Poachers get nabbedPoachers get nabbed

Hunting the deer hunters

Israel’s iconic gazelles, familiar since biblical times, are threatened by poaching

Ilan Ben Zion is an AFP reporter and a former news editor at The Times of Israel.

A gazelle in the protected reserve of Deer Valley in Jerusalem, which is surrounded by roads and highways. (Haim Shohat/Flash90)
A gazelle in the protected reserve of Deer Valley in Jerusalem, which is surrounded by roads and highways. (Haim Shohat/Flash90)

Park rangers arrested two poachers in Nitzanim Nature Reserve last Saturday for illegally hunting eight Chukar Partridges and a Mountain Gazelle.

Nature and Parks Authority officers found the pair’s hunting rifle and the recently slaughtered carcasses of the animals in the back of their vehicle. The two individuals reside in the western Galilee town of Yarka and entered the park armed and without a hunting license.

The two men reportedly belong to a hunting organization that poaches animals and illicitly sells their meat at exorbitant prices, wrote Yedioth Ahronoth. One of the hunters has a prior conviction for hunting without a license.

“The chutzpah of these hunters, hunting in a nature reserve after they’ve already been caught!”  the authority’s Director General Saul Goldstein was quoted by thePulse.co.il as saying.

In a similar incident in December 2009, Park authorities nabbed four poachers armed to the teeth after they killed four gazelle and two partridges in the Nitzanim reserve.

Park authorities tallied 156 gazelle in the Nitzanim reserve last year, slightly higher than the typical yearly average of 120-130.  Nonetheless, the Israeli sub-species — referred to in Hebrew as the Land of Israel Gazelle and by ARKive.com as the Northern Palestine Gazelle — hangs in the balance.  Having flourished in Israel since biblical times, the gazelle’s natural habitat is under assault by rising urbanization and development.

Goldstein fears that if appropriate legal action is not taken the iconic creatures could disappear from central Israel altogether.  Since then, the Knesset have raised the maximum fine for poaching to 134,000 NIS, but Nature and Park authorities argue that unless violators face stiffer fines or a prison sentence the slaughter will continue.

“A poaching fine issued by a judge once in a few years is cheaper than obtaining a license, and of course it’s less than their profits from selling black market meat. It’s an absurd situation,” Goldstein said.

 

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