On a chilly Sunday morning, Asgar Vahed, his partner, and I took a scenic drive to Cozy Bay in Cape Town. The morning unfolded into more than just shared knowledge and insight, and it began in the Cederberg Mountains where Vahed found himself.
In the Cederberg mountains, conservation is not decided by slogans or hashtags. It is decided by whether a single plant is cut too soon or not.
And well before anyone is allowed to harvest buchu, the fragrant indigenous plant that clings to steep Western Cape slopes, someone has to climb up there and count it.
Often, that someone is Asgar Vahed.
Vahed is a conservationist with CapeNature whose work lies at the intersection of ecology and enforcement, fieldwork and paperwork, idealism and reality.
Speaking to IOL, Vahed mentions the misconceptions surrounding his work, which people often assume is simply “running around with animals”, laughing at the persistent image of the khaki-clad television personality Steve Irwin.
“Conservation, it’s so much more than that,” Vahed tells IOL.
The 12-year-old snake catcher
Long before permits and risk assessments, there was a boy on a farm with a book of animals and too much curiosity.
For his twelfth birthday, Asgar’s father bought him a massive animal encyclopaedia. He spent his days running across fields, catching snakes.
“I was the real snake catcher,” he grins.
Growing up partly on a farm near the small town of Randvaal, he learned by doing. Handling. Observing. Getting it wrong. Getting it right.
Later, he studied conservation through the University of South Africa (UNISA), drawn to its practical structure. Each semester required time in reserves across the country. Limpopo. Mpumalanga. KwaZulu-Natal. The Western Cape.
His final year was entirely hands on: firearm training, snake handling, and firefighting.
“You don’t learn wildlife in a book,” he says. “You learn it on the job.”
In one particularly gruelling training period, students worked so hard they jokingly began calling one another “comrade”, bonded by blisters and exhaustion.
The lesson was not just physical endurance; it was perspective.
“One day you’ll manage people,” they were told. “If you don’t know how hard this is, you’ll ask unrealistic things.”
A honey badger at the Toyota dealership
One morning, shortly after starting at CapeNature in 2020, Asgar received a call from a Toyota dealership in Vredenburg. There was an animal stuck in a car.
They suspected a honey badger.
Vahed assumed it was a Dassie, rock hyrax, which often curls up in engine bays for warmth… until the photo arrived, and it was unmistakably a honey badger, an animal notorious for its ferocity.
The vehicle had been in Paternoster, near a reserve. The badger had climbed in unnoticed. It travelled all the way to town before being discovered.
For hours, the animal refused to budge. Then, without drama, it simply walked into the cage.
Honey badgers, famously labelled by the Guinness World Records as among the world’s most fearless animals, are not known for cooperation. After a veterinary check, it was released back where it belonged.
For Vahed, this was another day at the office.
Lessons in the wild
Talking to IOL, Vahed explains the intricacies concerning preservation, using buchu, for example, a fragrant indigenous plant that grows in the mountains of the Cederberg and is used in oils and traditional remedies.
Vahed explains the matter, emphasising how it is protected and “you cannot simply climb up and harvest it”.
Vahed told IOL that he had to hike into the mountains himself to assess whether the population could sustain harvesting.
“You aren’t following the trail,” he points out. “You’re looking for the plant, making sure there’s enough of it, and ensuring that this process is sustainable.”
However, this is conservation at ground level. And it reveals something fundamental to his profession: conservation is not just about charismatic animals.
It is about flora and fauna. It is about ecosystems. It is about balance. It is also about paperwork.
Vahed explains how “there are possession permits. Transport permits. Import permits. Export permits. Permits to sell endangered flora. Permits to keep certain animals.”
Entire frameworks are designed to track the origin and migration of a species.
If you do not track it, someone else will trade it, and conservationists will track you.
Layers of protection
Conservation in South Africa is tiered and complex, Vahed explains.
“National parks like Kruger National Park and Table Mountain National Park fall under SANParks. Provincial reserves are managed by bodies such as CapeNature. Municipal reserves sit under local authorities.”
Then there are private reserves and stewardship agreements, landowners who voluntarily commit their property to conservation.
Stewardship agreements can protect threatened ecosystems or create wildlife corridors for species like leopards.
Conservation here is not just about wild landscapes. It is about contracts, negotiations, and the long arc of land use.
First encounters
His first encounter with poaching occurred in 2017, while he was a student working in a reserve in Mpumalanga.
Part of his daily duty was walking the perimeter fence, removing snares, and repairing cuts where people had broken through. One morning, they found fresh blood.
They followed the trail beyond the reserve boundary and found people butchering the animal.
Police were called. Nothing came of it.
“At the time, you just think: poachers,” he recalls. “But later you understand the complexity of sustenance poaching. People hunting for food. No syndicate. No international trade, but pure hunger.”
“They are doing it because they don’t have another option,” he says. “And then there’s the other side: people doing it out of greed.”
The global black market in plants
Illegal wildlife trade is not a distant problem reserved for rhinos and ivory. It is here. It is active. And it is botanical.
“There’s a massive illegal plant trade,” Vahed says.”Succulents from the Northern Cape have become prized collectibles in Europe and Asia. Many species occur nowhere else in the world.
“Imagine owning something that exists only in a single stretch of arid South African landscape and placing it on a windowsill thousands of kilometres away.”
He goes on to further clarify how, when “the exclusivity drives the price, the price drives poaching”.
“I don’t like talking about what they go for,” he says carefully.
“That just encourages more,” Vahed asserts, explaining how “it is a strange paradox: the rarer a species becomes, the more desirable it is to collectors. And the more desirable it becomes, the closer it edges to extinction.
“That game is scary,” he admits.
Border patrol for biodiversity
Another aspect of his work involves exotic species. Every application to import a new species triggers a risk assessment.
Does it naturalise easily? Has it become invasive elsewhere? Does our climate suit it?
“If it escapes, what happens?” he asks.
Social media recently buzzed with rumours of anacondas in local waters. Vahed dismisses it with practical logic: Amazonian humidity is not Cape winter.
But other species are genuine threats.
Bearded dragons, popular exotic pets, are a no-go for private ownership because of their invasive potential. Facilities can apply under strict management plans; however, individuals cannot.
If someone reports illegal possession, the process can escalate to affidavits and search warrants.
“It’s like border patrol for nature,” he says.
Off the grid
I asked him whether we were killing our planet, and his answer was simple.
“Yes, overfishing, deforestation, and overpopulation, while ecosystems are treated as infinite, we carry on as if everything is renewable, acting as if it will all be here tomorrow.”
Vahed believes conservation in the Western Cape is in safe hands, but only if more people step forward. Study conservation. Ask questions. Vote. Pay attention.
Vahed explores and still learns something new every day.
“Humility, in this field, is survival,” Vahed proclaims to IOL.
The quiet ones saving the day
Asgar Vahed does not bask in the spotlight.
He carries forms, snake hooks, and a working knowledge of ecological law. He navigates mountains, court processes, and moral complexity with the same steady pragmatism.
He has worked with leopards, rhinos, honey badgers. He has walked fence lines at dawn, chased down permits at dusk, and stood in the uneasy space between hunger and illegality.
Conservation, in his telling, is not glamorous nor is it performative, and in a city where porcupines wander into luxury suburbs, and endangered plants grow above hiking trails, can be tricky to enact.
And somewhere between Camps Bay and the Cederberg, between paperwork and wilderness, Asgar – like other conservationists – is holding that line, quietly, methodically, one permit and one animal at a time.
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Yaeesh Collins
iol.co.za