Elephants: too many to live - February 27, 2008
South Africa, which has for years struggled to fit its elephants in amongst all its people, has announced that it will resume culling the animals when their hungry numbers threaten to destroy the enclosed reserves in which they live. Since 1995, when the ban went into effect, numbers of elephants have risen from less than 10,000 to more than 20,000 in that country (The Independent; Washington Post)
South Africa is very much a special case when it comes to elephants. In most of the continent, elephants are still in danger from poachers (and it may even be getting worse: The tusk detective) South Africa's elephants are just a small fragment of the total number of African elephants, which is very likely more than 500,000 (IUCN data, with cool distribution map).
When I went to South Africa last year, I heard representatives of the parks department express a lot of frustration at the condemnation of elephant culling that rains in from around the world. After all, these parks officials said, who are these people to tell us how to deal with our own domestic problems? Alternative management strategies all have their problems: contraception takes a long time to take effect, while forests are being ripped up now; "letting nature take its course" isn't particularly natural, since all the elephants are trapped inside small parks, and would be quite bleak, as elephant herds starved to death; knocking down fences to let elephants expand makes them the problem of poor rural people whose fields would bear the brunt of elephantine appetites. It is a knotty problem, to be sure, and a highly emotional one.
A deer cull in New Jersey pushed many of the same emotional buttons earlier this month (New York Times) but got much less press. I guess deer are just not as compelling as elephants. And that is South Africa's tourism blessing and public relations curse.
Read our feature on managing elephants in South Africa, "Africa conservation: Making room".
Emma Marris. Image credit Emma Marris
