RICHARD Peirce, wildlife conservationist, author and producer, was a welcome speaker at Bude CWT giving an illuminating talk on the problems associated with conservation in the wild.

Richard showed two films the first of a trip made to the Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda and secondly a TV programme made with Ben Fogle searching for a great white shark off the Cornish coast using a dead whale as bait.

The Rwandan gorillas can generate one million dollars per gorilla per year for the Rwandan government from tourists and so they are protected by armed guards, have their own vet and tourists have limited access to the gorillas in their natural habitat. In this instance they are worth more alive than they are dead unlike the rhino where a horn is worth more weight for weight then gold to a poacher who sells to the Asian markets.

Richard was excited to be involved with a TV programme hoping to see a great white shark in UK waters there have only been a handful of credible sightings over the years and they were not lucky this time but the dead whale proved irresistible to nearly two hundred blue sharks. There are many species of shark threatened with extinction, being killed for their fins, which in turn creates an ecological imbalance in our oceans where they are natural predators.

Richards’s message was quite clear that despite all the work being done by conservation groups the biggest threat to wildlife was still humans and their greed for money and what was needed to make real and lasting changes was to change the mindset of humanity so that our precious diminishing wild life is saved for its own sake.