Zimbabwe: Parks Still to Implement SADC Strategies on Elephants

The Herald (Harare)

27 August 2008
Posted to the web 27 August 2008

Harare

The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority said on Sunday it has not yet started implementing any of the 2005 recommendations of the Sadc Taskforce on strategies to control the population of elephants in the region.

Director-General Dr Morris Mutsambiwa said the Government had not yet taken a position on any of the four methods that Sadc countries were given the greenlight to adopt in 2005.


"Although culling is a recognised method of controlling populations, we have not started implementing it," he said.

Dr Mutsambiwa was responding to allegations by chairman of an organisation calling itself the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, Johnny Rodrigues that the authority had embarked on an "Elephant population management programme".

Some online news agencies recently quoted Rodrigues saying the Parks authority was killing elephants for money under the guise of animal control, saying the "programme" was targeting animals with the largest tusks and had nothing to do with population control.

Rodrigues alleged that the ivory and skins were not being sent to the Parks central stores and nothing was being recorded.

He further alleged that in the Hwange National Park alone, the authority had killed over 1 800 elephants and planned to slaughter another 1 000.

Rodrigues also accused the Parks authority of lying that there were more than 100 000 elephants in the country, saying the figure was less than 50 000.

Dr Mutsambiwa accused Rodrigues of lying to satisfy the anti-Zimbabwe crusade as well as to solicit funding for his "dubious" organisation.

"He is lying. In fact he does not even know conservation," he said.

A meeting of heads of Sadc Parks and Wildlife Management Authorities held in Mauritius in November 2005 gave countries the green light to adopt any of four options to control the population of elephants, which has exceeded carrying capacities of national parks in most of the member countries.

These included contraception, culling, source and sink and translocation.

The meeting agreed that individual countries would take options depending on resources at their disposal, capacity and situation.

While contraception was a preferred option in view of pressure from animal rights groups against culling, it was expensive and sometimes did not work.

Culling involved killing excess animals using certain criteria such as age and sex while source and sink and translocation involved allowing elephants in areas of high density to move areas with low density.

In the Zimbabwean situation, culling could be the best option, as it would mean allowing communities adjacent to national parks to kill and eat elephants that spilled into their areas.

Translocation would mean transferring animals to countries such as Angola, Mozambique and Zambia whose populations are small. Years of civil war in Angola left it with a very small population of elephants.

In Zimbabwe, effects of the overpopulation are most manifest in the Hwange National Parks where the elephants die from lack of food and water during the dry seasons.

Pressure from animal rights groups has prevented the country from taking measures to reduce the elephant population. The conference supported sustainable use and adaptive management of elephants whereby communities benefited from coming into contact with them and governments monitored management options they would have taken to control the populations and take corrective action should results be negative.