Conservationists, scientists and animal-rights campaigners from around Southern Africa gathered on Wednesday at the start of a three-day conference to discuss ways of controlling the region’s expanding elephant population.
Most countries in the continent’s southern region, home to more than half of Africa’s elephants, downscaled or halted their elephant culling programmes in the mid-1990s amid pressure from animal-rights groups and in the wake of a worldwide ban on the sale of ivory and strict controls against poaching.
As a result, elephant numbers have increased rapidly and to the point, some scientists insist, where the mighty animals have become a threat to their environment, the people they must share it with and ultimately themselves.
”The elephant population south of the Zambezi river has grown from 5 000 to over 200 000 in the last 100 years. With growth at around 5% per annum not slowing down, in the next 15 to 20 years we could have as many as 400 000 elephants,” said Dr Dave Cumming of the University of Zimbabwe.
”This, when in 1900 people feared for the future of these animals. Now we are looking back at 100 years of successful recovery,” he added.
Debate around the elephants has been characterised by sharply conflicting views and high emotion, particularly on the issue of culling.
The ”Great Elephant Indaba”, as the three-day event has been dubbed, is intended to provide a platform for the study of possible solutions.
But animal-rights groups have expressed concern that the outcome of the conference is predetermined and that the ”mass killing” of elephants will prevail as the ultimate answer to one of the region’s thorniest conservation issues.
The increase in the human population has brought about increasing conflict with elephants.
”As people take up more land, elephants are left with less and less,” Cumming explained.
”Conservation managers and scientists started this morning to examine one of the various options. We have heard a recommendation for elephant meta-population management where individual elephant populations can be linked up between countries,” he said.
The recommendation, he said, appears feasible in light of the implementation of a plan to establish three large transfrontier parks in the region.
Park managers have, however, noted that initial costly efforts to translocate elephant across borders — for instance between South Africa’s Kruger National Park and Mozambique — have been hampered by, among other things, the fact that most of the elephants have simply returned.
The conference is also expected to take another look at contraceptive and sterilisation programmes as a means of controlling the population. Some scientists who have argued that tampering with the fertility of the creatures would stabilise rather than reduce the size of the population attended the meeting on Wednesday.
”The Kruger is just one example of a large park where for 26 years it was able to keep and manage an elephant population of between 6 000 and 8 000, but today it has nearly 12 000 elephants,” Cumming said of the facility hosting the conference, organised by South African National Parks.
The two million hectare, internationally renowned Kruger Park is home to most of South Africa’s 17 000 elephants.
The elephant population in neighbouring Zimbabwe had reached an estimated 100 000, about 28 times more than the population at the turn of the century, he said.
Although the impact of the large elephant populations on woodlands in places such as the Kruger Park is well documented — elephants have been blamed for the destruction of many indigenous trees — the exact impact of their presence in large numbers on biodiversity has yet to be determined. — Sapa-DPA