Elephants face death in their hundreds

Published on Monday 25 February 2008 21:21

SOUTH Africa said yesterday it will begin culling elephants for the first time since 1994, because scientists say they are threatening other wildlife species in the country's national parks.

The elephant population has risen from about 10,000 to more than 20,000 since the government succumbed to pressure from international animal welfare groups 14 years ago and suspended the annual cull of 400 animals in Kruger Park.

The announcement of the resumed cull, from May onwards, will infuriate such radical animal rights organisations as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

IFAW, based in the United States, argues that culling is a cruel, unethical and scientifically unsound practice and that other non-lethal options, including contraception and habitat expansion, should be considered.

A local conservation organisation, the Johannesburg-based Animal Rights Africa (ARA), called for an international campaign to persuade tourists to boycott South Africa's national parks if culling goes ahead. ARA described past Kruger culls as "undeniably cruel and morally reprehensible".

ARA claim elephants have a sense of self-awareness that places them in a unique category together with great apes, dolphins and humans. "How much like us do elephants have to be before killing them becomes murder?" ARA asked in a statement released last night.

However Dr Ian Whyte, 60, who recently retired as the Kruger Park's top elephant scientist said that he and his colleagues are in the business of conservation of all species, including plants, not just elephants.

Dr Whyte said: "Elephants have big appetites, with adults consuming on average 375 pounds of vegetation each day. In any protected area that has elephants you have two choices – you utilise the area to maintain biodiversity, or else you have an elephant sanctuary. You can't have both."

In the mid-1990s, Dr Whyte and fellow scientists set the ideal elephant population for the 8,000 square-mile Kruger at 7,500. Beyond that number, they argued, the elephants would multiply and destroy such trees as baobabs, which take thousands of years to reach maturity, and knobthorns, in which martial eagles and vultures nest and on which giraffes browse

The Kruger elephant population now numbers 15,000 and is predicted to reach 34,000 by 2020. Dr Whyte said that if the numbers continue to increase the Kruger Park will become a grassland instead of a woodland and that many existing species will die.

However, Dr Whyte argued that it is not the elephants who are to blame for the crisis. They have been confined as growing human populations use more and more land. "There are not too many elephants," he said. "There are too many people."

Recently elephants have been breaking through the Kruger fences and destroying the crops of neighbouring African farmers. They are also monopolising the park's restricted water points to the exclusion of other animals.

In the Africa of old – implanted in westerners' minds by films such as the Tarzan series – elephants dispersed naturally across the continent, moving on as herds expanded and stripped areas of vegetation. In modern Africa, people no more like elephants trampling their maize and bananas than would suburban dwellers in Edinburgh or Dundee accept anyone walking over their tomato plants and raspberry canes.

Meanwhile, in Cape Town, Marthinus Van Schalkwyk, the environmental affairs and tourism minister, said the killing of elephant herds would remain the "option of last resort that is acceptable only under strict conditions".

Van Schalkwyk added: "The issue of population management has been devilishly complex and we would like to think that we have come up with a framework that is acceptable to the majority of South Africans."

The Kruger elephant story, despite the controversy surrounding it, is one of success.

Back in 1902 white hunters had reduced the entire South African elephant population to barely 50. The recovery was led by Scotsman Major James Stevenson-Hamilton, Laird of Fairholm in Lanarkshire, who was appointed the first "chief ranger" of the Kruger at the end of the Boer War.

Thanks to such efforts, by 1954 the Kruger had a population of 514 elephants.

WITNESS TO THE LAST CULL

I SAT in the Kruger Park helicopter as the pilot swooped towards a family of 20 elephants, part of the last quota of 400 to be culled in the mid-1990s, writes Fred Bridgland.

The pilot radioed to the 60-strong ground team, who moved to the map reference point. From the copter, game-ranger Jack Greef fired gas-propelled syringes from his 16-bore shotgun into the hides of the elephants. The syringes contained a cocktail of tranquillisers and muscle-immobilising chemicals.

When all the elephants were down, those more than six feet tall at the shoulder were identified. Their death was imminent. The pilot floated within feet of each one and Jack fired a single high-velocity bullet behind the ear.

"Don't ask me if I enjoy this," he warned me. "Elephants are magnificent. I respect them above all other animals. Every time you cull it takes something away from you. This is not a nice job, but it has to be done."

Disposal teams eviscerated the dead animals, which were to become tinned elephant mince for distribution to park staff. Babies were revived and taken to a wooden stockade boma.

Ironically, a team of US conservationists based in Kenya were taking tissue samples from elephant foetuses for research into an elephant contraceptive. The Kenyans refuse to cull elephants, but have a major problem with beasts stampeding through villages. Years later, there is still no contraceptive solution to the elephant population problem.