just part of the flock protected nearly all the others. Also notably, the deterrent protection persisted even after the deterrent in the collars was depleted.

We urgently need to scale up the roll-out of BioBoundary deterrents which will require additional funding. Hit the DONATE button on this page or contact Dr Peter Apps Peterapps@wildentrust.org to discuss how a donation to support our Bioboundary research project can save both predators and livestock.