Sharon Hammond
The Kruger National Park will present its much-awaited proposal for a new policy on managing its elephant population on Saturday. This follows decades of highly emotional criticism for culling the animals in an effort to keep the population in the park at a fixed number of between 7 000 and 7 500.
“We acknowledge that the policies of the preceding three decades were too rigid and inflexible,” explains the general manager of conservation and development in the park, Dr Leo Braack. He adds, however, that previous policies were appropriate at the time, based on the best information available then.
The new elephant management plan will not totally exclude culling. Braack explains that culling will continue, but only in two of six huge proposed zones covering the park. Culling will also not be the only option in these two zones, called low-impact zones, as the elephant populations here will further be controlled through live capture.
“Contraception is also a future possibility,” adds Braack. In two other zones, marked as “high-impact”, elephant numbers won’t be controlled at all for several decades, while the two remaining zones in the north of the park will be off-limits to elephants to preserve rare and endangered plants in the area.
The zoning system, says Braack, will allow fluxes in the elephant population and thereby ensure a richer biodiversity in the park than under the previous elephant management policy. “Some areas will be opened up by high elephant numbers knocking down trees and thus promoting grassland and herds of zebra, wildebeest and others,” he says. “Other areas will become woodland due to low elephant numbers and this benefits many species of birds, reptiles and a host of other groups.”
If elephant numbers are not regulated at all, Braack warns, their destruction of plant life can wipe out entire habitats in the park, leading to the extinction of both the plants and other animals that survive on them. Although elephant numbers in the two proposed high-impact zones won’t be regulated, their impact in those areas will be monitored using a system called Thresholds for Potential Concern (TPC).
“Once a TPC has been reached and investigation shows we cannot allow further change to occur without incurring loss of some component of biodiversity, then the high-impact and low-impact zones will be switched,” explains Braack.
This will allow the high-impact zone to recover as the smaller elephant population from the low-impact zone is moved to the area, and the larger, uncontrolled group is taken to the low-impact zone.
“These switches will probably need to occur at anything between 30-year and 100-year intervals,” says Braack. He says the proposed policy was more realistic than the “hands-off” approach called for by activists. “The park is for all species, not just elephants.” – African Eye News Service