22 May 2020

Officials from veterinary services as well as wildlife and national parks have killed a buffalo that was spotted in Maun this morning.

Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) unit coordinator, Dr Odireleng Thololwane, confirmed in an interview that they received a report from one of the residents and dispatched a team of officers to attend to the situation.

He said there was no fatality recorded, adding that a decision was made to kill the buffalo because it was posing a danger to the community and to stop it from interacting with cattle.

The buffalo, he said, attracted a lot of attention from members of the community, but they managed to disperse the crowd with assistance from the police.

Dr Thololwane stated that they were doing a surveillance to establish whether the buffalo was alone as well as where was it came from.

He also pointed out that all officers who were in contact with the buffalo were disinfected with sodium chloride to prevent FMD and were expected to stay 14 days without interacting with livestock. 

However, there were reports that the said buffalo attacked a certain man early in the morning when he was riding on his bicycle at Disana ward but Maun police station commander, Superintendent Chenamo Orateng, said they had not received any report on such incident. 

Meanwhile, in a recent interview, regional wildlife coordinator, Mr Dimakatso Ntshebe, urged the community to be vigilant due to an increase in movement of wildlife across the district.

He said since the extreme social distancing period, they had registered 96 incidences of human-wildlife conflict because animals roamed freely due to restriction of people’s movements.

Some animals, he said, moved a lot because many water sources or islands had been filled up due to recent rains and flooding of the Okavango Delta, noting that two buffaloes were killed at Matlapana ward in Maun last month. Ends