Looks like strange management to me -- maybe an alternative future for other African nations?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/08/25/kenya.elephants.ap/index.html

Kenya elephant evacuation crumbles under jumbo load

SHIMBA HILLS, Kenya (AP) -- The 22-year-old bull elephant was tranquilized, bound with rope and loaded onto a truck for what should have been the start of an ambitious relocation operation.

Then Kenya Wildlife Service rangers discovered their truck wasn't up to the job.

The $3.2 million exercise, the biggest elephant relocation Kenya has ever attempted, was suspended indefinitely Thursday after the truck's trailer broke under the bull's weight. (Watch: Elephantine operation)

The bull was to have been the first of 400 elephants to be taken on an eight-hour drive from crowded Shimba Hills National Reserve more than 350 kilometers (218 miles) to the northern part of Tsavo East National Park.

Kenya Wildlife Service rangers had planned to begin moving entire elephant family groups starting Saturday. The schedule for the government-financed operation is now uncertain.

Shimba Hills has 600 elephants, three times what it can comfortably handle, resulting in the animals moving into populated area and destroying crops and injuring people. Tsavo East National Park has 10,397 elephants, down from a peak of 25,268 in 1972.

Tsavo East suffered its heaviest loss of elephants during the 1980s and early 1990s when poachers devastated Kenya's pachyderms. Poaching has since subsided, helped by a 1989 global ban on the ivory trade that has seen prices drop.

Kenya Wildlife Service Director Julius Kipng'etich said Monday that his organization has increased security in the area where the elephants will be relocated.

"We deployed 83 young ranger recruits to Tsavo East last month ... If the poachers come, they will find us ready," Kipng'etich said. He said that they will also have regular aerial patrols.

Kipng'etich also said that Kenya Wildlife Service had taken steps to reduce the possibility of elephants damaging farms near Tsavo East, a constant threat facing wildlife authorities as Kenya's population grows and more people move to once-empty land to farm, at times close to national parks.

"We have also radio-collared six matriarchs ... and will be monitoring their movements using Geographical Positioning Systems or GPS so that our rangers can drive them away before they reach private farms," Kipng'etich said.

"We want to be pro-active in our management of problem elephants."

Now that is a typical African cluster something or other!!

Saw a video on fox. It was a cluster............
insert word of YOUR choice

I hope they manage to pull it off. The area they are moving them to can reportedly sustain the influx quite easily as the original ele population had been greatly reduced by poachers in the past.

If big projects like this can be made to work it might herald the reintroduction of viable breeding herds in other poacher hit areas. Whether its affordable/viable I don't know, but if the green's want to finance it to reduce the need for mass elephant culls, thats fine by me..

pete--would love to see it work, the video showed how poorly it was planned. They might as well as had a stretcher.
I do not have an answer as I supect there is a good reason cowboys drive cows, not elephant.

Kenya has put itself in a difficult position. They don't want to face the reality that animals will breed to fill their habitat opportunistically. As it is, they followed Leakey's (and others') positions to ban hunting, and won't let go. The irony is that, with the overpopulation they're suffering under, they would not even have this stop-gap opportunity if it weren't for the poaching that had already occurred in Tsavo.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050820/s...ildlife_050820162855

quote:

Kenya won't abolish hunting ban to cull high wildlife numbers: Kibaki

Sat Aug 20,12:28 PM ET

Kenya will not drop an 18-year-old hunting ban despite calls for it to be lifted to cull high numbers of wildlife and reduce damage to farms, President Mwai Kibaki said.

Kibaki, who last year vetoed changes to the 1977 ban to allow sport hunting and ranchers to kill stray wildlife on their land, said new "innovative" ideas were needed to cut down on growing human-animal conflict in the country.

"Although currently the numbers of Kenyas wildlife is high, the government (will) not lift the ban on hunting but step up its conservation efforts," Kibaki said, according to a statement from his office.

"Conservationists in Kenya must seek innovative ways of dealing with the excessive number of wildlife to avoid serious human-wildlife conflict," he said, adding that Nairobi would "continue to protect the natural heritage".

Kibaki's comments, in a speech to potential investors in Hong Kong at the end of a five-day state visit to China, come as hunting advocates -- mainly ranchers and big-game trophy seekers -- try to revive the vetoed legislation.

Lawmakers amended the 1977 Wildlife Conservation and Management Act, which banned poaching and reckless killing of wild animals, to ease the proscription in early December 2004, but Kibaki vetoed the bill on New Year's Eve.

At the time, Kibaki said he agreed with provisions to boost compensation payments for livestock killed by wild animals but would not allow the "relegation of wildlife management to a few interest groups."

Kenya, home to some of the world's largest populations of exotic game, depends heavily on wildlife tourism and the country has won plaudits for its staunch opposition to lifting the international ban on the ivory trade.

Dan