Battling to save the Ethiopian wolf, Africa's rarest carnivore

Most members of the Canidae family, such as wolves, dogs and foxes, are versatile and opportunistic animals, thriving in many habitats and some even living in urban and suburban settings. In contrast, Ethiopian wolves are highly specialised to life in the Ethiopian highlands. Also called the "Roof of Africa", it encompasses 80% of Africa’s land above 3,000 metres. 

The wolves are remarkable rodent hunters, with long muzzles and slender legs. Their tight social bonds help them protect their precious family territories from competitors. For a canid of their size (about 14-20kg – the weight of a medium-sized dog), Ethiopian wolves are unique at surviving on small prey (most highland rodent species weigh less than 100g) and are solitary foragers. With their striking red coats and black-and-white markings, they appear physically distant from their closest relative, the grey wolf.

The wolves skilfully stalk the rodents out in the open, or dig them out of their burrows. Image: Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme via Born Free Foundation/YouTube

These qualities made the wolves successful colonisers of an expanding ecosystem as the African glaciers retreated during the end of the last Ice Age, but paradoxically, they have also contributed to their demise.

Due to a warming continent, the tree line has gone up by 1,000 metres in the last 100,000 years, encroaching on open Afroalpine grasslands and meadows. Due to the pressure of humans, livestock and domestic dogs, the wolves are now restricted to tiny mountain pockets on either side of the Great Rift Valley, and are constantly being pushed up the slopes.

Although they were never particularly common, today there are fewer than 500 adult wolves in the mountains of Bale, Arsi, Simien and Wollo, over half of whom are harboured within the Bale Mountains National Park. This makes them Africa's rarest, and most threatened, carnivore species. As an indication, this is ten times fewer than African wild dogs and fifty times rarer than lions.

But there is hope. The Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme and its Ethiopian partners continue to put all their strength into fighting the wolves' various challenges through awareness, education and science-led approaches to disease and population management.

The challenges

The challenges they face are diverse.

It's not for lack of food that wolf numbers are small. Their environments harbour a particularly high rodent biomass, up to 3,000kg of rats per km2 in some meadows. The wolves live in large family packs, where all members patrol and scent-mark the boundaries of small communal territories. This protects their rich food patches from neighbouring wolves, and other carnivores such as spotted hyenas and jackals.

Tight social bonds help Ethiopian wolves protect their families and territories. © by lorenzfischer.photo

The most immediate and real threat to wolves is in fact domestic animals. While many highland wildlife species have been able to coexist with highland shepherds and their livestock, domestic dogs bring an additional challenge.

The dogs not only compete for food but, as dogs and wolves are inexorably drawn to each other and interact, dogs transmit rabies and canine distemper virus to their wild cousins. This has the potential to decimate wolf populations in a short period of time. In extreme cases, dogs may even mate and hybridise with the wolves, threatening the genetic integrity of this rare and endemic canid.

Disease ultimately determines the dynamics of the last remaining wolf havens. Three out of four wolves typically die in populations hit by outbreaks, and may result in local extinctions.

In the last three years, populations in the Bale Mountains have endured back-to-back rabies and distemper outbreaks. Smaller populations are at even greater risk. At the end of last year, disease decimated the smallest wolf population in Wollo, now feared on the brink of extinction.

The other great threat to the wolves is Ethiopia's changing landscape due to farming. Expanding populations and the need for arable land bring about an incessant pressure on natural habitats.

By and large the people that live in the Ethiopian highlands are relatively tolerant of wildlife, but their priority is survival. Unless their livelihoods can be brought into line with sustainable practices, the meadows and moors they need for grazing, to gather firewood and tend their crops will soon be degraded to bare rock.

Bouncing back

Nevertheless, there are reasons to be optimistic about the future of the Ethiopian wolf. In the Bale Mountains, the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme has vaccinated over 80,000 dogs to prevent rabies getting across to wolves. And when the deadly virus strikes, swift interventions to vaccinate the wolves have taken place.

Image: Today, the wolves are restricted to just tiny mountain pockets on either side of the Great Rift Valley. Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme via Born Free Foundation/YouTube

There are early signs that the wolves in Bale are bouncing back. By the end of January, nearly all of 18 local packs monitored – and most recently vaccinated – had bred successfully. As many as seven pups were born to a dominant female and there were over 80 healthy pups located in the Bale Mountains alone. It was also encouraging to see some of the larger packs split, increasing the number of breeding families.

In a shift from reactive vaccination of Ethiopian wolves following outbreaks to a preventive approach, an oral vaccine has been trialled. This will offer protection from future rabies outbreaks.

More to be done

Rare, ecological specialists such as these wolves will continue to be threatened as environments change and human populations grow. That means heavy intervention is needed to secure their survival.

A critical factor in their preservation is the commitment and dedication to finding common ground between the needs of people and wildlife. For example, Ethiopia's long-term conservation view is that there should be no domestic dogs within protected areas. More can be done to facilitate this, such as improved night protection for people's livestock with predator-proof enclosures. This would reduce their dependence on guard dogs and, in time, reduce the negative impact of dogs on wild carnivores.

Another key intervention would be to implement a metapopulation management paradigm under which isolated populations are treated as part of a single (or meta) population, and animals are trans-located between them. This enables recovery and a healthy flow of genes.

In the meantime, our vaccination work brings us closer to the local communities and provides a channel of communication to transmit our environmental education message. Read more here

Habesha Beer Bagged 32 Million Birr

Habesha Brewery S.C., one of the beer brewing companies in Ethiopia, disclosed it made a net profit of 32 million Birr. This is unique for a brewery operating in Ethiopia as most manufacturers face loss in their first year of operation. For instance, Raya Brewery S.C. reported a loss of 104 million Birr on its first year of operation.

The brewery company sold 1 billion Birr worth beers across Ethiopia. Compare to the previous year, the sales shoot up by 375 percent. It was after undertaking expansion work in the last fiscal year that the company managed to raise its production capacity. Now its capacity stands at 400,000 hectoliters, which is a 100,000 hectoliters increase.

Habesha Brewery, owned by around 8,000 shareholders and Bavaria, has further expanded its factory this fiscal year. It has now increase the production capacity to 700,000 hectoliters.

Currently Ethiopia is home for 7 breweries and 23 brands of beers. The country’s per capital consumption of beer is said to be 10 liters.

Source: Fortune

The Thinking and Objective of Polarizing Politics

By Messay Kebede

Ever since rudiments of dialectical thinking grabbed the imagination of Ethiopia’s educated youngsters and elites, essentially as a result of the global prestige of the Marxist class analysis of society in the 60s and early 70s, modern Ethiopian politics has shifted toward polarizing trends that have been perilous to the unity and economic development of the country. The trouble is that the questionable nature of the Marxist-Leninist concepts of class and class struggle stood out only after the total failures of socialist experiences in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. The concepts had to be disproved by facts developing over decades for them to lose their grip on the mind of educated people, especially in third world countries. Unfortunately, what was unleashed by the concepts has developed a life of its own, thereby reviving the thinking even if it has lost its original purpose.

In hindsight, it now appears that common sense could have been enough to prevent us from engaging in the path of polarizing thinking. The link is quite obvious between the state of mind of the generation of the 60s and 70s and the politics they advocated. Indeed, the notion of contradiction between classes stemming from irreconcilable, antagonistic interests, polarized our vision of society, thereby nurturing radicalism. To the extent that class struggle means that one class excludes other classes, it rules out a policy of compromise based on the common good, since the notion of common good is viewed as illusory and counter to the course of societal progress. By contrast, one activates the real forces governing history if one adopts an exclusive form of thinking: just as class interests are incompatible, so too should the politics of change be as uncompromising as the interests. This means radicalism and revolution.

Be it noted that ethnic politics is just a derivation of class antagonism. Just as classes are viewed as opposites, ethnic groups are construed as contradictory in their aspiration and interests. This explains why the transition from Marxism to ethnocentrism has been so easy for so many educated elites: once you adopt the view of society as torn between contradictory and irreconcilable class interests, the presence of different and socially unequal ethnic groups becomes a breeding ground for ethnic polarizations. Unravelling the secret of radical politics, Amartya Sen finds that the main ingredient is the advocacy of “single-dimensional categorization of human beings.” The attribution of one single overriding identity to people is how they become alien and hostile to each other. The assumption of a single identity means that one cannot be Oromo or Somali and Ethiopian at the same time. What is more, ethnic divisions look even more radical and revolutionary than Marxist radicalization because it goes to the extent of questioning the political unity of the country. What could better show one’s unreserved commitment to polarizing politics than to espouse a secessionist objective?

To explain the loss of the common sense I talked about, it is enough to recall that youngsters in the 60s and 70s learned Marxism mostly from Soviet and Chinese pamphlets. For Marxism, the pamphlets said, everything is contradictory: contradiction is the structure and the driving force of all things. Night is opposed to day, cold to hot, north to south, positive to negative, life to death, etc. Let us focus on night and day: to constitute these two moments as opposites, I must obviously ignore intermediary states and retain only extremes. This is to say that opposition is a construct involving abstract thinking, that is, the discarding of the movement of day as a series of transitory states without ever reaching the extreme level of contradiction, of mutual exclusiveness for the reason that there is no such a thing as extreme, pure night.

It is the same in society: where Marxism sees clearly contrasted classes, the reality of social life exhibits not so much closed groups as an array in which individuals impinge on each other. The rigid classification by which classes are construed as opposites ignores the reality of intermediaries that presents society as a range of differentiations rather than polarizations. To constitute classes as antagonistic, I must put aside the many-sided overlappings by which one group touches on other groups, thereby forming a chain of differentiations rather than exclusive and hostile poles. For instance, no person in Ethiopia is solely a member of a class or an ethnic group: he/she is a Christian or a Muslim, a parent, a member of a particular profession, a native of a certain ethnic group, an Ethiopian, an African, etc. What this means is that the perception of rigid oppositions in what constitutes a multifaceted chain is exactly the product of a construct for the obvious purpose of political mobilization under the exclusive control of a totalitarian leadership.

I am not saying that the attempt to unify and mobilized people around some shared interests is a bad thing. Rather, we must understand it for what it really is, namely, a mental construction forged by elites in the struggle for the control of power. We must never lose sight of the fact that it is an abstraction that serves a definite purpose and that the concrete reality is a mixture, an infringement of various interests. Great national politics consists in harmonizing the diversity of social life rather than polarizing groups. Again, Sen gets it right when he writes: “The world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of group, which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence.”

The failure of modern Ethiopia, failure that took an alarming trend with the Derg and a frankly dangerous one with the Woyanne rule, originates from the stubborn attempt of one group to exclude and dominate other groups, on the grounds that the society is composed of antagonistic interests. Willy-nilly, such a politics cannot offer anything other than endless repression, erection of social blockages, and exasperation of hostilities, thereby endangering unity and blocking the development of the country.

Suppose that you consider society more as an array of overlapping interests rather than a field torn by irreconcilable interests. The role of politics will strongly resemble that of an orchestra conductor: just as the conductor harmonizes various instruments into an integrated totality, so too politics attentive to overlapping groups blends various interests into one diversified and mutually supportive unity. Polarizing politics silences all the other instruments in favor of one instrument; harmonizing politics allows all instruments to play but in an integrating fashion, by which they become mutually supportive and achieve a richer unity. This harmonizing politics is none other than democracy.

Recall Mao Tse-tung’s slogan, “let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.” It announced the temporary suspension of the communist repression and a vision of social development correcting polarization in favor of pluralism. Unfortunately or predictably, Mao very soon returned to his previous vision of “let one flower bloom, one school of thought dominate,” which was a return to the notion of antagonistic interests, as a response to mounting criticisms against the communist party. Nothing could better show the real goal of polarizing politics, namely, the exclusive control of power. Read more here

Ethiopia, others ready to 'shed our blood' for a stable region - PM

Ethiopian Prime Minister, Hailemariam Dessalegn, has said his country and others in the Horn of Africa region were ready to do all it takes to achieve a secure and stable region.

Dessalegn joined other leaders and the international community at the just ended London Conference on Somalia. During his 6-minute address, he stressed four points that could help realize a stable Somalia and by extension a peaceful region.

‘‘We in the region will continue to shed our blood and do whatever is just and necessary to restore the long sought after peace and stability in Somalia and across the region. There is no greater contribution, no greater solidarity than this,’‘ he said.

We in the region will continue to shed our blood and do whatever is just and necessary to restore the long sought after peace and stability in Somalia and across the region. There is no greater contribution, no greater solidarity than this.

According to him, there was the need to better equip the Somali National Army, the AMISOM mission and other friendly nations engaged in the fight against the Al-Shabaab insurgents. He said the terrorist group’s support was waning, their income dwindling and their ability to command forces downgraded.

Despite indications that they were are retreating, he said they were not eliminated and remained dangerous. He lauded the partial lifting of US arms embargo on Somalia and called for political and financial support to be given to AMISOM to keep up the fight.

He touched on the recent drought afflicting the region – a situation that he said bore security implications with the continued flooding of refugees to stable countries.

He celebrated moves to better coordinate and consolidate governance mechanisms at the federal and regional levels in Somalia. He tasked the government to be at the center of the initiative and to demonstrate to its people that it was up to the task.

‘‘Let us empower the Federal government of Somalia to be at the center of all these endeavours. Let us speak with one voice with new partnership experience. Let us be focused, let us follow one channel of intervention for regional and international collaborative action.

‘‘This I believe is the only viable option, otherwise, we can be sure that the progress will be so sluggish,’‘ he said in his concluding remarks. Read more here

“እስር ቤት ውስጥ ሞተ ተብሎ አስክሬን ተሰጠን” - የሟች እናት

ዘነበ ጫቅሌ ዩሃንስ የተባለ የሁለት ልጆች አባትና የ32 ዓመት ወጣት ዳንሻ ከብት ገበያ ውስጥ ከብት በመነገድ ላይ እያለ መጋቢት 23 ቀን 2009 ዓ.ም በፖሊሶች ተይዞ ከተወሰደ ከሁለት ሳምንት በኋላ በእስር ቤት መሞቱን ቤተሰቡና በቅርብ የሚያውቁት ለአሜሪካ ድምጽ ሬድዮ ገልጸዋል።

ዋሽንግተን ዲሲ — 

በአማራ ክልል በተለይ በወልቃይት ፀገዴ ለወራት የዘለቁ ሕዝባዊ ተቃውሞዎችን ተከትሎ፤ በቁጥጥር የሚውሉና የደረሱበት የማይታወቅ ሰዎች መበራከታቸውን በሰሜን ምእራባዊው ግዛት የባህልና ማንነት ጥያቄ አንስተው ይንቀሳቀሱ የነበሩ የማህበረሰብ ለውጥ አቀንቃኞች ይገልጻሉ።

ዘነበ ጫቅሌ ዩሃንስ የተባለ የሁለት ልጆች አባትና የ32 ዓመት ወጣት ዳንሻ ከብት ገበያ ውስጥ ከብት በመነገድ ላይ እያለ መጋቢት 23 ቀን 2009 ዓ.ም በፖሊሶች ተይዞ ከተወሰደ ከሁለት ሳምንት በኋላ በእስር ቤት መሞቱን ቤተሰቡና በቅርብ የሚያውቁት ለአሜሪካ ድምጽ ሬድዮ ገልጸዋል። ሟች ለፋሲካ በዓል ለቤተሰቡ ደውሎ የቀረበበትን ክስ በፍርድ ቤት እንደሚሟገት ተናግሮ እንደነበል ወላጅ እናቱ ተናግረዋል።

እንዴት ሞተ? ቤተሰቦቹ የተሰጣቸው ምክንያት ለማመን የሚያስቸግር እንደሆነ ገልጸው፤ አስከሬኑ መመርመሩን ተነግሯቸው ውጤቱን ግን እንዳልሰሙ ተናግረዋል። በወልቃይት ፀገዴ የማንነት ጥያቄ ላይ የተሳተፉ፤ ከመሪዎቹ ጨምሮ በእስር ላይ መሆናቸውንና ደብዛቸው የሚጠፋና ድንገት የሚሞቱም አሉ ሲሉ የእንቅስቃሴው አደራጆች ገልጸውልናል።
የፀገዴ ወረዳና የሽሬ ፖሊስ እንዲህ የሚባል እስረኛ “እኛ ጋር አልነበረም። የኛ እስር ቤቶች የእስረኛ ዴሞክራሲያዊ መብት የሚከበረባቸው ናቸው” ብለዋል። የእንዳ አባ ጉና ፖሊስ ሃላፊ በበኩላቸው በአካል ካልተገኘን ምንም መረጃ እንደማይሰቱን ገልፀዋል።
ዝርዝሩን ከተያያዘው የድምፅ ፋይል ያድምጡ።

“እስር ቤት ውስጥ ሞተ ተብሎ አስክሬን ተሰጠን” - የሟች እናት

0:00:00/0:13:13

 ቀጥተኛ መገናኛ