*Owls Used as Food and Medicine and for Witchcraft in Africa DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108913*


*In this table, the number of killings is indicated in parentheses after the region or the country (countries with a lot of killings are presented separately from the region). East Africa = Botswana (6), Kenya (16), Lesotho (6), Mozambique (9), Tanzania (9), Uganda (5), Zambia (18), and Zimbabwe (15); Malawi (147); South Africa (181), and West Africa = Angola (4), Cameroon (6), Ghana (20), Guinea (8), Liberia (14), Namibia (4), Nigeria (96), and Senegal (5); the Gambia (188); Sierra Leone (37) (total number of the interviews in parentheses). Percentages above include only four reasons for killings, excluding many others like killing for decorations, feathers, fun, mistake, or due to the noise of owls.*

#### **Table 1.**

*How many owls are killed because they are bad omens or evil spirits or to be used as food, traditional medicine, or witchcraft in Africa as a percentage of all listed killings.*


#### **Table 2.**

*Eating and killing the rare owl species in Africa. Owls listed in taxonomic order [15].*



#### **Table 3.**

*Some traditional owl medicines as known from Africa, Europe, India, and South America [20–23].*

presented in **Table 3** only as a curiosity and as an example, which may explain the thinking behind any unnecessary killing of owls.
