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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
A plan to kill 25,000 elephants a year -- with trophy hunters doing some of the shooting -- has divided African wildlife experts and revived old charges of colonialism.
Dec 13, 2004 | On the Chobe riverfront, the place looks as though it's been bombed by high explosives. The shores are a muddy quagmire, trees are broken off, underbrush is nonexistent. Elephants crowd flank to flank in the river spraying water on themselves, or meander among the remaining trees, splintering the air with the sound of breaking branches as they stuff the greenery into their mouths. They have enormous appetites, each adult elephant consuming between 300 and 600 pounds of vegetation a day, plus 40 gallons of water.
Watching wild elephants like these makes it hard not to conclude that their lives form a rich and complex tapestry. They raise their young in extended matrilineal families, great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and sisters looking over calves with a care and affection they don't hesitate to lavish on themselves. They talk, they call, they rub flanks, they touch each other with their trunks, intertwining them in what can only be described as the proboscidean equivalent of a human hug. In the distance you can see herds of males, one of them walking up to a tree and pushing it over with his head, then stepping back to cast a sly glance at his fellows, indicating, "Beat that." And one of them will accept the challenge, pushing over a slightly larger tree.
Remove our technology and it's hard to see how elephants are all that different from us, right down to the way they linger over their dead, their wilted body language signifying grief by anyone's definition of the word.
All of which makes it profoundly difficult to figure out what to do with so many of them as they've begun to trash the woodlands of Africa's wildlife reserves like Botswana's Chobe National Park, Zimbabwe's Hwange and South Africa's Kruger. Today, wildlife experts are at loggerheads over how to deal with a species that has become a runaway train. The former warden of Hwange National Park suggests that Botswana alone should begin to kill 25,000 elephants a year, allowing trophy hunters to do some of the shooting.
Although the number is arguable, numerous wildlife veterinarians agree that culling elephants may be the only option for saving African forests and the many other species of wildlife that depend on them. Other ecologists view what's happening as a natural process and insist that the elephants be left alone. The conflict isn't new, but it has taken on more stark proportions as Africa's human population has exploded during the past two decades. In addition, wildlife biologists now have more accurate measuring tools to assess ecological damage, or lack thereof, enabling them to bolster their case for or against killing elephants. In the end, it's a conflict over how to control nature, one that revives an old colonial song over who should decide the fate of Africa's natural resources.
But right about now most everyone in North America and Europe is asking, aren't elephants an endangered species? Well, yes and no.
In July 1989, Richard Leakey, the director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, torched a pile of ivory worth $3 million in a telegenic moment that highlighted the so-called plight of African elephants and galvanized world opinion in favor of a worldwide ivory ban, just in time for the upcoming, biannual CITES meeting. (CITES -- the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora -- is a U.N.-sponsored agreement between governments that aims to ensure that international trade in wild animals and plants doesn't threaten their survival.) However, the southern African nations of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe protested that their national parks were well policed, their elephant herds weren't threatened by poaching, and a split listing was justified for African elephants. A split listing would mean that ivory from East African elephants would be taken off the world market and ivory from southern African elephants would be legally traded, with its proceeds going to fund wildlife conservation.
Their pleas fell on deaf ears. The East African nations -- who indeed were losing elephants to poachers -- persuaded the CITES delegates to vote for a total ivory ban, helped by intense pressure from the U.S. delegation and the lobbying of international animal rights organizations. Elephants were listed as endangered -- placed on CITES' Appendix I -- embargoing trade in their products and implanting the notion in the public mind that all African elephants were hovering on the brink of extinction.
That notion was false then, and it's more so now. Since the 1989 CITES protocol, elephant populations have rebounded. In East Africa, they've increased because the ivory ban has worked as planned, removing the fiscal incentive to poach. In southern Africa, where about 60 percent of Africa's elephants live, the species has continued to do what it's always done, and that is reproduce abundantly.
Female elephants can breed at 10 years old and give birth every four years until they're into their 50s. According to the latest figures, about 300,000 elephants inhabited southern Africa in 2002, with another 200,000 in the rest of the continent. Given the annual increase of elephants, their 2004 population now stands at about 560,000 individuals, and more than a few wildlife biologists have begun to worry that the pachyderms are eating themselves, and other wildlife, out of house and home.
