Swazi elephants get vesectomies
Staff Reporter
August 10 2009 at 10:26AM



In an effort to reduce the need for elephant culling, Disney Animal Kingdom vets have successfully performed vasectomies on seven Swaziland bull elephants.

The elephants were from the Hlane Royal National Park and Mkhaya Game Reserve, both owned by Big Game Parks. The parks carry small elephant herds.

While the operation helped to pave the way forward in finding environmentally sound, financially viable and humane methods of elephant population control, park managers said the vasectomy operation was expensive and that similar efforts would be useful only in managing small herds.

Big Game Parks marketing manager Mike Richardson said: "I accompanied the ground crew, while Mick Reilly, the head of conservation, took to the air in a helicopter.


"Within a quarter of an hour, the call came in: 'The bull is down', and within five minutes, we had bushwhacked our way to the area where the immobilised elephant lay.

"A ground team cleared the bush, and five minutes later the elephant was suspended from the crane and having a harness fitted, before it was flipped the right way up. A sterile operating table was set up on the crane truck and, while the surgeons had their scrubs fitted, the flanks of the elephant were scrubbed and prepared for surgery."

Two 12cm incisions were cut into the elephant's flanks through which a 1.5m laparoscope fitted with a camera attachment and a light was inserted, allowing surgeons to operate. The elephant was then stitched up with stainless-steel trace wire, injected with an antidote before it lumbered to its feet and returned to its herd.

Park authorities said they would monitor the elephants.

"The full impact - and ultimate success or failure - of the operation is only likely to be quantifiable in four to five years from now, due to the interval between calving in elephants", said Reilly.

SANParks vet Markus Hofmeyr confirmed that vasectomies would not be a solution in controlling elephant numbers in South African parks with large populations. - Staff Reporter


This article was originally published on page 3 of The Star on August 10, 2009

Disney vet to crew: "Well these seven elephants were really worth the money and effort guys!!! Now all they have to do is cull the other 9,993!!!!!"



Brett

Bet the elephant was pissed off!

This may be the most cost inefficient p.c. crap that any idiot ever conceived... oh, heck! I forgot about The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

I did have to giggle, though:
"A ground team cleared the bush, and five minutes later the elephant was suspended from the crane and having a harness fitted, before it was flipped the right way up." I wonder if Catherine the Great's ghost was around and smiling?

Won't this just mean that the other mature bulls will just pick up the slack? Population control through exhaustion? Seriously though, how does the elephant breeding dynamic work?

Dean

Ponderously!

the elephants need a new flag: don't cut on me

Now if they'd castrated them instead of just giving them vasectomies, it might have calmed the whole herd down.

quote:

Originally posted by maki:
Won't this just mean that the other mature bulls will just pick up the slack? Population control through exhaustion? Seriously though, how does the elephant breeding dynamic work?

Dean

That's actually an interesting question. I don't know a hell of a lot about it but I do know a vet who has performed a few similar operations.

As I understand it, the op is relatively new and there's a degree of speculation about what'll happen.

Remember it's a vasectomy, so the bulls will still be able to perform but they won't be able to impregnate the female.

Also remember that the op can only be performed on relatively small bulls, or more precisely, can't be performed on really big bulls.

Therfore as I see it, just some of the possibilities are:

As the big bulls will be the dominant bulls, it won't make a hell of a lot of difference, esp in the shorter term. In the longer term, when the dominant bulls who are now firing on all cylinders lose dominance and stop breeding etc, the vasectomised bulls will step in and assuming the programme is an ongoing project, the breeding rates will drop.

OR

The females will sense they haven't been impregnated and will try again, possibly with an unvasectomised bull.

OR

It'll work and breeding rates will drop immediately.

OR

Pretty much any other scenario you can think of.

Whatever happens, it'll be interesting to see the outcome.

My guess is that one of the best informed on this will be our very own Ganyana and I'll be very interested to hear his opinion on it.

I recently went up to the Tembe Elephant reserve on the Moz border and was chatting to the head ranger. As I recall they have a herd of just under 400 jumbo.
They have been playing with a female contraceptive for the past few years. It works like this; a chopper comes in and they locate the family groups and shoot females with a dart which contains the contraceptive which lasts for about 12 months. As the dart hits the animal it releases a blaze orange dye which marks the animal. They try and do this to about 70% of the breeding cows. Each year they do this, and naturally since the dye wears off it is not necesarily the same cows. This is now the 3rd year, and they are starting to monitor the birth rate carefully to see how effective this is, since the gestation period runs around 22 months.
It will be interesting to see the results.
The head ranger is the first to admit that this process can only work with a small reserve and herd size, 400 animals being the upper limit.
It is also costly at about R10000 per animal. He also says the whole process takes them just under 7 hours.
He also indicates that they will still have to control the number of bulls on the reserve, and this will be through culling. Ganyana will be familiar with the problems surrounding a corridor between the reserve and the Maputo elephant reserve which if was opened up and protected would probably go a long way in doing away with this nonsense.