Nine years after international outrage stopped the cull of elephants in the Kruger National Park, more than 3 000 of the beasts face the new threat of a death sentence — because science has failed to come up with a cheap elephant contraceptive.
The 11 000 elephants in South Africa’s Kruger are reproducing at 1 000 a year and each consumes 150kg of vegetation a day — eating up the park, say its officials.
In benign environments such as the Kruger where food is plentiful and water readily available, elephants reproduce on average every four years between the ages of 14 and 45. Unlike most other species, elephants have no predators other than man. They are good parents, infant mortality is negligible and they live for up to 70 years.
”Culling is the only realistic option,” said Hector Magome, chief conservation officer for South African National Parks. ”When we stopped culling in 1994, we said we would try other options. We tried contraception and we tried much bigger parks — the transfrontier park.’
Two types of contraception were experimented with: one involved oestrogen implants that stopped the production of eggs. The other, immuno-contraception, meant darting the elephant cow with a vaccine that prevented fertilisation.
The oestrogen option was stopped after frustrated bulls began attacking treated cows. The vaccine produced much better results but, said Magome, it was far too expensive for a state park in a developing country.
The vaccine is only effective for a year before the cow needs to be darted again. This is a huge logistics operation, involving keeping track of each cow in a park the size of Wales.
The other option was the new transfrontier parks set up to link protected areas across Southern Africa. Wild animals, unrestricted by man-made national borders, would once again roam the continent in their ancient migration patterns.
One park, which linked the Kruger to Zimbabwe in the north and Mozambique to the east, was opened two years ago by Nelson Mandela. The fence was torn down and 60 Kruger elephants taken into their new million-hectare playground in Mozambique in what was hoped would be the start of a mass migration.
Unfortunately, half of them immediately migrated back again while the rest of Kruger’s elephants have stayed put.
The Southern African branch of Ifaw (the International Federation for Animal Welfare) is leading protests against culling.
”Elephants are highly intelligent animals and live in a very complex society,” said Ifaw’s regional director, Jason Bell. ”They are also the flagship species for this country.”
He believes the Kruger is exaggerating the need for urgent action and has not proved that elephants are destroying biodiversity.
Les Carlisle, environmental manager for CC Africa, one of the biggest private game-lodge consortiums in the region, disagrees.
”Protecting biodioversity is our mandate and the mega-herbivores have a staggering impact. Elephants and humans are the only mammals with the ability to destroy the habitat on which they depend for survival. They have to take action now or they will lose the park.”
Long-term transfrontier parks are the answer. But elephants have strong homing instincts and introducing them to new territories means tranquillising them and moving them at least 300km from their old stamping ground. This is expensive.
”As a developing country, we have other priorities,” said Magome. ”If people who say they are concerned put up the money, we could do it in six months. But we do not see people coming to the party when it means putting money on the table.” — Guardian Unlimited Â