Eddie Koch
The young bull elephant that charged a group of tourists in the Pilanesberg Game Reserve last week and killed the professional hunter who went to shoot it the next day are the latest victims of a new set of economic and political problems troubling the managers of South Africa’s burgeoning game reserve industry.
Two years ago a German tourist was trampled to death by another rogue elephant in the Pilanesberg. Soon after that attack, a lion at a privately owned park called Phinda Izilwane (“the return of the animals”) stalked and killed a tourist inside the reserve’s luxury lodge. Last month a rhino gored a young ranger to death in a Botswana reserve. This year a wounded giraffe kicked the life out of a conservation official in the Northern Province.
And a group of foreign tourists were recently involved in a near-fatal incident at the Hluhluwe Game Reserve when an elephant charged their open-air vehicle. It would appear humans are not the only casualties in the recent offensive on the part of wild animals in the country’s game reserves. Nearly 20 white rhinos, worth R60 000 each, have been mauled to death in the Pilanesberg by elephant herds showing increasing signs of pathological behaviour — including aberrant efforts to mate with rhino cows.
A debate is beginning to grow around the most recent incident in the Pilanesberg. Specialists from the Rhino and Elephant Foundation, regarded as one of the world’s best elephant research institutions, believe these could be the unanticipated symptoms of a huge increase in trade and translocation of wild animals that were made to roam freely across the plains of Africa.
“It is as though the animals are beginning to bite back. They are being hunted, culled, captured, transported and shunted into small and closed game reserves,” says an ecologist who asked not to be named as he has been involved in the investigation into the Pilanesberg incidents.
“And not enough research is being done about the impact such practices have on these dangerous beasts. What we may be seeing are early warning signs that conservationists may have been playing God with the animals without anticipating the consequences.”
The bull elephant at the centre of the Pilanesberg tragedy was an orphan taken either from a matriarchal herd in the Addo Elephant Park in the Eastern Cape or from a herd that was killed during the Kruger National Park’s controversial culling programme in the early 1980s. Most elephants in the Hluhluwe Game Reserve are also the orphaned products of Kruger’s culls — and ecologists are beginning to believe aggressive behaviour by these animals in both reserves are early signs of the trauma and stress the animals have been subjected to.
Until this year the National Parks Board killed a few hundred elephant in the Kruger Park each year on the grounds that this was neccessary to prevent the park from being overpopulated. During the cull, which involved darting adult animals with a paralysing agent from the air and then shooting them, the youngsters were rounded up and exported to other game reserves.
The practice has allowed South African conservationists to reintroduce elephant into areas of the country where they had become extinct. But it is possible that the orphaned elephants were traumatised by the mass killing that took place around them. And, in many cases, the youngsters were sent to game reserves where there were no matriarchs to care for and discipline them.
“We would need to monitor the behaviour of these animals for at least another 10 years before we can say with scientific certainty that the culling programme is a direct cause of the anti-social behaviour on the part of young elephant bulls who were translocated,” says Marion Gara, who co- ordinates pachyderm research at the Rhino and Elephant Foundation.
She points out that there have been attacks on tourists by aggressive elephants in game reserves where culling does not occur and where the herds are not made up of translocated animals, and that there is probably a host of factors explaining the strange behaviour of the Pilanesberg’s pachyderms.
Apart from the absence of matriarchal discipline, the young bulls have grown into adulthood without the presence of older and more mature bulls. The older bulls appear to be an important balancing factor, especially when the young ones are in musth (ready to mate). When they are forced to compete with the old bulls, they are forced to retreat and calm down sexually. Without this process, it seems the animals take out their frustration on other species in the area.
Scientists at Pilanesberg have established that the problem bull was in musth last week and believe this may have contributed to its aggressive behaviour. Park officials also have photographs of male elephants trying to mount female rhinos. They believe sexual and territorial aggression by the young elephant bulls may explain why most of the 19 rhinos gored to death by elephants in the past few years were all cows.
Another factor that influences the behaviour of dangerous animals is that most South African game reserves, with the exception of the Kruger, are small and closed systems — unlike the vast, open game reserves of the type in East Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, where natural processes are able to operate with less human interference than that which takes place in South African reserves.
Charles Ndabeni, a senior official in the public relations division of the North West Parks Board, says all of the explanations for the recent attack in Pilanesberg are being investigated by a team of scientists in the game reserve. “A full report is being compiled by this team and will be distributed as and when requested.
“The acting director of North West Parks, on behalf of the board, further offers its sincere and deep condolences to the bereaved family of Ricky Walsh, the hunter who was killed last week. Walsh is survived by his wife and two children.”