But for every person of Thomson's mind -- for instance, Ian Whyte, senior scientist in South Africa's Kruger National Park, and Chris Foggin of Zimbabwe's Wildlife Veterinary Unit, who agree that culling may be the only realistic option left for preserving the biodiversity of the parks -- there are others who think that culling is anathema. One is professor Rudi van Aarde, 53, the head of the Conservation Ecology Research Unit at the University of Pretoria, a man with thick gray hair, hooded blue eyes, and a laptop full of PowerPoints. During the past 12 years he's devoted himself full time to the study of elephants and presently has 74 collared with global positioning system locators, roaming over 3.5 million square miles of southern Africa. From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, they represent what he calls a "metapopulation" -- a collection of elephant populations across the range of the species. "What drives this population," he tells me, "is the interaction between its different units."

Moving between his laptop's geographic information systems maps and bar graphs, he notes places where elephants have a high birthrate and are densely populated. In other locales, elephants have low birthrates, or very high death rates, and are scarce. In still other areas, elephants have been absent for decades and then, suddenly, will start to recolonize the empty niche. What is crucial to remember, he goes on to say, is that north, east and west of the largest elephant subpopulations in southern Africa -- Botswana and Zimbabwe -- lie places in Angola, Mozambique and Zambia where human populations are very low, in fact fewer than three people per square mile, making them ripe for recolonization by elephants. Elephants could make the trek without too much difficulty since the distance between any of the existing large conservation areas -- say, between those in Botswana and those in Zambia -- is only about 180 miles.

"We don't have people living all around Africa," he emphasizes. "It's a figment of the imagination."

The other factor to keep in mind is that the problem of too many elephants is largely manmade. "National parks have drilled dozens of watering holes, enabling elephants to survive and live where historically they couldn't," he says.

In turn, the wells have dramatically increased viewing opportunities for eco-tourists and have now -- a half-century into the experiment -- institutionalized mega-wildlife populations that the tourist industry advertises and is loath to see diminished. Here, van Aarde and Thomson are on exactly the same page. Both believe Africa's parks could do with fewer elephants, but they disagree on the means to achieve that end.

"These artificial water sources should be closed," van Aarde says, "and drought allowed to keep elephant numbers at bay, as it has done for thousands of years. We have the natural forces to control elephants, if we'd only let them operate."

When it comes to losses of biodiversity -- vanishing woodland species and broken trees, the kind of damage epitomized by the Chobe riverfront -- van Aarde is far less exercised than Thomson. On his laptop, he launches a graph depicting elephant populations against a timeline. It shows that at the onset of the ivory trade in northern Botswana in 1896, thousands of kilograms of tusks were exported yearly. Elephant populations subsequently collapsed just as rinderpest -- an acute infectious disease affecting both livestock and wildlife -- swept through Africa. With elephants gone, the trees in Chobe began to flourish. With impala and kudu wiped out by rinderpest, the new trees that these two species would have cropped flourished. The riverfront became lush, providing food for elephants. Decades later, the pachyderms are back in force.

With a wave of his hand, van Aarde dismisses those who believe that elephants are causing a biodiversity crisis. "If we limit ourselves to one site, we can become concerned; but if we look at the region in total, we have places where lots of elephants have taken away the trees, and -- just a short distance away -- we have thick forest. In other words, the forest reappears someplace else. People who want to cull," he concludes, "are out of the colonial mode, chaps who like to control."

Rather than fall prey to this antiquated way of thinking, van Aarde believes, we should wait for elephants to move on their own. Pointing to a map, he says, "The longest straight-line distance between any two sites occupied by elephants in southern Africa is about 68 miles. At six miles per year, which is the distance elephants were shown to travel during their colonization of Kruger National Park, that means it takes less than one elephant generation, 13 years, to make the journey."

Van Aarde flatly disagrees with those who claim that elephant dispersal is hemmed in by fences and humanity. Around small reserves in South Africa and Zimbabwe, their movements are impeded. But these reserves are what he calls "zoos" -- theme parks where human manipulation of wildlife can be justified. In the lightly populated areas of Mozambique, Zambia, and Angola, the elephants of Namibia, Botswana, and northern Zimbabwe have terrain that awaits them. He sits back with an air of conviction. "This is not something we should be worrying about."

Yet African park managers continue to do so. And many are now focusing on nonlethal solutions to control elephants -- so as to forestall a tourist boycott that might cut off the stream of dollars and euros that flood Africa each year if culling were reintroduced.

One is translocation -- literally picking up elephants and moving them -- although it's no easy matter. It involves darting the animals from helicopters with anesthetics, winching them onto flatbed trucks, moving them into transport containers on massive conveyor belts, waking them up with reversal drugs, and finally driving them hundreds of miles to places that have fewer elephants. At a cost of $1,500 per elephant, it's a cool $150 million to move only about half of Botswana's and Zimbabwe's elephant population into new habitat. African states can't even come close to investing this sort of money in translocating elephants, nor is it likely that the NGOs of Europe and North America, or their elephant-loving people, will.

Another solution -- one that has been favored by animal rights organizations -- is to put elephants on birth control. In the late 1990s, South Africa's Kruger National Park tried the experiment, funded by the Humane Society of the United States. The drugs were delivered by darting the elephants from helicopters, and the experiment proved that elephants could be injected for about $35 per individual and that about 75 percent of the adult female population would have to be treated to achieve zero population growth. The catch is that elephants are as long-lived as humans, having a life span of 60 to 70 years. Until the elephants on birth control die, they will continue to eat the woodlands upon which all those other species -- birds and butterflies, reptiles and antelope -- depend. Contraception is also plagued by an ethical concern nearly as large as the one involved with killing elephants to save the forest. No one has a clue as to what putting thousands of elephants on birth control will do to elephant society, based as it is on many generations of related females raising children in extended family groups.

When I ask van Aarde what he thinks of these schemes, he replies, "When you can rely on natural means, why rely on artificial ones? Given enough time and space, the elephants will take care of themselves."

It's doubtful that it will be that simple. With the tremendous pressures that both rural people and too many elephants are putting on African parks, it's likely that a multipronged approach will evolve: culling where politically feasible, translocation if the funds become available, contraception in smaller reserves, and natural dispersal during the next few decades. The hardest hurdle of all may be overcoming how the developed world continues to view the big, gray shambling animals, and their equally large personalities, out of context with their environment. It's not a mistake that rural Africans easily make. When one of my fellow journalists asked an African teenager why he thought elephants were bad, the boy answered in three words: "They kill me."

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