As i watched TAA last night the consevation message got me to thinking. If you want to maintain your deer herd population, you have to remove a certain percentage of females every year. Its as high as 30% in some locations.
In a recent study (2009?) i think they came up with Kruger having 15,000 too many elephants. Are there any established fiqures for the number of cow elephants you would need to remove to maintain the population at a certain level?

The problem with the Kruger elephants, according to a report by Ron Thomson a few years ago, is in the loss of top-canopy trees from an overabundance of elephant which has severely impacted the biodiversity of the park.

So, for the Kruger ecosystem to recover via normal ecological succession, the number of elephant would have to be reduced not to a sustainable level (about 6,000 if I remember correctly), but way below that - to around two or three thousand.

This is all from memory. It was a 2-part report, published in African Hunter I think - though not a scientific study. Maybe someone can pull it up.

As for just removing females, I think it's been determined that the best approach to culling elephant is to remove whole herds because selective culling causes too much trauma to the survivors.

SteveGI is spot on! My memory - usually not very good - feeds back the same sort of numbers. You try telling a the ANC misgovernment, but really just a terrorist organization, with an idiot like Kortbroek van Schalkwyk as the relevant minister, that they are destroying a national park with their absolutely stupid policies.

Go see Kruger National Park now - soon it will be a wasteland!

quote:

Originally posted by SteveGl:
As for just removing females, I think it's been determined that the best approach to culling elephant is to remove whole herds because selective culling causes too much trauma to the survivors.

The only trauma I am aware of is that suffered by dependent calfs. That is why we do not take cows holding dependent calfs.

Why so many experienced african hunters on this forum seem to have so much difficulty understanding correct elephant culling procedures is beyond me.

LH: What studies do you refer to for your basis of culling procedures?