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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
To air the problem, the Netherlands' Prince Bernhard Nature Fund convened an international workshop in November 2003. As the organizing committee put it, "[The] recovery in elephant numbers within both National and privately owned game parks poses a threat to the survival of many other species." The committee went on to say that when elephants exceed the carrying capacity of a game park -- in other words, when there are more elephants than the food will support -- not only do they begin to starve but all the species that rely on woodlands for food and shelter are also affected. These species include a wide spectrum of the continent's fauna -- squirrels and bush babies, falcons and eagles, bushbucks and red duikers, butterflies and geckos -- as well as forests of baobabs and hardwoods like ebony.
From the 1960s until the mid-1990s, burgeoning elephant populations, and the impacts they had on woodlands, were controlled by culling -- brutal but effective operations conducted by trained national park rangers. Elephants were shot with high-powered rifles -- entire family groups taken out within a few minutes, so no survivors remained to deal with the shock and grief of seeing their families destroyed -- the meat sold to local communities, the hides tanned into leather and sold, and the ivory traded when it was still legal to do so. In the 1990s, international public pressure, and the threat of tourist boycotts mounted by animal rights organizations, brought culling to a close.
Today, a growing number of wildlife specialists in southern Africa would like to resume culling. One of the most outspoken is Ron Thomson, a provincial game warden in Zimbabwe and a national park director in South Africa's tribal homelands from 1975 to 1988, who personally culled more than 5,000 elephants and who is a firm believer in the human management and restoration of nature.
A hale 65, with a full head of white hair and intense blue eyes, Thomson lives near Pretoria and writes books that attempt to prove that elephants are destroying the richness of Africa's national parks. One of his most graphic examples is Botswana. He suggests that the nation (whose herds presently contain about 140,000 animals) begin to kill 25,000 elephants a year until its herd is reduced to 10,000 animals. At that point, ecological studies would be conducted to see whether the habitat can support this number of elephants. "I sincerely believe," he says, "that such a takeoff is necessary if Botswana is to save the species diversity of its national parks."
Of course, once upon a time, elephants would have utilized a forest and then moved on, letting it recover. Today they are prevented from dispersing by 8-foot-high electrified barriers built around wildlife reserves, designed to reduce conflicts between wildlife and rural farmers. Where parks aren't surrounded by wire, elephant dispersal is cut short by villages, livestock and roads, for female elephants and their calves won't tolerate settled countryside. Thomson also notes that elephant dispersal is a slow phenomenon even through wild country. Like most humans, elephants prefer to stay with what is familiar, and it's only the young males that make the first exploratory journeys -- what might be called walkabouts -- when their habitat becomes overcrowded.
In the absence of such dispersals, Thomson would not only cull elephants with trained teams of rangers but would also open selected areas of the national parks to safari hunters, allowing them to take about 10 percent of the mature male animals. Today, some of the most avid of these hunters come from the United States, Germany, Russia and Japan, and they are willing to pay large fees for the opportunity to collect the tusks of older male elephants. A license for a male with ivory that weighs between 45 and 75 pounds per tusk is approximately $45,000; an elephant with hundred-pound tusks can cost as much as $100,000. (Females, who have small, slender tusks, are not hunted for trophies.) Hunting takes place in a variety of venues: private game ranches, tribal lands and some provincial wildlife reserves. This is big business in southern Africa. Annually, hunters in Botswana kill about 200 trophy elephants; regionwide, they leave behind $80 million to $100 million.
In Thomson's scheme, money generated from hunting within the national parks would be transferred to surrounding rural communities for such necessities as clean drinking water, schools and medical facilities. After all, he points out, before colonial times and the creation of these parks, elephants and the rest of Africa's fauna belonged to these local people -- and still should. Only in this way -- not by handouts of food and money but by genuine reenfranchisement, with the communities managing their wildlife sustainably -- will some of Africa's rural poverty be alleviated and the poaching it fuels be stopped. This isn't the well-publicized kind of poaching of the 1980s in which gangs armed with AK-47s slew elephants and rhinos for their ivory and tusks; rather it's the ongoing, low-level poaching by farmers and pastoralists, using low-tech wire snares to capture sorely needed extra protein.
