Wildlife conservation, either as a form of research or as a commercial enterprise is not something that is popular in Nigeria. How exactly did you get into this field?
I came into wildlife conservation not just as a professional but as a way to pay back to my early life. In my early life, I was not a conservationist. As a child, I was a hunter. I hunted for wildlife. I hunted for fish in the water and so on and so forth. I even hunted snails in order to keep myself going and also to better the prospects of my family. I helped my mother to bring home animals I caught in the forest. We sold some of those, and also, that was the source of protein we had. At night, we would set traps to catch fish. We set traps for animals in the forest. At that time, I personally knew nothing about conservation and I was not bothered about the animals I caught. I was happy doing that until I became an adolescent qualified to go secondary school. By providence, I was taken to Jos, Plateau (State). I am from Akwa Ibom. So, on completion of my primary school in Akwa Ibom, providence had that my older brother, Major Archibong Nyang took me to Jos, Plateau where I schooled at Command Secondary School, Jos. That was in 1979. While at Command Secondary School, my guardian who was then the editor of Standard Newspaper, Jos, Mr Ekpeyong Ekpeyong took me to Jos Wildlife Park. At that place, I saw so many animals. With the instinct of the hunter in me, I was marvelling how they could put so many animals in such a place instead of killing them and eating them. My curiosity took the best of me. I went round the whole place and I did not want to go back home.
Did you try to kill any of the animals there?
No, I was just looking, wondering how I could have the means of getting them. How I wished I could see them in the jungle. Mr Ekpeyong took me away. But as an adult, a professional, he observed my interest. So, during the Christmas of 1980, he took me to Jos Zoo and the zoo was crowded with a lot of visitors. At a particular area of the zoo, people were screaming, laughing, chattering and I went there. I observed that a chimpanzee in a cage was dancing to disco music and people were cheering it. It was dancing, doing the styles that I knew and use to watch on television. I was amazed. I could not believe that a chimpanzee would dance. That is where I was caught the interest, realising that the same animals that I was catching back in the village could be so useful with people paying money to come and see them. Some of them entertaining people, the chimps dancing and then people throwing coins at a particular crocodile inside a pit in a zoo. I watched all those things. And then the feeding of the lions with large goats took the best of me. When I observed those activities, I then realised that these animals were so important. So, when I got back to Lagos where I was living then, I went to a house in a place called Mende around Maryland in Ikeja. There was a house that someone owned a chimpanzee by the name of Umuk. They called the chimp Umuk. Every day of my life, I had to go and watch that chimpanzee, and I started observing the behaviour. That is where I fell in love with the same animals I was killing and I vowed that I would never kill animals again.
So, I grew up, wrote my JAMB, finished from Command, Jos and got admission to the university. I started studying Agriculture as a course. But along the line, the faculty I was in established a faculty of agriculture and thereafter came a department of forestry and wildlife. I abandoned what I was studying and switched to forestry and wildlife, even at the risk of losing a whole year. I had to go in because I wanted to go and study this same forest and wildlife that I was once decimating as a boy. That’s what made me to be able to survive the rigours of the forest as a child. At seven, I was already like a forest master. So, here is where my love, my passion started. And with the good teachers I had in the university, they motivated me so much. And they attached so much practical training to the programme at that time. I got a dredge in forestry and wildlife. I proceeded to get a master’s degree in wildlife and fisheries from the University of Ibadan and then I went on to study snakes for my Ph.D. I came about the enormous responsibility to change the huge population of people who are currently doing the same thing I was doing in the dark age when conservation education was not common in many places in Nigeria. So, I decided that I would not kill animals again. Rather, I will train a majority of people to go into conservation by making them understand, by helping them to know that the animal is worth more alive than dead. And because of the value, the habitat they live in, being part of our own settlement and survival and the role they play in the ecosystem, that is why I decided to not just do my research as a scholar, but opened the Biodiversity Preservation Centre, an education centre cum animal rescue centre so that the general public, especially our younger generation, will be able to come to that centre and be exposed to animals like I was exposed in Jos. It gives young children the opportunity to ask questions, outlive their curiosity and begin to see these animals not just as food, but part and parcel of the natural ecosystem. And when they grow up, they will not have the penchant to kill every moving animal.
Conserving animals is a big challenge in Africa. We hear stories of animals that are going extinct being killed for the horns because the horns are worth enough to feed entire villages. The first question an average person would ask is, does wildlife conservation put food on the table?
Yes. Frankly speaking, if we conserve our animals out there in their habitats, it will put much more food on the table. It will enhance our survival prospects in a changing world. If we fail to conserve the animals, we will lose much more opportunities, even for getting food. Apart from the city dwellers/people in the urban centres, local community people depend enormously on the biodiversity of our forests. It is this same people that are the majority of our population. The forest provides medicine for our hospitals. The forest is the source of energy that they use in cooking their food because they take the wood, branches and twigs from the forest. It is from the forest they obtain forest food, especially vegetables, fruits, nuts and so on and so forth. Guess what? Majority of the food resources in the forest, it is the living animals that plant them. It is the killing animals that pollinate them. It is the living nails that diverse them across territories. And it is the living animals that ensure that those resources continue to exist for mankind.
You breed snakes for their venom. How safe is this line of business and in treating snake bites, does the kind of snake matter?
For snake anti-venom, most of the anti-venom that are commonly available in the market are action specific. For instance, a colubrid has bitten someone; you cannot use an anti-venom meant for vipers to treat the victim. So, colubrids have their anti-venom, vipers have their anti-venom. That is why it is always necessary when a victim comes to the clinic, the doctors will ask what type of snake bit you. They will try to know so that they know the type of anti-venom to use. So, anti-venoms are action specific unlike other antibodies. Coming to the other side, I want to assure you that breeding snakes is one of the most lucrative businesses that anybody can embark upon. On the surface, it is very dangerous. But for people with proper training, this is a business they go into. industrialists that have the fund and want to invest in something, as at today, they quickest and the easiest business they can embark upon with minimal investment is snake farming. Currently on this planet, among the liquid that exist commercially in the world, only one liquid surpasses snake venom in terms of monetary value. And that is the scorpion venom.
Scorpion venom is the most expensive extract from any animal. The second most expensive is snake venom. It is used in industry to produce anti-venom. That is number one. It is used to produce other medicines. For instance, industry people have learnt to introduce some snake venom like green mamba venom is very useful in medicines that have to do with nervous breakdown. For instance, people who suffer from high blood pressure can get treatment with medicines that contain very minute quality of this venom. You find the wet venom of certain snakes, very minor quantities like let say a 60-litre bottle or a 75-litre bottle will be running into millions in the international market. The dry venom of an equivalent quantity will attract millions of dollars in some areas. But what are we doing as a people? We have the penchant to kill any snake. Sad enough, in Nigeria as I speak today, more than 75 percent of Nigerian snake species are non-venomous. And with the ones that have venom, less than 10 percent have direct contact with human beings. The rest are living in the forest as tree snakes. They live on top of tall trees that they rarely have contact with any human. These are the same snakes that could be found and we can extract their venom, preserve them and export for a better diversification of our economy.
In Africa, there is a lot of superstition surrounding snakes. Are our people misinformed?
The fear of snakes; what we call in science ophidiophobia. It is this fear that people generally have of crawling animals like snakes. According to the dictionary, the people who suffer most from this fear are people who have never had direct contact with snakes. The fear is fuelled by ignorance of the snake. Unfortunately also, movie makers who are very anxious to draw undue attention to their movies, will go out of their way to make snakes look evil beyond even what the bible says. So, people born into a system whereby they carry a medicine, a packet of a chemical and the warning sign has the image of the snake. Those kind of things evoke unnecessary negative awareness on the mind of the common man. But the same people forget that medical associations, the Nigerian Medical Association for an example, if you look at their insignia, what do you see? You see a snake. Why is it so? The awareness is lacking. There is so much misinformation. Look at the movie Anaconda that reigned some years back. It portrayed anaconda as an evil snake that can swallow and spit a man. When I went to South America, I met a family that was farming anaconda and I took part in helping the anaconda to exercise in the morning. The anaconda was so fat and huge, it rarely moved. It was developing sores. We had to chain it and drag it to move. Despite its size, it doesn’t see humans as its prey.
There are real life stories of people who keep pythons as pets only for the snakes to starve themselves and size up their owner in preparation for swallowing them. Are you aware of such cases?
Please, in life generally, there are some situations where people out of carelessness, people out of ignorance put themselves in situations that are clearly avoidable. In Nigeria and elsewhere for example, we have had situations of people being attacked by dogs. In fact, we have had stories of dogs killing humans. Has it made us stop keeping dogs? We have had so many negative stories, but for snakes in particular, I want to say that you should not take certain animals as pets; especially if you live in a house environment where you don’t have enough prey. You don’t have living things the snake will eat and you start feeding it with meat you bought from the shop. The snake was not made by God to be eating meat bought in the market. Snakes were made to kill their prey and swallow. The whole process of doing that has a lot of hormonal influence in their body. In a situation where a snake has grown to adulthood eating sausage and so on, instinctively, that innate, inbred behaviour of a snake must come to play. Those people who kept them as pets, they have no training. They have no knowledge of the ecology and biology of the snake. And so they become the victim. How can you keep a giant python in your house with your baby?
There is this general belief that the saliva of a wall gecko is poisonous and could kill. Is this true or just a myth?
Complete myth; it is not true. There is no scientific basis to it. People in Nigeria have developed a penchant for going to social media and marketing their blogs by creating sensational stories that have not been verified in science. This is a very bad trend. I have seen situations when even criminals will hide under such negative stories to cover a crime.
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