An Eastern Cape man will have to pay nearly R3m in damages for selling three blesbuck that died soon after the sale due to stress in the capturing process.
Hendrik Botha lost his appeal against a judgment in the Eastern Cape High Court sitting in Makhanda earlier this month.
The court had awarded damages of R2,850,000 to Izak Grobbelaar, after it was found that Botha breached a tacit term in the contract of the sale.
Judge Clive Plasket said Botha had failed to deliver animals that were in good health.
The animals had succumbed to capture myopathy, a syndrome induced by undue stress in the capture process, he said.
Grobbelaar had originally purchased four blesbuck from Botha in 2014 for R912,000.
The four animals were darted on September 5 2014 by Dr Schalk Jansen van Rensburg, a veterinarian hired by Botha.
One was found to have been too young and was revived and released.
The other three, an ewe and two rams, were loaded into a game-transporting trailer and conveyed to Grobbelaar’s farm a short distance away.
According to court documents, the ewe died within minutes of arrival.
The two rams were in a distressed state and one died a short while later, while the other died during the course of the night.
As a result of the deaths, Grobbelaar sued Botha.
Grobbelaar won the case but Botha was granted leave to appeal.
“Botha pleaded that the cause of the death of the three blesbuck was not capture myopathy but bloat,” Plasket said.
“Presumably, this defence had its origin in the opinion expressed by Jansen van Rensburg when he conducted rudimentary postmortem examinations on the first two animals to die.
“This defence did not last. “First, Grobbelaar, an experienced sheep farmer, saw no symptoms of bloat in the animals and when Jansen van Rensburg inserted a trocar into one of them, he heard no escape of gas.”
The judge said there was also no evidence to support Botha’s bloat theory when postmortems were conducted.
“Thirdly, Botha’s own expert witness, Dr Johan Steyl, a specialist in wildlife pathology, disavowed bloat as a cause of death.
“Finally, Dr Jansen van Rensburg appeared to accept that his initial diagnosis had been incorrect when he conceded that the specialist reports indicated that the animals died as a result of ‘stress’.”
Plasket found that convincing evidence had been led by Grobbelaar to establish capture myopathy. “The capture was conducted in circumstances that increased the risk of capture myopathy; when the last two surviving animals were in the throes of death, the symptoms they displayed were consistent with capture myopathy,” Plasket said.
“The postmortems and pathological examinations revealed that all three animals had died of the same cause, that they displayed signs consistent with capture myopathy and to the extent that there may have been doubt, that doubt was removed by the presence of myoglobin in the last dying animal’s kidneys [and possible traces of it in the others].”
He said of the two events – the capture and the translocation – the former was clearly the more traumatic and likely to induce high levels of stress in the animals.
Plasket dismissed Botha’s appeal with costs, including the costs of the application for leave to appeal.