Saving Elephants Results in Exploding Population

by David L. Michelmore, 2002 Pew Gatekeeper Editor
Reprinted with permission of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Around dusk, the elephants start moving out from the Sabie River into the bush for the night.

A big old wrinkly male with huge floppy ears leads a half dozen females, recalcitrant teens and calves across the paved road running beside the river. One of the females flaps her ears and makes a step toward a car that has gotten too close. The car speeds away.

Other than that, the elephants pay no attention to the humans who have stopped to watch them. And why should they? No one dares bother them in the bush, not even the leopards or the lions.

"They're a lot like us, really. They're very admirable. They have strong family bonds, and they don't give a damn about anybody else," said Ian Whyte, who's in charge of large herbivores at the 210-mile-long park.

It's this type of elephant that killed a keeper at the Pittsburgh Zoo on Monday. But here, there's no attempt to train them or herd them. When the park opened 100 years ago, there were no elephants left. Now there are more than 10,000.

As the elephants come up from the river, they grab anything green and tasty they find - branches, bushes, grasses. They break them off with their trunks and then stuff them into their mouths. This bunch of elephants stuck to leaves and branches and didn't grab any tree bark, but all around the park, tree trunks are stripped bare and half bare. Many are dead.

A little farther along, another herd, even bigger, makes its way along the rocky riverbed. There are 16 of them, of all ages. They're not wandering aimlessly, they're moving in the same direction in an organized way. They look after each other and stick together.

In Kruger, elephants indeed do whatever they want and that's part of the problem.

Kruger scientists, who count the herds regularly from the air, say the elephants appear impervious to the natural cycles of wet and dry and feast and famine that keep other creatures in the park in balance. While other animal populations rise and fall, the elephants just keep growing -- at a rate of 7 percent a year. There's nothing to stop them.

"You have to decide if you want to run a protected area for the elephants or for biodiversity," Whyte said. "You can't do both."

In a change of long-standing policy, Kruger scientists now put great stock in biodiversity. They are convinced the animals in the park should manage themselves; even the water holes dug in previous eras to help animals in dry weather are being closed.

It seems to have had an impact on every type of animal except the elephants, whose surging numbers are causing problems.

One dramatic sign of trouble is the storied baobab tree, an extremely long-lived but increasingly rare species whose trunk is shaped like an upside down cone. The baobab, said to live for hundreds of years, is a favorite target of hungry elephants, who strip away the bark, eventually killing it. The baobab is now threatened with extinction in some areas.

A dozen years ago, the African elephant was in such a precarious position that in order to protect them, international trade in ivory was banned. Poachers had killed off entire elephant populations, including those in Mozambique, which lies just over the fence from Kruger.

Two weeks ago, the United Nations Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species backed requests from South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, but not Zimbabwe and Zambia, to lift a 13-year-old ban on the sale of ivory, in effect approving plans to "cull" the herd.

Conservationists in Kenya and other places argue that allowing legal sales of ivory simply reopens the market to poachers. Ivory buyers, no matter how closely the U.N. group monitors sales, won't be able to distinguish between legal and poached ivory. That, in turn, may lead to another round of mass killings. South Africa says it can keep the poachers at bay.

Inside Kruger, a small, nondescript warehouse no bigger than a two-car garage holds more than 4,800 tusks, about 36 tons of ivory.

The tusks, which used to be arranged on shelves according to their whiteness but are just stored anywhere now, include all those collected from animals that died of natural causes and those taken from captured poachers, plus the supply left over from the years when the herd was culled on a regular basis to keep the population at around 7,000.

No one knows exactly how much the ivory is worth. Best guesses put it at $3.5 million.

Before the end of apartheid in 1994, Kruger didn't worry much about its funding, said Danie Pienar, director of research. That was a time when the engine of government was designed to serve just 10 percent of the population - the whites.

Now it's trying to serve everyone and that makes money scarce. An extra $3.5 million from ivory sales would help Kruger take care of itself. Its annual budget is about $20 million, of which $5 million comes from the government.

The plan developed by Whyte and others would divide the park into seven sections that would more or less conform to the areas where distinct groups of elephants operate. Starting at small areas in the extreme north and south - the baobabs are prevalent in the northern section - the elephant population would be reduced by killing or moving them.

After some number of years, another area would be targeted. The idea is to protect the park's diversity and at the same time do a sensible job of managing the elephants, destroying some families in order to save others. The plan was approved by the government a couple of years ago, but has yet to be implemented.

South Africa is sensitive to how it looks to the world. And nobody really wants to do it, for reasons that are distinctly human.

"The idea of going out and killing these wonderful animals is not something anyone wants to do," Whyte said.

He just doesn't think there's any other choice.

Copyright © 2007 International Reporting Project. All Rights Reserved.