In South Africa, Ranchers Are Breeding Mutant Animals To Be Hunted

Today, York has roughly 600 gnus. He keeps the best — the most fertile and beautiful, with the biggest horns — for breeding. The next tier goes to auction, mostly for sale to other breeders. Animals that don’t make the grade for breeding are sold to hunting ranches, which are typically bigger and more scenic than York’s, giving hunters the feel of the wild African bush. York allows the least-desirable animals to be shot by local hunters for food.

A drive around York’s spread reveals little evidence of its former life as an intensive crop farm growing potatoes, corn and peanuts. Long native grass flickers in the wind as the gnus graze peacefully. The only signs of man are the electric fences York uses to separate his herds. Since he took over the farm, jackals, bat-eared foxes, and caracals, as well as troops of monkeys, have appeared on the land.

“Previously this was crop land with pesticides, chemicals, very few trees, no wildlife,” he says. “Now there are hundreds of wildebeest where there were none for 100 years. The color variants are paying for it.”

Breeding exotic big game is also attracting South Africa’s wealthy, including billionaire Johann Rupert, who controls the world’s largest jewelry maker Cie Financiere Richemont, as well as Norman Adami, ex-chairman of the South African unit of SABMiller, and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa. Two years ago, Rupert led a group that paid 40 million rand, for a buffalo named Mystery, specifically bred for his large horns. Ramaphosa, one of South Africa’s wealthiest men, sold impala with white flanks (they are normally copper colored) for 27.3 million rand last September. The same year, York sold a male golden gnu named General Rommel for 1.83 million rand.

“Everyone wants wildebeest,” says York, who received 10 calls from people wanting to buy while a Bloomberg reporter was recently visiting his farm. “We haven’t got enough stock. It’s every day, new people wanting to get in.”

from ffffff http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-hunting-mutant-big-game-in-south-africa/

via IFTTT