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Stray cattle that roam the streets of Nelson Mandela Bay, damaging graves and tombstones and placing motorists at risk of causing serious accidents, may soon become a thing of the past.
The metro’s public health directorate has put a plan in place to control the movement of roaming animals and hopes that every farmer in the Bay will come to the party and accept the suggestion made by the directorate.
MMC for public health, Lance Grootboom, said that they have identified commonage around the metro – which is land that belongs to the municipality – and will soon engage with small scale farmers to allow their cattle to roam on this land.
“We have commonage in the Uitenhage (Kariega) area and quite a few (sites) in the Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha) area.
“That is the current process that we are working on.
“We, which includes the economic development, tourism and agriculture directorate (EDTA), will be setting up a meeting with these farmers and provide additional land to them in order for their animals to roam there and not on our streets,” Grootboom explained.
He acknowledged that the metro had a capacity problem, since there was only one pound in Kariega and thus, even if animals roaming the streets are impounded by metro police, as it is a by-law that they have to enforce, there is no space at the pound to house the animals.
“The pound can roughly only take up to 18 to 30 cattle at a time so when it’s full, it becomes a problem.
“What we do as a city, when we impound animals, is keep them there for a period of 21 days in terms of our policy and inform the owners that their animals have been impounded and should be collected.
“If the owners don’t come and get them after we have sent them notices, we sell them on auction.”
Grootboom also mentioned that they are aware of the fact that having only one pound is a problem and funds should be generated to build more pounds.
He explained that there are future plans to upgrade the pound in Kariega but the metro is still looking at commonage land since that will alleviate the problem of roaming animals on the streets of Nelson Mandela Bay.
“The three directorates, public health, EDTA and safety and security, will be meeting within the next two to three weeks to map out this plan.
“We are also looking at another type of initiative because some of these animals are not marked and then we don’t know who the owners are. Sometimes the animals are marked but the mark is not registered with the municipality.
“So we are also looking at a plan to put reflector tags on the earpieces of these animals,” Grootboom elaborated.
“So in the evenings, if one gets separated from its herd, we’d be able to identify it if found on the road.
“It will also help us to identify who these animals belong to when we impound them,” he added.
“This is another initiative we are looking at but I think the most important thing is to talk to EDTA and invite the small scale farmers to the table to make use of our commonage.”
He added that there are approximately 18 commonage sites across the metro but there might be slightly more.
“This is our plan to address this and we are trying to move with speed to make sure that our residents are safe on the road and animals don’t roam around on our streets and in our suburbs.”
