Background

Historically in South Africa livestock numbers were comparatively small and man­aged by transhumance, but they played an important role in the communities of the indigenous Africans and the early settlers (Beinart 2007).

Before the arrival of the first European settlers, wildlife was very abundant throughout South Africa, but uncontrolled hunting for economic gain decimated the populations of many wildlife species by the late nineteenth century (Mossman and Mossman 1976). The regulatory authorities were also of the opinion that for

A. L. Michel (*)

Faculty of Veterinary Science, Department of Veterinary Tropical Diseases, University of

Pretoria, Onderstepoort, South Africa

e-mail: anita.michel@up.ac.za

D. R. Sibanda

Department of Agriculture and Animal Health, University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria, South Africa

L.-M. de Klerk-Lorist

Directorate of Animal Health, Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Pretoria,

South Africa

e-mail: linmariedk@daff.gov.za

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 387

A. B. Dibaba et al. (eds.), Tuberculosis in Animals: An African Perspective,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18690-6_19 livestock production to prosper, wildlife had to make way for livestock because of the devastating diseases that they sustain, and because they competed for the limited available grazing.

Because of governmental policy throughout the twentieth century, the white commercial livestock sector enjoyed governmental support and investment while the rural black communities were restricted to communal land where they practiced small-scale or subsistence livestock farming without the benefit of governmental financial or veterinary support (Beinart 2007). Currently, the national cattle herd of 14 million consists of communal cattle (40%), commercial beef and dual-purpose herds (mixed beef and dairy production) (50%), and dairy herds (10%) (Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries 2002). The commercial farmers thus received most of the benefits, and the marginalized communities were, and still remain, insufficiently supported to cope with the effects of livestock diseases and the transmission of indigenous and introduced zoonotic diseases by consuming unpasteurized milk and uninspected meat.

Livestock farming is the largest agricultural sector in South Africa. The wildlife industry is part of this sector, and it recently became the fastest growing agricultural sector with 2-2.5% of farms annually converting from livestock to wildlife farming (Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism 2005). Wildlife farming is a diverse enterprise, and it comprises a number of subsectors including intensive game farming for harvesting marketable products (e.g., meat, hides) and sought-after blood lines and extensive game ranching focusing on the sustainable utilization of wildlife through hunting and ecotourism (Taylor et al. 2015). Of the approximately 50,000 registered commercial farms in South Africa, the 5000 game farms and 4000 mixed game and livestock farms occupy a larger land surface than the combined South African national and provincial parks and other officially declared wildlife conservation areas.

It is considered that (BTB) was introduced into South Africa with the importation of dairy cattle from Europe and from other continents by the early European settlers in the Cape Colony (Hutcheon 1880; Cousins et al. 2004). Hutcheon (1880) first detected BTB in cattle in South Africa in 1880. During the twentieth century, the disease became widespread in South Africa with herd infection rates of 60% or more in dairy cattle herds on the Cape Peninsula, and it was declared a notifiable disease with the promulgation of the Diseases of Stock Act (Act no. 14) of the Union of South Africa in 1911.

More specific information about the occurrence and dynamics of BTB in wildlife is provided in Chap. 5.

19.2