Dr Bool Smuts exposes SA wildlife crisis: Leopard killers walk for R1 000

Key topics:Leopard killings met with weak or no prosecutionR1,000 fine sparks outrage over wildlife justiceNPA accused of failing to enforce conservation laws.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By BizNews Reporter.On paper, South Africa possesses unambiguous and comprehensive legislation to protect its vulnerable wildlife. To trap, capture, handle, or kill a protected leopard without a permit is a criminal offence. The law threatens offenders with a maximum penalty of a R10 million fine, imprisonment of up to ten years, or both.Yet, the practical enforcement record tells a completely different story. An expose’ see story below) by Dr Bool Smuts, founder and general manager of the Landmark Foundation Trust, documents a chilling pattern of prosecutorial failure spanning seven incidents, two provinces, and two years. In not a single one of these cases has justice been served.Consider the Heidelberg case. In July 2025, a sub-adult leopard was caught simultaneously in two gin traps set at a calf carcass dump on the farm of Malan Rall. The animal suffered fatal fractures and died during a rescue attempt. Despite investigators recommending severe charges, the magistrate accepted a paltry admission-of-guilt fine of just R1,000 under the Animals Protection Act. Available, greater charges under the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act (NEMBA) and statutory vicarious liability provisions were completely ignored. Consequently, killing a globally threatened apex predator costs a farmer—who lives on a property estimated in the tens of millions of Rand—the equivalent of a traffic fine. Thanks to constitutional protections against double jeopardy, the state is now barred from reissuing stronger charges..Read more:.Should wildlife parks be fenced?: 60 African examples gives us an answer.This is not an administrative delay; it represents a deliberate prosecutorial choice. In Calvinia, Northern Cape, a farmer captured an adult male leopard in a gin trap in July 2025. In a documented display of extreme distress, the animal attempted to eat through its own trapped limb to escape before ultimately being euthanised. Although evidence existed and charge recommendations were formally submitted, ten months have passed without a single summons.In Riebeeck West, a research-collared leopard—the very first to recolonise that landscape in a century—was shot dead in October 2024. CapeNature failed to open an investigation or refer the matter to the police, and the physical bullet fragment lodged in the animal's chest was apparently never collected. Meanwhile, in three separate incidents across Piketberg, Bot River, and Bredasdorp, leopards were captured alive in cage traps without permits. Authorities were notified in every instance but uniformly elected not to prosecute. The message sent to landowners is unambiguous: illegally capturing a protected leopard carries no practical legal risk.Even when matters do reach court, flawed prosecutorial framing undermines the state. In George, the trial of Andre Barnard—accused of leaving a trapped leopard to die of dehydration in 2020—has crawled through the courts for six years. By charging him under provincial ordinances rather than national vicarious liability frameworks, prosecutors constructed the accused's best defence, allowing him to demand proof of who personally set the trap.The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has met inquiries with extended silence. The Landmark Foundation directed correspondence to the NPA thirteen times over five months regarding the Rall case, demanding to know why primary environmental and cruelty charges were ignored. The sole substantive response was advice that the Director of Public Prosecutions would inform the decision "in due course," alongside a directive instructing the control prosecutor to cease communicating with the Foundation.While environmental crime prosecution is genuinely under-resourced, resource constraints do not explain a protracted refusal to answer correspondence, nor do they justify ignoring free, expert legal analysis provided by a conservation organisation. The Foundation has formally demanded a substantive written response within fourteen days. Failing that, it will consider pursuing judicial reviews, lodging complaints with the Public Protector, or referring the pattern to the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation to examine potential corruption.In a season where the state found the will to imprison a man for firing a single gunshot into the air at a political gathering, its inability to prosecute the prolonged torture and killing of protected apex predators beyond a R1,000 fine is a profound miscarriage of justice..The NPA’s War on Leopards and the Wildlife Laws.A documented pattern of prosecutorial failure has rendered South Africa’sbiodiversity legislation effectively unenforceable. The expose spans sevenincidents, over two provinces, and two years. In not one of them has justicebeen served. While government recites the “sustainable use” mantra, theenforcement record tells a different story entirely.By Dr Bool Smuts*3 May 2026Landmark Foundation’s work focuses on leopards. South African law is unambiguous on the subject of leopards. The species is listed as vulnerable and protected under the Threatened or Protected Species (TOPS) Regulations promulgated under the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act 10 of 2004 (NEMBA). To trap, capture, handle or kill a leopard without a permit constitutes a criminal offence. The maximum penalty is a fine of R10 million, imprisonment of up to ten years, or both. The Western Cape Nature Conservation Ordinance of 1974 adds further prohibitions: no person may hunt a protected wild animal without a permit, and no person may use a trap to hunt any wild animal without a permit. The Animals Protection Act 71 of 1962 provides independent grounds for prosecution wherever cruelty can be established. Section 34 of the National Environmental Management Act 107 of 1998 (NEMA) and NEMBA and TOPS provisions creates vicarious liability for environmental harm arising on land under a person’s control.The law, in other words, is comprehensive. What follows is a record of whathappens when it is not enforced. The Heidelberg case: R1 000 for a leopard’s life.On 2 July 2025, at the farm Doornkraal of Mr Malan Rall in the Duivenhoks Valley near Heidelberg, Western Cape, a sub-adult 13 kg male leopard, and no older than six months, was caught simultaneously in two gin traps. The traps had been set at a carcass dump where dead dairy calves had been used as bait. The animal had sustained compound comminuted fractures to two legs which was incompatible with life. It died during the rescue attempt. There was no permit to use gin traps or to kill it. It could not, by any credible assessment, have been responsible for livestock losses justifying cruel lethal intervention.The case was investigated by CapeNature and reported to the Police. It wasprosecuted in the Magistrates Court. On 20 October 2025, presiding Magistrate Du Plessis accepted an admission of guilt fine from the accused. The charge: a single count of setting an unlawful trap under the Animals Protection Act. The fine: R1 000.Each of the following charges were available on the facts and would have elicited graver punishment, were not brought: sections 27 and 29(d) of the Nature Conservation Ordinance (which CapeNature had specifically recommended); sections 57(1) and 101 of NEMBA read with the TOPS Regulations (regulations 104 and 105); section 34 of NEMA and other vicarious liability provisions in NEMBA and TOPS; and multiple counts under the Animals Protection Act (including 2(1)(a) and 2(1)(b)) addressing the cruelty inflicted. No imprisonment was sought or imposed. The Court&#39;s acceptance of a R1 000 admission of guilt fine, without interrogating the charges or the evidence, makes it a participant in this outcome.Rall has since expressed no remorse. He was hostile to Foundation representatives who had visited his farm on multiple occasions after the incident to offer assistance with predator management, directing abuse at them and subsequently sending hostile messages after the fine was reported in the media.He lives on property with an estimated value in the tens of millions of Rand. The total financial consequence of killing a globally threatened apex predator on his land was R1 000. An attempt at consideration of reissuing of charges of the statutes not initially charged, will unlikely land, as it would expose the prosecution to constitutionally prescribed double jeopardy defence and protections.It should be recorded that the Western Cape Government, through CapeNature, has for nineteen years failed to give effect to the TOPS Regulations in its own enforcement practices, itself being unlawful. The NPA’s failure to charge under TOPS in the prosecution may, in part, reflect this systemic institutional failure.That explanation does not excuse it. It compounds it.The Calvinia case: ten months, no charges In Calvinia in the Northern Cape, farmer Altus Zandberg captured an adult male leopard in a gin trap on 11 July 2025. The animal, unable to free itself, attempted to eat through its own trapped limb in order to escape; a documented behavioural response to prolonged entrapment that is, by any measure, among the most distressing indicators of suffering available to investigators. The matter was reported and officials were on the scene. Evidence existed. Recommendations for charges were made. The leopard was euthanised.Ten months later, no charges have been brought. Not a reduced charge, not a paltry fine, not a summons. The NPA for the Northern Cape has offered no public explanation. The recommendations to charge have been received and not acted on. The accused has faced no legal consequence of any kind, whether against biodiversity legislation or anti-cruelty statutes.Almost a year of inaction in the face of documented evidence and a formal charge recommendation is not an administrative delay. It is a prosecutorial decision, even if no one has acknowledged making it. The Riebeeck West case: a research animal shot, no investigation In Riebeeck West in the Western Cape, a leopard that had been fitted with a research collar as part of an active research programme was killed in October 2024. A necropsy revealed a bullet fragment lodged in the animal’s chest. The killing of a research-collared animal is not merely a wildlife offence; it represents the destruction of irreplaceable scientific data, the elimination of a monitored individual that was the sole leopard that had recolonised into that landscape for the first time in a century.CapeNature did not open a formal investigation nor attempted themselves to investigate the matter. The matter was not referred to the Police for criminal investigation. No suspect has been investigated, let alone charged. The bullet fragment, physical forensic evidence capable of supporting a ballistics investigation, appears to have not been collected and filed.The failure to investigate this matter is itself a dereliction of the statutory mandate of CapeNature as the provincial conservation authority responsible for the enforcement of the Nature Conservation Ordinance, let alone the National TOPS Regulation which they refuse to implement.Piketberg, Bot River, and Bredasdorp: three leopards captured, no permits, no prosecutions In three separate incidents across the Western Cape in the last year in Piketberg, Bot River, and Bredasdorp, leopards were captured alive in cage traps by landowners or their agents without permits that are required for such traps. In each case, the capture of an Ordinance protected and TOPS-listed species requires a permit. In none of these cases did the responsible party hold a valid permit. In each case, the animal survived. In none of these cases were prosecutions instituted..Read more:.How hunting actually saved South Africa’s wildlife: Ivo Vegter.The three cases share a common feature beyond the permit failure: in each instance, the relevant authorities, CapeNature, the Police, and/or the NPA, were either notified or became aware of the incident, and between them elected not to prosecute. No public explanation has been given for any of these decisions.These permit violations are straightforward to establish and prosecute. The enforcement response was uniform: nothing. The message this sends to landowners across the Western Cape are unambiguous. Capturing a protected a leopard without a permit carries, in practice, carries no legal risk.The George case: when prosecutorial failure becomes constitutionally permanent. The matter of State v Andre Barnard, Case No USH 15/22, currently before the Regional Court in George, represents a further and qualitatively distinct dimension of the enforcement failure. The accused is charged in connection with the trapping and killing of a leopard on his property in 2020 without a permit. He is alleged to have left a leopard in a cage trap to die of dehydration, the cruellest death any animal can endure. The case has crawled through the Court over a 6-year period.The Landmark Foundation has attended eighteen court appearances, and has engaged extensively, and largely fruitlessly, with the prosecution.The charges were framed under the Ordinance and the Animals Protection Act. The prosecution refused to charge farm workers or call some material witnesses.Once again, NEMBA, the TOPS Regulations, and NEMA were not invoked despite the Foundation’s repeated urging to do so. The consequence of this framing became apparent at the close of the State’s case, when the accused brought an application for a Criminal Procedure Act section 174 discharge. The discharge application is premised substantially on the argument that the State failed to prove who personally set the trap in which the leopard was found, and this while an available witness that could attest to this was not called. Under the Ordinance charges, as framed, that argument carries considerable legal weight. Under NEMBA and TOPS and the vicarious liability framework of NEMA section 34, the question of who physically set the trap carries materially different and lesser legal significance. The prosecution’s failure to invoke the correct legal framework has, in effect, constructed the accused’s best argument in defence.The constitutional stakes of this framing failure cannot be overstated. A discharge granted under section 174 (of the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977) is a constitutionally final acquittal. Section 35(3)(m) of the Constitution provides an absolute guarantee against double jeopardy, as it does in the Rall matter with charging on other grounds not initially charged. Once granted, no further prosecution is possible for the same conduct, regardless of what evidence subsequently comes to light and regardless of what prosecutorial failures contributed to the weakness of the State’s case. The NPA’s failure to apply the correct law does not remain a correctable error. It becomes a permanent constitutional outcome.The Foundation, having received no substantive response to its repeatedcorrespondence with the NPA, and was compelled to approach Magistrate directly by way of written submissions. The accused’s attorney objected to the Foundation’s standing. The section 174 application was dismissed on 1 April 2026, but the prosecution is still not out of the woods as closing arguments are now due, and “beyond reasonable doubt” and direct liability test still exposes the prosecution in the judgment.Five months of silence: the NPA’s correspondence record In the Rall matter alone, the Landmark Foundation directed correspondence to the NPA on no fewer than thirteen separate occasions between December 2025 and April 2026. The correspondence sought answers to four specific questions: why were Ordinance charges not brought despite investigator recommendations; why were NEMA, NEMBA and TOPS charges not brought; why were the full range of cruelty charges not pursued; and why was the fine set at a paltry R1 000.The responses received in that period were as follows: extended silence; an acknowledgement that the control prosecutor had been abroad; an undertaking to forward the docket to the Director of Public Prosecutions; and, most recently, the advice from Head Control Prosecutor Prins that “the DPP will inform the decision in due course.” At one point, Advocate Snyman of the DPP’s office advised that the control prosecutor had been instructed to cease communicating with the Foundation until further instruction was issued from his office. No explanation was given for that instruction and no instruction has been forthcoming for almost 2 months.Five months. Thirteen letters. One substantive sentence. This is the correspondence record of a constitutional organ of state in respect of a matter involving the killing of a globally protected species, documented cruelty, and a sentence that was, on any objective reading of the applicable law, a profound miscarriage of justice.Institutional failure or institutional choice?It would be neither fair nor accurate to characterise every aspect of this pattern as the product of deliberate misconduct, although some of it is. Environmental crime prosecution in South Africa is genuinely under-resourced and under-prioritised.Prosecutors managing high-volume district court rolls, often without specialist training in biodiversity legislation, cannot fully be expected to arrive at a leopard-trapping case with fluency in the intersection of NEMBA, TOPS, NEMA section 34, the Nature Conservation Ordinance, and the Animal Protection Act. That is a training and institutional support failure, and responsibility for it lies with the NPA, not entirely with individual prosecutors, although they are trained lawyers.Resource constraints do not, however, explain the failure to answer correspondence. They do not explain the instruction to a control prosecutor to cease communicating with a conservation NGO that was providing, without charge, detailed legal analysis, advice and charge recommendations. They do not explain protracted inaction in multiple cases. They do not explain why the prosecution frames its cases under subordinate legislation when it had been repeatedly advised, over a period of years, that the primary applicable framework was NEMA, NEMBA and TOPS, and the APA.A pattern this consistent, across this many matters, in this specific category of offence, admits of three possible explanations: systemic institutional incompetence; a tacit policy decision that leopard/wildlife-related prosecutions are not worth the investment of prosecutorial resources; or something more troubling.The Landmark Foundation does not yet assert which of these explanations is correct. It asserts that the NPA owes the public, and this species, an answer.The Foundation has formally demanded a substantive written response from the NPA within fourteen days. In the absence of an adequate response, it will consider pursuing a judicial review of the Rall prosecution decision, a formal complaint to the Public Protector or Department of Justice, a referral to the Portfolio Committee on Justice, and, or where the evidence warrants it, a complaint to the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation regarding the possibility that the documented pattern constitutes conduct falling within the scope of the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act. Similar actions may be considered depending on the final outcome of the Barnard matter.What the law requires, and what justice demands.The legal framework is not the problem here. South Africa’s biodiversity legislation in NEMBA, TOPS, NEMA, the Nature Conservation Ordinance, the Animals Protection Act provides a comprehensive and adequately designed set of tools for the prosecution of exactly the conduct described in this article. The penalties are serious. The vicarious liability provisions address the standard defences. The Constitutional foundation in section 24 is explicit. Nothing in the law requires a prosecutor to accept a R1 000 admission of guilt fine for the killing of a globally threatened and protected species.What justice requires in the Rall matter is not complicated. It requires a fullaccount of why investigators’ charge recommendations were not followed. It requires an explanation of why the NEMA, NEMBA and TOPS framework was not invoked. It requires an explanation for the paltry R1000 fine. It requires an assessment of whether the double jeopardy protection, created by the NPA’s own conduct, now bars remediation, and if so, what accountability mechanism applies to those whose decisions created that bar. It requires, at a minimum, that correspondence from a registered conservation organisation raising serious legal concerns about a finalised prosecution be answered within a reasonable period.Five months is not a reasonable period.What justice requires in the Calvinia matter is that a charge recommendation made to the NPA be either acted upon or formally declined, with reasons, within a timeframe that bears some relationship to the seriousness of the offence. Ten months is not that timeframe..Read more:.Give wildlife value and it flourishes; deny it value and it vanishes.What justice requires in the Riebeeck West matter is that the killing of a research- collared animal, with forensic evidence available, be investigated. The absence of any investigation is, on the current record, inexplicable.What justice requires in other cases is that the illegal capture of a TOPS-listed species without a permit, an offence that is, of all the offences described in this article, perhaps the most straightforward to establish, be prosecuted. That none of these three cases produced prosecutions suggests that the permit requirement for capturing a leopard is, in practice, unenforced in the Western Cape.The sub-adult male leopard that died on Malan Rall’s farm on 2 July 2025 was probably born in early 2025. He was navigating a landscape that his species has occupied for millennia, but that humans have made progressively more hostile. He died in barbaric gin traps. The man who set those traps paid R1 000.Section 24 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa provides that the environment must be protected for the benefit of present and future generations through reasonable legislative and other measures that prevent ecological degradation and promote conservation. The legislative measures exist but are not used.It would appear that those who have been appointed the leopard’s protectors, have become amongst its worst threats. Leopards deserve better.In the same season that the state found the will to imprison a man for firing a single gunshot into the air at a political meeting, it could not find the will to prosecute the prolonged torture and death of a protected apex predator beyond the equivalent of a traffic fine..*Dr Bool Smuts is the Founder and General Manager of the Landmark Foundation Trust (NPO 039-416), a conservation organisation dedicated to the protection of apex predators and their habitats in southern Africa, with a particular mandate in respect of the leopard. The Foundation has been operational since 2005 and engages in research, advocacy, human-predator conflict mitigation, environmental education, habitat expansion, and the enforcement of legislative protections for listed species. Dr Smuts holds advanced qualifications in conservation management and has appeared as an expert in multiple court proceedings involving predator-related offences.

Dr Bool Smuts exposes SA wildlife crisis: Leopard killers walk for R1 000

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