Conservation officials have refused to allow an African elephant bull into the Northern Province
Fiona Macleod
South Africa has turned its back on Sahib, a mighty African elephant bull, who is stranded in a German circus and desperately in need of rescue.
Sahib was two years old when he was orphaned during a cull in a Zimbabwean reserve in 1983 and sold to a circus in Germany. For the past 18 years his life in exile has been characterised by bullying and abuse.
Now his trainer is ready to retire and the circus wants to get rid of him, even if this means shooting him. The circus owners claim he has become aggressive, so he has been constantly chained up since the middle of last year.
When SanWild, a Northern Province wildlife sanctuary, heard about Sahib’s plight late last year it offered to bring him back to Africa. It found a donor to sponsor his transportation, set aside a 100ha camp in the sanctuary for him to live in and started looking for a mate for Sahib to settle down with.
“This was a humanitarian mission,” says Rozanne Savory, a SanWild trustee. “It offered South Africa a wonderful opportunity for some positive public relations and to show it has compassion for animals.”
The sanctuary also assembled a group of local elephant experts to study Sahib’s rehabilitation process in the wild. He was one of hundreds of African elephants exported to overseas circuses and zoos during the peak of culling operations in South Africa and Zimbabwe from the early 1970s to mid-1980s.
Research by the European Elephant Group shows that the physical development of African elephants in circuses is stunted, and they are usually destroyed before they reach 25 because they become aggressive.
“Elephants turn out to be the most dangerous animals in circuses and zoos because they are not treated like wild animals. A life in chains, constantly being ordered about by their human handlers and frequent abuse are the main reasons for a permanent ‘rebellion’ of this species,” says the group’s chair, Alexander Haufellner.
The group cites several recent examples of “rebellious” African elephants calming down and living out normal lives after they have been released into large, open areas in Europe and their contact with people limited.
But Northern Province conservation officials are not interested in the Mayibuye Sahib project. They have refused to allow Sahib into the province, because they say the project will not contribute significantly towards elephant conservation and may cause an “unmanageable precedent”.
“Due to the high media profile and emotive nature of these cases, they often become a liability to the individuals involved as well as the province as a whole,” says Feltus Brandt, director of resource management at the Northern Province Department of Agriculture and Environment.
For similar reasons, the department has rejected an application for the import and rehabilitation of a four-year-old lioness living in a tiny cage in Italy. The lioness, whose parents came from Kenya, has been brought up as a pet and lives on a diet of spaghetti.
SanWild has not given up on its attempts to get Sahib back to Africa. After appeals to the national Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism were rejected, the sanctuary is considering legal action.
“The authorities have not applied their minds fairly to Sahib’s situation,” says Savory. “They are simply rejecting our application on principle, because they regard it as the kind of ‘green’ project they oppose.”
l One of three young Tuli elephants being kept at the Basel zoo in Switzerland attacked her handler this week while she was recovering from an operation on one of her tusks. The handler was seriously wounded before his colleagues could distract the elephant.
The elephant calf, named Rosy, was one of 30 youngsters captured in the Tuli bushlands in Botswana by animal trader Riccardo Ghiazza in 1998. Three were bought by the Basel zoo and four ended up in a zoo in Germany.