In southern Africa, too many elephants
John Donnelly The Boston Globe Monday, September 20, 2004

Is killing the best remedy for overpopulation? Some ecologists say it may be

PILANESBERG NATIONAL PARK, Rudi van Aarde, an ecologist, leaned back on a
veranda that overlooked dry grasslands and a group of bull elephants, his
shoes still dusty from a 12,800-kilometer tour of game reserves in southern
Africa. Van Aarde was on a mission: saving elephants from sanctioned
killings.
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The overpopulation of elephants in parks throughout southern Africa has
reached a crisis stage, most conservationists agree, and South Africa soon
will consider whether to cull its herds. It would be the first culling on
the continent in a decade. Proponents say it is necessary because the
elephants are fast destroying valuable woodlands in many parks, including
some 2,000-year-old thick-trunked baobabs. But van Aarde, head of the
Conservation Ecology Research Unit at the University of Pretoria, and a
collection of animal rights groups and zoologists hope to avoid culling by
expanding newly created transnational parks. In this way, they hope to link
the seven largest clusters of elephants in southern Africa.
.
Their theory, which they call "Megaparks for Metapopulations," is that by
merging herds with high and low reproduction rates, and then drying up many
water holes, the numbers of the world's largest land mammals will reduce
more naturally.
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They don't have much time to make their case. Public hearings on how best to
manage the growing elephant herds, including the option of culling, are
scheduled for next month in Kruger National Park in northeastern South
Africa.
.
"This is a problem that man induced," said van Aarde at dusk one day last
week, relaxing on the veranda of an open-air restaurant in Pilanesberg
National Park, a small reserve crowded with nearly 180 elephants. He had
just returned from a five-week trip in a Land Rover through Malawi, Zambia,
Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. "We reduced their range and forced the
elephants into fenced-in areas and then artificially created water holes.
The populations grew rapidly. What did we expect?"
.
Those who favor culling the herds, he said, are "only dealing with a symptom
of the problem. It's a short-term solution. I think we need to deal with
what caused the problem in the first place."
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Opponents of culling also worry that such killings may lead to lifting the
worldwide ban on ivory sales. Opening the market, they say, could encourage
poachers to kill elephants in protected areas as well.
.
But those who favor culling include respected ecologists who acknowledge
that they are trying to solve a vexing problem in which all the viable
options are risky. Given current reproduction rates in Kruger National Park
and Chobe National Park in northern Botswana, they say that if half the
herds were killed, it would take a dozen years to return to today's numbers.
.
"No one wants to go out and cull elephants," said Jeremy Anderson, a South
African wildlife consultant. "Say we take off half of the elephants; it will
take 12 years to get back to where you were. "If you don't take them off,
and you're wrong about the baobabs, it will take us 2,000 years to replace
them, or wrong about the soil, it will take us 2 million years to replace
that. No one is looking at the big picture and the loss of biodiversity."
Africa's elephants once roamed the continent wherever water and trees were
plentiful, but their range today, while still spread over 37 countries, has
been vastly reduced because of development and the once-lucrative trade in
ivory. In 1979, the African elephant population was estimated at more than
1.3 million; a decade later, the widespread slaughter for ivory had reduced
it by half.
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In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species placed
a worldwide ban on the trade in ivory and other elephant products. The ban
had an immediate effect, vastly shrinking the market for poachers. But
because the elephants' traditional range in western and central Africa had
been greatly reduced, the numbers of elephants there stabilized or continued
to dwindle.
.
Southern Africa is a different story. It is home to about 300,000 of the
continent's estimated population of 400,000 to 600,000 elephants; about 80
percent of the region's elephants are in northern Botswana and Zimbabwe, in
the vast region stretching from Chobe to Hwange to Lower Zambezi. South
Africa has about 17,000 elephants in 75 fenced-in parks, and specialists
estimate that the numbers of elephants exceed the capacity of the land in
three-quarters of those populations.
.
Elephants are herbivores with a great appetite for trees. They use their
versatile trunks to snap branches and strip off leaves and bark; some bulls
level mature trees, snapping the roots with relative ease. They eat about 5
percent of their weight daily, which means 68 kilograms, or 150 pounds, of
vegetation for a young bull.
.
The environmental destruction can be negligible if elephants have wide areas
to roam.
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But in southern Africa, they don't, so they have turned some forest areas
into grassland or denuded the land in ways that open it to erosion.
.
In Botswana, the government determined in 1991 that its population of 54,000
elephants was the maximum its parks could handle without severe
environmental damage. Today, the number of elephants is estimated at more
than 120,000.

"No one wants to go out and cull elephants"

I wouldn't mind signing up for a few...I realize that it isn't hunting, and you'd probably be shooting family groups, etc. but it is an experience not shared by many I would think.

Frans

The only thing better than culling ele is culling enviromentalists.

Even at $1000 a head, that is $200 million. With the right system in place, yeah like that would happen, they could put untold tons of meat in deep freeze - or irradiate it - for use by their citizens. A good hunting program could work - I just hate to see noble animals killed like so many coachroaches when there are better ways to do it.

Former flyer,
My comment was tongue in cheek, but the underlying point is that it could be a source of revenue generation for a part of the world that has renewable resources that can be harvested for some economic gain. The idea is one that should be explored, absent my above mentioned sarcasm.
However, much of the support structure is in place. There are what, 1200 PH in RSA alone. I would not suggest gov't run, perhaps just gov't regulated.
How much of the economy on the African contintent is driven by the huntining industry? And while I agree you could not find a 1/4 million people to fork over 20k, there would still be a huge amount of revenue generated and meat collected for a segemnt of the world that finds itself largely unable to care for itself. Instead of giving in to the fruitcakes at greenpeace et. al., perhaps a little more self-reliance would be more helpful to the people of Africa.

Kathi.....Thanks for the post....I did a search, and found Mr. Van Aarde's e-mail address. I sent him a nice note, explaining the error of his ways.......Grant.

"Let's see if I have this right. There are about 600,000 elephants and some believe they have around 300,000 too many. If they cull only 200,000 and charge the going rate of, say, 20k per elephant...holy shit they could buy their own HIV meds for the continent. Or maybe feed themselves. Or pay the local folk not to continue to chip away at the obviously limited land.

What am I missing here?"





How about the barest understanding of market economics, for starters?



There are nowhere near 200,000 hunters willing to pay $20,000 each to hunt an ele. I seriously doubt that there are 10% of that number. In any kind of remotely competitively market, as supply goes up, price drops so as to sell as much inventory as possible before the "other guy" sells his first and uses up all the available buyers. Lowering prices will bring in more buyers who stayed out of the market at the higher cost. These buyers will consume more units, and so on, until eventually the price lowers to the point where the inventory is sold off.



If there is an artificial hold on the price (trophy or culling fees that are set by government without interest in the market price of the goods being sold) then the market will not sell much at all, and there will be huge surpluses of product, leaving almost all of your 200,000 ele to be culled by some other system.



My completely unscientific guess about the "free for all" price of ele cull hunting (no trophy, no selection, shoot what you're told to and then call in for the meat processing team)? Probably under a thousand per ele. If you were to allow minor trophies to be kept, (tails, hides, feet, etc.), probably twice that number. If keeping the ivory was part of the deal, then I think they'd sell for about the cost of the ivory, or maybe some small amount above that.



Of course then there is the small matter of finding enough PH's, vehicles and support staff to handle the messier parts of this endeavor. Note that, as most hunters probably won't be inclined to shoot enough ele at one time in one spot to make the best use of the support structure, you'd need several times the amount of support to handle it this way that you would with a conventional culling operation.



Bottom line, as much as I'd like to turn on the full Walter Mitty vibe, load up a couple hundred solids for my .458 Lott and go experience an ele cull first hand, there is no way that hunters alone can solve this problem, or in my opinion even contribute substantially. Just my two cents worth, your mileage may vary.

It is not so easy to cull an enviromentalist.
What do you aim at?
They are brainless, heartless, and spineless.

Let's see if I have this right. There are about 600,000 elephants and some believe they have around 300,000 too many. If they cull only 200,000 and charge the going rate of, say, 20k per elephant...holy shit they could buy their own HIV meds for the continent. Or maybe feed themselves. Or pay the local folk not to continue to chip away at the obviously limited land.
What am I missing here?