Orphaned Zimbabwean elephants will be trained to give tourists rides
Fiona Macleod
A row has erupted over the importation into South Africa of young, free-ranging elephants captured and trained for tourist joyrides.
The 12 elephants, destined for a private game reserve in Limpopo province, were orphaned during culling operations or drought in the early 1990s and have now been trained to take tourists on elephant-back safaris. Little is known about the training methods used on them.
Limpopo conservation authorities have given permission for the 12 to be imported from Zimbabwe to Kapama Game Reserve, which belongs to billionaire businessman and chairperson of giant milling company GenFoods, Johann Roode.
Roode is a controversial figure in conservation circles. A hunting outfit attached to his wildlife business near Hoedspruit was linked by the world-famous TV documentary The Cook Report to “canned” lion hunting in 1997. The outfit admitted allowing unfit clients to shoot lions on a bait or from behind a blind.
Roode closed down the hunting operation, called Kapama Safaris, in 1999 after video footage leaked to the media exposed numerous atrocities. These included a hunter killing an elephant with 21 shots, another firing seven shots at a rhinoceros and a suspected drugged lion dying after being shot six times.
Roode is founder of the Endangered Species Protection Trust and has donated millions of rands over the past 12 years to the specialised anti-poaching police unit.
Amid accusations that he is standing in the way of transformation, several fellow trustees, including chairperson Ivan May, resigned earlier this month. The South African Police Service is threatening to disband the ESP unit.
The import of the 12 elephants to Kapama will provide South Africa’s first elephant-back safaris. Roode plans to use them to give tourists an “elephant bush experience”, but says he has no idea how the elephants were trained.
News of the importation broke this week as wildlife dealer Riccardo Ghiazza went on trial in the Pretoria Regional Court for allegedly using cruelty to train young elephants captured in the Tuli Block in 1998. National Council of SPCAs (NSPCA) monitors described this week how 30 young elephants taken from the wild in 1998 were chained, beaten, deprived of sleep, food and inter-group contact in an attempt to bully them into submission. The object of this exercise was apparently to train them to move timber and other heavy objects.
Ghiazza, trainer Wayne Stockigt and Craig Saunders who bought five of the Tuli elephants have pleaded not guilty to four charges of cruelty under the Animal Protection Act. Ghiazza also denies not having a licence to train the elephants.
Roode says he has given the authorities an undertaking that he won’t chain his elephants or keep them in steel-and-concrete structures like Ghiazza did. They will roam free in a 1 500ha camp when not being used by tourists.
In fact, Roode says he wants to base his new venture on the model of Randall Moore, who takes tourists on elephant-back safaris in Botswana’s Okavango Delta.
Moore uses former circus elephants and has built up an international reputation for his humane treatment of his animals. Animal welfarists say a major difference between Moore’s operations and others is that Moore’s elephants are saved from dire circus circumstances, and he often releases them in the wild as they get old. They are worried the Zimbabwe elephants may get out of hand at the age of about 25 most are now in the region of 18 years.
“Most of the orphans trained in Zimbabwe are males, because the females were sold to zoos or breeding programmes,” explains Theresa Warth of the Domestic Elephants Association in Zimbabwe. “When [the males] start coming into musth at about 25 years, they can become very dangerous. Only Moore has experience of dealing with this in African elephants.”
The 12 come from a group of about 40 elephants owned by Zimbabwean businessman and farmer Rory Hensman. He has been using them for tourist rides in Chinoyi, near Harare, and Victoria Falls, but needs to move them because of the political instability in that country. He is reluctant to talk about the move or the elephants’ training.
Another condition Roode has agreed to is that the trainers will move to Kapama with the elephants. Warth says the trainers have attended courses run by Scott Riddle in Arkansas in the United States.
The Humane Society of the United States which has provided expert witnesses on the humane treatment of elephants during Ghiazza’s numerous legal battles with the NSPCA over the past three years does not recommend Riddle as an expert.
Welfare organisations have been calling for a national code on training elephants ever since shocking images of the Tuli elephants caused a public furore. The Tuli debacle highlighted the shortage of elephant behaviour know-how in this country.
The Elephant Management and Owners’ Association (Emoa), a private initiative, recently added a chapter on domesticated elephants to its policy on the introduction and management of elephants in confined areas. This provides minimum guidelines for the keeping and handling of trained elephants.
It says acceptable sources for domesticated elephants include “already tame, semi-tame or trained elephants on private land; elephants which are bred in captivity from existing domesticated elephants; genuine orphans rejected by wild herds and likely to die; any captive elephant in a situation where it is being abused or neglected; and elephants from population reductions”.
The head of Emoa, Marion Garai, has agreed to join a foundation that will help guide Kapama in its introduction of elephant-back safaris, in an attempt to avoid turning the experiment into a repeat of the Tuli scandal.