one fight.”
But is it, in fact, truly one fight? From the perspective of traditional conservationists, vertebrate biologists, and habitat ecologists, clearly it is not: to these people, wildlife preservation and animal liberation are two distinct, even inimically opposed, issues. And there is also the matter of simple pragmatism: the disparity between what is “right” and what can work can be profound, particularly in Africa. For example, should the rights of elephants trump the rights of other wildlife species? This is a pressing question wherever elephants are found in Africa but particularly in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, a reserve that has been profoundly influenced by the continent’s nascent animal rights movement.
At more than seventy-three hundred square miles, Kruger is one of the largest game reserves in the world. It has more mammalian species than any other protected area in Africa, including the so-called Big Five: elephant, rhino (both species), lion, leopard, and Cape buffalo. But as vast as it is, Kruger is still limited in terms of its wildlife carrying capacity, especially in regard to elephants. If there are too many elephants—in Kruger or anywhere else—the land takes a beating. First, the trees are damaged from excessive browsing, and finally they disappear. The habitat literally changes, from forest to parkland and then to grassy savanna. The topsoil erodes. All the species that relied on these transitional habitats—from birds and forest antelopes to arboreal primates—disappear. An excessive number of elephants will eat everything, including themselves, out of a home.
As with most other African parks, Kruger is an island; the migration routes that had supported the region’s megafauna since the late Pleistocene are severed now, and the park is largely fenced. Progressively managed hunting preserves and tribal properties along Kruger’s borders have resulted in the removal of the wire in some areas, expanding available habitat to a degree. More significantly, a transfrontier pact has allowed fence removal between Kruger and Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park, essentially doubling the size of the protected habitat. Still, in general terms, Kruger’s elephants aren’t going anywhere. They have to stay in the Kruger-Limpopo biome; they have been denied those corridors that once allowed them to roam the continent as hunger, thirst, and will dictated. These strictures imply enforced limits on elephant numbers. The general consensus among biologists and game managers is that no more than eight thousand elephants should inhabit Kruger proper, and much of the park’s budget and management efforts over the past two decades have been devoted to trying to keep the herd to this figure.
In the past, the solution was easy: cull to the desired population. As previously discussed, experienced sharpshooters, mostly professional hunters and the game scouts they had personally trained, would identify family groups appropriate for removal and take them out in a minute or two of concentrated gunfire. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it even hunting; it was killing, and it sometimes emotionally damaged the men who had to do it. But culling was a long-established tradition in South Africa, and it worked. Eliminating entire family units rather than targeting individual animals from different groups kept the essential social structure of Kruger’s elephants intact, because it minimized stress on the population as a whole. Elephant herds are matriarchies. Each herd is controlled by a dominant cow, and each member has a place within the group. Killing individual animals (particularly the dominant matriarch) within a group invariably traumatizes the group as a whole, commonly resulting in the phenomenon of pachyderm “juvenile delinquents”: young males that act aggressively toward other elephants and are often inclined to attack humans or livestock.
But Kruger severely restricted culling beginning in 1989 as a result of international pressure—more from people enamored of elephants as a charismatic species than from scientists or mainline conservationists. In other words, animal rights advocates drove the change in policy. By 1995, culling was no longer actively pursued.
(As an aside, it should be noted that Kruger’s history of unexpected consequences in wildlife management is not dissimilar to other reserves on other continents where ambitious tinkering with the native fauna has been attempted. Gray wolves were mostly eliminated from Yellowstone National Park in the United States by the 1900s. As a result, the region’s elk population exploded, ultimately destroying much of the riparian vegetation and harming many species associated with Rocky Mountain riverine environments. But the elk population dropped after wolves were reintroduced to the park in the late twentieth century. Riparian flora rebounded, and with it beavers returned. These large aquatic rodents created extensive systems of dams and pools that attracted nesting waterfowl and other birds. In short, Yellowstone’s ecology was significantly enriched by reintroducing an apex predator long absent from the region.)
Unfortunately, all efforts to control Kruger’s elephants since the cessation of general culling have failed. Relocation and contraceptives have been tried. Both are expensive, extremely stressful on the animals, and, in the final analysis, ineffective. The elephant population swelled to almost 12,000 by 2004 and then to 15,500 by 2006. A new plan was refined between 2008 and 2010, dividing the park into discrete blocks. The scheme is, frankly, complicated. The basic idea is to manage each block separately for vegetative cycles—that is, to allow habitats to “degrade” or “recover” from elephant impacts at varying levels. This, ideally, will result in a wide range of niche habitats for varying species and minimize the need for elephant culling. But the plan may well be doomed simply because it has so many variables. Complex wildlife management schemes are difficult to implement successfully anywhere, all the more so on a huge preserve in Africa—even South Africa, which has well-developed infrastructure and a relatively responsive political system. Critics of the scheme abound. Some of the most incisive writing on the issue comes from Ron Thomson, a legendary former game warden.
Thomson worked as a ranger and warden in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for twenty-four years. During his duties, he killed five thousand elephants, eight hundred buffaloes, more than fifty lions—including six man-eaters—and two hundred hippos. He supervised a culling team that killed twenty-five hundred elephants at Gonarezhou National Park in the 1970s. These kinds of credentials, of course, don’t necessarily impress animal rights advocates. But Thomson’s work with black rhinos would certainly earn their plaudits. Thomson was an early pioneer in the live capture and translocation of rhinos. Over a seven-year period in the 1960s and 1970s, he led Rhodesia’s black rhino capture team, tranquilizing and moving 140 of the great beasts. Because a rhino stalk usually requires absolute silence, Thomson usually worked alone, armed only with a tranquilizer dart gun. Animal rightists may well disparage Thomson’s CV, but no one can dispute his deep and intimate knowledge of Africa’s game and the habitats they require to survive.
At this point, Thomson is thoroughly disenchanted with conservation policy across Africa. CITES, he feels, is an abject failure, especially when it comes to preventing the trade in elephant and rhino products. Poaching, he says, is driven by poverty—specifically the poverty in the communities surrounding the great parks. To stop poaching, the poverty must be alleviated, and that inevitably will involve the regulated taking of “surplus” animals within the parks.
Kruger’s new management plan is thus unworkable for a number of reasons, says Thomson. It treats elephants as discrete quanta—entities separate from elephants in other blocks, from the park as a whole, and from the surrounding countryside, including the villages full of poor hungry people on the border of the park. The idea that you can effectively manage Kruger’s elephants and improve biodiversity by juggling vegetative canopies—allowing elephants to devastate some blocks while culling to prescribed numbers in others—looks good on paper, Thomson avers on a Web site devoted to African game management and hunting issues, but applying the plan effectively will be next to impossible. Parts cannot be substituted for the whole; the forest cannot be ignored for the trees. And by the way, a lot of elephants will still be killed under the new plan:
In the new Kruger elephant management model it has already been decided that the northern and southern elephant management blocks will initially have their elephant populations reduced at the same rate at which they are now expanding. This will entail reducing each year’s standing population by 14 percent. The first 7 percent
