Villagers in the communal areas in Zimbabwe build home-made livestock holding pens to keep their livestock at night. Lions and hyena regularly get into these structures and kill livestock with devastating results to an impoverished community. The use of flashing LED lights placed on the holding pens at night has proven to deter large predators such as lion and spotted hyenas from entering these pens. A pen uses up to 8 LED lights. ALERT wants to expand this Community assistance project.
In the communal areas of Vic Falls and Chizarira live subsistence farming communities who suffer conflicts from wildlife such as lions and spotted hyena that comes from the Protected Areas. Livestock is killed by these two large carnivores. Also, elephants destroy crops. These resources are life or death to impoverished farmers. Livestock is the "bank" to these farmers that are kept to be sold or bartered for food and school fees, Cattle and donkeys are used for crop preparation and transport
The use of these flashing lights has proven to deter wildlife such as lions and hyenas from entering the holding pens and killing livestock. ALERT aims to install 8 flashing LED lights on each of 44 holding pens in the surrounding areas of Chizarira National Park and Victoria Falls. The project aims to greatly reduce the number of livestock attacks thus increasing the resources of the local people. People's poor perception of lions and hyena will also change as retaliation killings stop
At present villagers are losing valuable livestock to the two large predators, lions and spotted hyena. This causes anger against the Wildlife Authorities, and against lions and hyena, which then results in retaliated killing of these animals. The long term impact will be a positive attitude towards wildlife and the Wildlife Authority by the villagers. In addition these people will have a better standard of living by not losing valuable livestock and retaliation towards lions will not take place
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