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Obert Chifamba-Agri-Insight 

AT a time when the country was beginning to revel at the gains it has so far made in saving cattle from the January disease holocaust and its accomplice — poverty deaths — a new setback seems to be emerging in the form of cattle rustling. 

Yes, cattle rustling has in recent times become quite a BIG cause for concern with cases seeming to be increasing with each day that comes. 

What is, however, disturbing is the fact that most of the cases seem to be happening under the cover of darkness — during the night.

In fact, there is some kind of pattern that may easily give hints at something that is well choreographed involving some collaborations between the rustlers and informants they engage within different localities. 

It is the chilling accuracy with which the rustlers are easily identifying the best cattle targets, which in most cases are big oxen and steers that boggles the mind. 

The discerning individual can easily realise that the rustlers are in most cases working with locals who point out the best candidates for their nefarious intentions and know precisely where the rustlers can find exactly what they would be looking for. 

One undeniable truth is that these rustlers carry out reconnaissance missions in which they pick out informants and get to be acquainted with communities’ behavioural patterns when it comes to caring for their cattle. 

The sad reality in most cases is that farmers are also complicit in aiding these rustlers score big in their counter-productive missions through their failure to secure their cattle. 

If you were to travel in any direction at night, especially during the dry season when cattle roam freely without fears of them straying into fields, you will definitely see a lot of them napping or grazing by the road sides. 

This is one confirmation that farmers are not giving proper care to their animals. 

It is an undeniable fact that when prowling rustlers see such cattle, they can easily take advantage of this recklessness to fulfil their missions. 

And the following morning the farmers wake up to the news that someone had stumbled on the deboned carcasses of their animals, as has become the tradition with the way these rustlers are conducting their business.

 They usually leave the deboned carcasses, hides and heads after taking away steak, which they can easily stash out of sight when they travel with it to the final destinations where they sell it. 

The police must be commended for carrying out several operations to weed out illicit trading of meat in direct response to the cases of rustling that do not seem to be showing signs of abating any time soon.

Facts on the ground, however, seem to be always pointing in the direction of the farmers, as the key ingredient needed for the success of the war to root out rustling. 

The farmers must start by fortifying security systems around their cattle and where they used to put cattle pens a distance from their homesteads, they now need to situate them as close as possible so that they can pick out unusual noises at night. 

It is also necessary for farmers to keep dogs at their homesteads so that they can be alerted to anything out of the ordinary happening outside. 

Dogs usually react to sounds and movements taking place anywhere near the homestead so this is a characteristic that farmers can capitalise on for their own good. 

The habit of tethering cattle in their pens at night or in the pastures during day is also making them sitting targets for rustlers so farmers need to desist from doing it. 

In most cases farmers do so to stop the animals from breaking out or straying into fields, but with a problem like rustling stalking their wealth, they need to look at other options of addressing the matter instead of tethering animals. 

It is also not a bad idea for farmers to form committees tasked with overseeing security issues for their animals through night patrols and closely working with police and veterinary extension officers deployed in their areas. 

They need to alert the police to the presence of people or strangers moving cattle without permits regardless of the time of the day.

 Farmers also need to come to terms with the fact that rustlers can also be dangerous to anyone who tries to stop them from carrying out their intentions, hence the need to always work closely with the police or in numbers. 

They can take advantage of the current proliferation in the use of smart phones that is making it possible for them to form WhatsApp groups in which they can coopt police details who they can easily inform when they notice something suspicious. 

A stitch in time always saves nine. 

On the one hand, the Department of Veterinary Services (DVS) also needs to up its game and come up with stringent requirements that are supposed to be satisfied by those intending to move cattle. 

They need to be more visible to ensure there is no random movement of cattle while outlawing the transporting or movement of cattle at night. 

Local authorities who are mandated with promoting legal and fair trading in areas under their jurisdiction also need to actively enforce laws the ensure butcheries operate legally and secure their meat requirements from legal sources. 

It is not always easy to do so but sometimes random checks on butcheries in the company of the police and demanding transactional proof to show that the meat in their cold rooms would have come from honest sources may be necessary. 

There is, however, a disturbing trend in the sourcing of food stuffs that citizens need to nip in the bud as soon as possible. 

This is the random buying of food stuffs from undesignated sources or buyers for whom they have no way of establishing if they are meeting the recommended health standards. 

In most cases people who sell meat from illegally acquired cattle slash prices to ensure they quickly dispose of it, which in most cases should be the first signs that something is just not adding up. 

Of course it is the consumers’ rights to buy food from sources of their choice but they still need to protect their health and futures too. 

It is true that most legal retail outlets are hiking prices purportedly to remain in business in the face of an unstable exchange rate on the parallel market that is sadly also controlling formal business transactions but this does not justify reckless buying of goods. 

For the effective containment of this rustling scourge currently afflicting the cattle industry, all citizens need to work together otherwise the recent gains towards re-building the national herd may go to naught.

The herd has since grown from 5,5 to 5,6 million with Government going on record saying the objective is to have grown it to six million by the end of the year. 

And this is possible if all stakeholders work towards containing cattle rustling and the random slaughter of cattle without compelling reasons.