The NPA’s war on leopards and the wildlife laws

Landmark 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 10 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, create 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 what happens when it is not enforced.

The Heidelberg case: R1 000 for a leopard’s life

On 2 July 2025, at the farm Doornkraal owned by Malan Rall in the Duivenhoks Valley near Heidelberg in the Western Cape, a sub-adult male leopard weighing 13kg, 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 were 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 was prosecuted in the magistrate’s court. On 20 October 2025, presiding magistrate Du Plessis accepted an admission-of-guilt fine from the accused. The charge was a single count of setting an unlawful trap under the Animals Protection Act. The fine was R1 000.

Each of the following charges was available on the facts and would have elicited graver punishment, but they 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 sections 2(1)(a) and 2(1)(b), addressing the cruelty inflicted. No imprisonment was sought or imposed. The court’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 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 to reconsider charges under statutes not initially invoked will probably not succeed, as it would expose the prosecution to constitutionally prescribed double-jeopardy protections.

It should be recorded that the Western Cape government, through CapeNature, has for 19 years failed to give effect to the TOPS Regulations in its own enforcement practices, itself being unlawful. The National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) 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: 10 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 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. Recommendations to charge were received and not acted on. The accused has faced no legal consequence of any kind, whether under 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 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 and the elimination of a monitored individual that was the sole leopard to recolonise that landscape for the first time in a century.

CapeNature did not open a formal investigation or attempt 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 not to have 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 enforcing the Nature Conservation Ordinance, let alone the national TOPS Regulations, which it refuses to implement.

Piketberg, Bot River and Bredasdorp: three leopards captured, no permits, no prosecutions

In three separate incidents across the Western Cape in the past year — in Piketberg, Bot River and Bredasdorp — leopards were captured alive in cage traps by landowners or their agents without the permits required for such traps. In each case, the capture of an Ordinance-protected and TOPS-listed species required 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.

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 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 is unambiguous. Capturing a protected leopard without a permit carries, in practice, 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 — among the cruellest deaths an animal can endure. The case has crawled through the court over a six-year period. The Landmark Foundation has attended 18 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 certain material witnesses. Once again, NEMBA, the TOPS Regulations and NEMA were not invoked despite the Foundation’s repeated urging. 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, despite the existence of an available witness who could attest to this. Under the Ordinance charges, as framed, that argument carries considerable legal weight. Under NEMBA, 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 charges on other grounds not initially brought. 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 repeated correspondence with the NPA, was compelled to approach the 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 the “beyond reasonable doubt” and direct-liability tests still expose 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 13 separate occasions between December 2025 and April 2026. The correspondence sought answers to four specific questions: why Ordinance charges were not brought despite investigator recommendations; why NEMA, NEMBA and TOPS charges were not brought; why the full range of cruelty charges was not pursued; and why the fine was 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, 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 two 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 Animals 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 has repeatedly been advised, over a period of years, that the primary applicable framework was NEMA, NEMBA, TOPS and the Animals Protection Act.

A pattern this consistent, across this many matters, in this specific category of offence, admits three possible explanations: systemic institutional incompetence; a tacit policy decision that leopard and 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 14 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 justice department, a referral to the portfolio committee on justice, and, 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 — NEMBA, TOPS, NEMA, the Nature Conservation Ordinance and the Animals Protection Act — provides a comprehensive and adequately designed set of tools for prosecuting exactly the conduct described in this article. The penalties are serious. The vicarious liability provisions address 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 full account 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 R1 000 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 on or formally declined, with reasons, within a timeframe that bears some relationship to the seriousness of the offence. Ten months is not that timeframe.

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 they are not used.

It would appear that those appointed as the leopard’s protectors have become among its greatest 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, a conservation organisation dedicated to protecting apex predators and their habitats in southern Africa, with a particular mandate relating to the leopard. The Foundation has operated since 2005 and conducts research, advocacy, human-predator conflict mitigation, environmental education, habitat expansion and the enforcement of legislative protections for listed species. Smuts holds advanced qualifications in conservation management and has appeared as an expert in multiple court proceedings involving predator-related offences.

The views expressed are those of the author.