Save the vervet monkey and jackal for future generations!
[Letter to the editor]

I am 13 years old, part of the Generation Z population, and find myself pleading with the Babyboomer Generation to not kill the vervet monkeys and jackals!  

The rate at which wildlife is being shot, means my two younger sisters who fall within Generation Alpha, will see these animals on the list of endangered or extinct species. My family moved from the city to a game farm on the Magaliesberg mountain because of our passion for nature. We love sitting outside at night drinking tea and listening to the jackals. During the day, we enjoy watching the vervet monkeys play outside in the bush. 

Unfortunately, we share the game farm with older people who have decided to hunt or in their words ‘cull’ the jackals and the vervet monkeys. I don’t understand why the very same people say we should save the rhino, yet they kill other wildlife?  It does not make sense that they want to look after the bees... but kill the snakes? We should protect the leopard... yet kill the jackal? 

Who decides the fate of these animals? Generation Alpha might not get the chance to see wild rhino but do the Babyboomers and Millennials realise that their actions today will cause the vervet monkeys and jackals to also be in the same precarious position someday.

We have chosen to move into these wild animals’ habitat on the Magaliesberg mountain, and have taken their rightful place where they rested, played, and searched for food. Now we frighten them with firecrackers and bullets and heartlessly and illegally kill them. How is that fair? 

The monkeys have lived here longer than we have. The jackals have always been a part of the food chain, but property owners and farmers see them as a threat to farm animals and pets and think that they are overpopulated. I would like to know where these property owners got this information as the jackal numbers are not being tracked or studied objectively nor have we ever found the remains of game attacked or killed by the jackal. 

A while ago, when I went for a walk, I found a dead jackal on the gravel road and wondered why they had not removed the body. After a while I finally figured out that it had been left as a warning to the other jackal. In fact, the warning is for us. Our wildlife is being cruelly and mechanically destroyed at a time when we need to save the world and not destroy it. 
Auralea Langford