Canning Kruger's Elephants


Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg)

July 9, 2004
Posted to the web July 9, 2004

Fiona Macleod


Professional hunters are capitalising on the Kruger National Park's growing elephant population by selling "canned" elephant hunts to wealthy American clients.

Police and conservation officials are investigating the "hunting" of a Kruger bull within hours of its delivery to a safari outfit in North West province. Sedated and disoriented after being plucked out of the wild and transported hundreds of kilometres, the bull was reportedly shot by a Texan oil magnate.


Three other bulls have been delivered to the Orion Safari Lodge and farm near Rustenburg in the past fortnight, where New York hotel and casino tycoon Donald Trump is among the clients expected soon.

They may arrive to find their intended trophies have fled the "postage-stamp size" property where they will be hunted. Two of the bulls have already escaped and one travelled about 200km northwards before both were recaptured and returned to the property.

The hunters charge their clients up to $50 000 (about R303 500) to shoot a mature Kruger elephant. Their own costs involved in buying the elephants and moving them to the hunting destination are unlikely to amount to more than R100 000.

"Taking an animal like this out of the Kruger park, transporting it hundreds of kilometres and then shooting it within hours is immoral and unacceptable," says a conservation official who did not want to be named.

"If it is an issue of too many elephants, then they should rather be honest and cull the elephants on their home ground. But, of course, there is not as much money to be made in culling. This is a false pretence. It is not the way South Africa should handle its wildlife."

The four bulls were bought by hunting outfitter Hugo Ras from the Sabi Sands game reserve on the western boundary of the Kruger. Home to luxury tourism lodges such as Mala Mala, Sabi Sabi and Londolozi, the reserve says it has an overpopulation of elephants coming from the Kruger.

Sabi Sands has sold about 80 elephants to private buyers in the past two years and plans to sell off more family groups. Controversies around culling Kruger's elephants, which was stopped in 1995, have resurfaced recently as scientists say there are too many elephants in the world-famous park.

Gavin Hulett, warden at Sabi Sands, says it was a condition of the sale to Ras that the elephants would not be hunted. But it is clear Ras did not feel obliged to abide by this condition - he obtained a hunting permit from the North West authorities even before the bulls arrived at the Orion premises.

Ras has also recently acquired a small family group of seven elephants, which he bought from insurance tycoon Douw Steyn's reserve in Limpopo. Breeding herds of elephants need about 1 500ha per elephant - Orion, which Ras is in the process of buying from fellow professional hunter Johan Botha, covers about 4 500ha and now has 10 elephants.

Ras admitted to the Mail & Guardian this week that the elephant bull was shot within hours of being offloaded. He said it had broken out of a camp and was causing mayhem.

"I am no elephant killer. I am a farmer dealing in wildlife," he said.

Ras has faced a number of charges of illegal hunting in Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal. Limpopo officials say they are investigating him in connection with further irregularities in that province.

They are also trying to find out the fate of four lions Ras has moved to Orion. The lions were wild-caught at a reserve in Limpopo and the condition of their sale to Ras was that they must be free-ranging.

For years American hunters have been complaining about corruption and a lack of ethics in the South African hunting industry, including "canned" lion hunts. These complaints led to Safari Club International (SCI), the biggest hunting organisation in the United States, opening an office in South Africa nine years ago, says Linda Venter, SCI's Africa office manager.


SCI still outlaws records of lion-hunting trophies from South Africa as a result of the scandal surrounding canned lion hunting. SCI will be part of a high-level annual Africa Wildlife Consultative Forum discussing hunting and other conservation-related issues at Sun City early next week.

It will not be surprising if canned elephant hunting in South Africa becomes part of those discussions.

'The Donald' hunts?





As for the rest of it, it strikes me as a) typical 'green' sentimentality (as if culling an entire family group at taxpayer expense is 'better' than shooting a single animal at a huge profit); and, b) more greedy, 'buccaneer' behavior by a landowner cum safari operator (if he agreed not to hunt the animals, he should have kept his word). Saying it escaped and was causing problems is akin to all the white rhinos declared 'rogues' so that visiting bwanas would want to shoot them.



George

Before everybody gets worked up over this,lets remember that we only have Fiona Macleod say so on the supposed "facts" here and we all know how impartial / accurate the Press are when it comes to hunting related stories!

So, you're saying 'The Donald' doesn't hunt?

George

The sensible solution is to hunt them in the park, but solitary bulls only (otherwise you create survivors with a fear and hatred of man that will chase the tourists). This option has been discussed more than once, and apparently the Parks Board is OK with it, but the Greens got wind of it and threatened to make a big stink. So now they are doing the next most practical thing....it's still a wild elephant but the hunt is contrived and that's not my cup of tea.

At one time, they did allow hunting in a specific area in Hluhluwe Park in KZN I think it was. Not sure if that is still going on, but I doubt it.

Kruger is easily big enough to set aside a few areas for "hunter-culling". Buffer zones would also work like in Zim, and that's already an informal reality as a lot of private hunting ranches abut the park and the fences don't always keep the animals in...particularly when the rivers flood.

Trump is radically liberal so him hunting is unbelieveable. However, I know a very liberal and wealthy minister who heads a very large church(River Bend Church) here in Austin, Texas that I was amazed to learn that has been on safari in Africa ten or eleven times. He shot two elephants and a leopard on one of his latest trips and his office is full of trophies. This minister is an unabashed Clinton fan.

There is major culling in Kruger each year. This sounds like an additional program to enrich someone in the Parks dept.

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While in RSA 2 weeks ago we heard from 3 different local residents that Kruger was thinking about allowing trophy hunting of their surplus elephants. I guess the "culling" was not received by the public very well. I think its a good idea if managed properly. It will bring more money to the park for other projects. Of course I wonder how much of the money will actually go for the animals?
Maybe they are just selling them as mentioned in the above article. Do we have any locals who can shed any more light on this topic?
Alf, is this rumor KAKA, or true?

There USED to be regular culling of Elephants in Kruger. It was halted, I think in the early 90s, and now they are dealing with the consequences. The biologists want to commence culling again but there are those that oppose the idea on emotional grounds (gee, we hear elephants are almost extinct, you can't be serious about shooting them in a NATIONAL PARK!!!).

My info is a little out of date. Culling may have recommenced recently. Obviously, they are looking for ways to relocate elephants but like Alf says, the recipients have to be pre-approved (electrified fencing, minimum size property etc.). Not too many qualify. And a group of elephants for purely aesthetic reasons is not an economic proposition because they consume vast amounts of forage, reducing the carrying capacity for other huntable species.

I have also heard that trophy hunting in KP has been seriously considered but once again, it doesn't pass the newspaper test.

So they do nothing, all the while the habitat is taking a beating. In some areas, baobabs, thousands of years old, have been smashed to pulp. It takes a very long time for an area to recover from elephant overpopulation.

RSA, Zim and especially Botswana have way too many elephants for the remaining habitat. Botswana has 90,000 of them with a long term capacity of less than 10,000.

So I think the outlook for elephant hunting is good. Just a matter of time before the facts overcome the emotions. The complication though, is that history has demonstrated that you need to take out entire family groups, not single animals, if you want to avoid "incidents" in the national parks. So that leaves three options: hunting in the park for solitary bulls only; or relocating animals to private farms before hunting (expensive proposition); or going back to rangers working in teams to take out groups as was done in the 80s.

leo,
I would have thought the same thing, but you never know. In 1998 my husband and I were elk hunting at Ted Turner's huge (588,000 acre)Vermejo Park Ranch in Raton, New Mexico. The Atlanta Braves got knocked out of the playoffs. Guess who showed up? Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. He went out flyfishing and she went on a cow elk hunt. She shot one and had the liver for dinner. Ted's son,Beau, is a huge international sheephunter. Beau and his wife archery hunt elk every fall at Vermejo.

You just never know who hunts and who doesn't, like the minister.

I know some of the old, what used to be, the Transvaal ranches that have elephant, and they are quit large, they got them from Kruger and I would call them fair chase hunts, at least as fair as hunting them in Kruger, its fenced too you know...

Seleti has a herd of 65 elephants on about a 100,000 acres and so do the folks next door...They allow the shooting of a bull now and then.

There is always a few bad apples in the bunch, and you'll never get around that..whatever the business.

I know some high ranking folks that raised the biggest stink of all about canned Lion hunting and even got some legislation against it and thats good, I also know they got their black maned Lions before they got the legislation passed, so goes our world today, thats the way it is...

One thing I have learned in 70 years and that is few things are what they seem on the surface...politics, bureaucrats, executives, the jet set, stupidity, and big money have a big bearing on most things, they disfuse and confuse right from wrong. We do that right here, some people don't know the difference between a canned hunt and a fenced hunt, they put them in the same hat, thats horse hockey, some think hunting an elephant in 200,000 acres of African bush is unsportsmanlike and not for them, yet they have not done it...You could disapear in 200,000 ac. of bush and never be found for goodness sake and many concessions which are fine by these disenters are 30,000 acres or even less...Nope nothing is what it seems these days.