Uganda Cranes Declining Due to “Witch Doctors”
In Uganda, East African, there were once fifty-thousand of Gray Crowned Crane in 1980, but just after two decade in 2000, there were only twenty-thousand left and the population of crested crane has been declining since then. The major reason for causing Gray Crowned Crane’s population to decline is due to “Witch Doctors," also known as traditional healers. They believe crane is an important ingredient in some folk medicine, so they capture the cranes from their natural habitat.
Gray Crowned Crane is the national bird of Uganda and it is illegal to capture cranes for medical reasons. Because cranes mate for life, local people believe marriages and relationships will last forever if they consume the feathers and the eggs of the cranes. The Witch Doctors will crush the eggs with herbs and sell it as a “love potion” to local people. Besides the feathers and the eggs, other parts of the cranes are also used in other forms of goods. Claws and the beaks are used in drinks and as a way for promoting monogamy and affection. The cranes also represent good omen that can cast evil spirits away.
The tools they used to capture the cranes are very rough, such as: metallic traps, snares and hooks. The tools are so rough it often kills the cranes or get their wings cut off. "To catch a hundred cranes, you have to kill four or five times as many in the process," Byaruhanda of Nature Uganda said. Young cranes are sold for higher price than adult cranes. Therefore, more young cranes were captured, which made the population become smaller.
Their population had drop 60% during 12 years, if we don’t do something to stop the hunting of Gray Crowned Crane, soon there will not be any more cranes in Uganda. We need to find a way to protect these cranes from being captured by the Witch Doctors and we have to educate those local people that using cranes as illegal medicine and the love potion doesn’t work as they thought it would. So once the local people stop eating cranes and the cranes’ population will increase again.
Sources:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/071019-crane-potion_2.html
http://allafrica.com/stories/200710100216.html
~Kaiming (Kyle) Chiang (5)
posted by PWH @ 11:30 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
It's tragic that a people that revere the cranes so much are causing their destruction. I hope that the witch doctors and their people can come to understand that they have to make concessions in order to protect those cranes, and that if they continue as they are now then both they and the cranes will lose out.
Posted by Jon Hicks. (4)
This is pretty disturbing to think that a barbaric practice like this is stilling going on. I am from Salem, Ma so reading about witches and magical remedies is not really surprising to me because I know people that practice black magic, but it doesn't involve the merciless slaughtering of animals. Good article just watch for sentence structure in the last few paragraphs. Typing it up in Microsoft Word would fix these errors immensely.
amolina (4)
If the people in Ugandan keeping hunting the cranes, no need a century the crane will be extinct. As what was written on the essay, the people should be educated and understood that there is no such thing as "love potion" in the world. They should be more civilized. It is a tragedy for the cranes to be killed in such ways. "Love potion" is an excuse which people make up to satisfy their own good.
Posted by Xuni Li (5)
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