Ploy’s Blog

For my second post, I found another blogger from Sub-Saharan Africa called Samuel Maina. He has written a few posts, and I found them quite interesting. One of the posts was about three wildlife tragedies that happened in Africa.

On Januarary 2nd, the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group attacked the rangers at Garamba National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo. The rebels caused much damage to property and killed 8 people, including 2 rangers and 2 wives of wardens.

Although it is a government rebel group, in Wikipedia, it says that the LRA are also accused of human rights violations, including murder, abduction, sexual enslavement, etc. It is condemned as a terrorist organization by the USA. I don’t understand why would a group against the government attack a national park. The USA says it’s a terrorist organization, but what does sexual enslavement, murder, and national parks have to do with the government? I don’t quite understand this part.

In Diana Beach, Kenya, a Humpback Whale was caught in a fishing net donated to the local fisherman by a development NGO. This was actually written as a protest in the Whale Sharks blog, because the Whale Shark Trust, who runs the blog, believes the nets are inappropriate and illegal.

If the net was illegal, why didn’t the NGO know? I think they should’ve known that those kinds of nets were illegal, because they were the ones who bought it and gave it to the fishermen. I feel sorry the whale. I hope it survived.

Also in Kenya, something really bizarre happened at the West Gate Community Conservancy. Usually, male leopards only kill each other to eliminate competition, but at West Gate, a leopard had eaten another younger leopard. It suffocated the younger leopard and dragged it across the road into the bushes. It had eaten a big part of the other leopard’s stomach, revealing the insides, and left the rest. The blogger said it was to eliminate competition, but cannibalism of the same species is very uncommon.

I think this is quite shocking. I mean, killing your own species is fine, but eating?? I think that is very strange. I also don’t understand one thing. Why did the leopard have to eat it? Wasn’t killing it enough to make it dead? (<–I hope this makes sense to you.) I think that maybe the leopard wanted to eat its own species. Maybe it wanted to taste its species meat, but didn’t want to eat himself? Anyway, this post makes me think of the Maori and the Solomon Islands cannibals. They never ate their own people, only visitors and foreigners. However, animals eat other species, and some also also eat their own.

I found that iGoogle is useful after all. I think that something to do with Ndesanjo Macha, the previous blogger writing only one sentence confused me, making me clicking on the post link on Global Voices, which made me think that iGoogle sucked, and only Global Voices was useful. I don’t think you understand what I just said, but the main point is that, iGoogle is very useful and efficient (to me).