Up TO 10,000 elephants, including whole families, are facing slaughter as South Africa prepares to end its ten-year ban on culling according to various news reports, including at Times Online.
The South Africa government is expecting an outcry from animal rights groups across the world and is trying to temper this through an 18-month ‘consultation period’ to precede the cull. The cull will involve rounding up and shooting entire family groups.
The cull is necessary because the thriving elephant population in the Kruger national park is eating itself out of vegetation and drinking itself out of water.
An adult elephant consumes about 170kg of vegetation a day. And this is what it produces …
Photo taken in Kenya in about 1990 .
The article in Times Online continues,
The inevitable outcry about the cull disguises South Africa’s remarkable achievements in bringing the Kruger elephants back from the brink of being wiped out. At the beginning of the 20th century there were only 50 or so wild elephants in the whole of South Africa.
Major James Stevenson-Hamilton, a short, stocky Scot, Laird of Fairholm in Lanarkshire, started the recovery when he created the Kruger Park in 1902 at the end of the Boer War. There are now 17,000 elephants in 31 separate South African reserves.
It is unknown how many elephants there are globally. It is generally accepted/quoted that in 1930s there were 5-10 million elephants in Africa. But by 1979 only 1.3 million. The current estimate is about 600,000. But I am not sure how any of the above figures were calculated/estimated.
I can’t find any information on elephants numbers at the CITES site.
It seems particularly sad if there are so few, that any have to be killed. Many of the Kenyan National Parks were being poached out when I was working there in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I hope that you don’t wear those sunglasses any more!
Bob, Those sunglasses survived more than a bit of elephant poo. They were eventually lost at Burleigh Heads – in the surf.
Greetings,
I have been to the Kruger Park twice in 1989 and drove the full length. I saw two elephants. In 1986, also saw two, one of which stands near a gate and ‘terrorises’ cars. As well, also went to the Addo park on those occasions and saw the usual few. There is another small private game park. If there are 17,000 where are they ? Must be eating all the time, which they do of course.
So to cull 10,000 of 17,000 seems extreme but nothing in South Africa is extreme today. T feel the figure is exaggerated. Still, they do eat a lot and have very limited space. Mind you, the indigenous humans continue to exaggerate their numbers despite AIDS !!!! Give all a sense of reason.
Even more intresting is the Pleistocene Killing Hypothesis when the Clovis people are alleged to have killed of all the North American Megafuana while their contempories in Africa and Asia did not.
Abu survive in Africa and Asia.
Perhaps the theory is wrong.
And as the same academecians produced global warming theory, perhaps that theory also is wrong.
The reality is that if elephants are to survive in the wild, or at least on game reserves, culling will be necessary. We can be emotional about it, but that doesn’t help the elephants. We need to embrace a robust pragmatic approach in order to save the species.
Why ?
It may be a bit of a diversion from the central topic, but I think that some elephants, and rhino, were killed by a big bushfire in Kruger Park in 2001. The fire was unusually fierce, due to the cessation of regular controlled burning, on the advice of ‘ecologists’. Some African women, cutting grass, were also killed. Sounds a bit like our National Parks, where many native animals are killed, due to a lack of regular fuel reduction by fire. As Jim Hoggard said, ‘when will we ever learn?’ The history of fire in Kruger National Park has many lessons on fire for Australian followers of the ‘ignis nullius’ cult.
If anybody is interested in fire management in Kruger National Park, as a comparison with Australian National Parks, there are many items on the web. A good one is by Navashni Govender, see http://ag.arizona.edu/OALS/ALN/aln54/govender.html
i think that instead of killing the elephants they should send them to a place where the elephant population is low.
As an animal lover and biologist it is always tough for me to see the impact that humans have had on wildlife. It is my job to make sure that governments do the right things and I have dedicated my life to it. Truthfully culling humans, while not a practical option, would help to solve the problem of the overpopulation of many of the animals we have here in Africa. We haven’t had a serious disease, food shortage or war to help control our population in a long time. Unfortunately the Elephants here in South Africa now are rapidly developing the first two of these problems. The closest two pods have started losing weight from lack of food and one is seriously ill. Starvation and malnutrition drives diseases. We have to control the population now. I have been asking for support to be able to finance birth control for the whole area, but as it is we now have no choice but to reduce the population. I cannot stand to watch these animals starve to death and die very sick painful deaths. We must cull some of them now before the entire worlds population of elephants is threatened by disease from further starvation. I am also searching for support to raise money for tranquilizers to reduce the stress on the animals to be removed.