South Africa Considers Culling Elephants as Last Resort

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/world/africa/01safrica.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
By Michael WINES
Published March 1, 2007

JOHANNESBURG, Feb 28 — South Africa’s environment minister offered a new plan on Wednesday to control the nation’s booming elephant population that contemplates resuming the much-criticized killing of excess animals, but only after thorough scientific study and as a last resort.

Without some form of population control, elephants will soon overwhelm the public parks and private game reserves where they can still roam free, the minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, warned.

Mr. van Schalkwyk’s proposal, unveiled at a crowded elephant reserve in the nation’s southeast, appeared to defuse for now a looming confrontation between environmentalists and game managers over ways to manage the nation’s 20,000 elephants, a major tourist attraction and, in some parks, a growing headache.

National park officials have already considered a mass killing, or culling, of elephants in Kruger National Park, South Africa’s biggest and best-known wildlife reserve. They contended that the park, with a population of at least 12,500 elephants, could support only 7,500. Some conservationists have agreed, saying that preserving the park’s biological diversity is more important than saving elephants.

But some environmentalists and elephant researchers argue that the killings are both unnecessary and inhumane, given elephants’ high intelligence and complex social structure.

South Africa ordered the killing of more than 14,000 elephants in Kruger until an international outcry helped bring about a moratorium in 1995. Opponents of culling have threatened to start a boycott of South Africa tourism, a huge moneymaker here, were a new culling campaign to be approved.

While he did not rule out further killings, Mr. van Schalkwyk, who is also minister of tourism, made it clear on Wednesday that the cullings would be both limited and approved only after other options had been exhausted.

“The government will never give a blank check to culling,” he said.

Instead, the new proposal envisions a range of methods to address the rising number of elephants, including contraception and luring elephants from crowded parks to vacant spaces.

There are no quick options. Contraception is not a simple solution, in part because it subjects female elephants to great stress from more frequent matings with heavy bulls. Nor is it easy to relocate elephant herds, although the recent removal of fences between Kruger park and vacant parkland in neighboring Mozambique holds the prospect that elephants will eventually migrate there.

Mr. van Schalkwyk also allotted about $700,000 for scientists to study elephant management techniques and to address some basic questions, including whether the existing population is straining the habitat as much as some say.

That elephants are destructive is unquestioned. African elephants can eat as much as 5 percent of their weight and drink up to 50 gallons of water a day, and herds have been known to reduce forests and bushlands to treeless expanses of weeds, grass and broken stumps.

The government says that South African herds are growing at a rate of 6 percent a year. Left unchecked, officials say, the national elephant population will rise from 20,000 now to more than 34,000 in 2020, 12 years from now.

Mr. van Schalkwyk’s proposal must still be subjected to public comment, and it could be months before it or another plan is approved. But some critics of South Africa’s elephant management plans gave this one their cautious approval on Wednesday.

“The government has committed to the role of science in the context of elephant management in South Africa, and that is critical,” said Jason Bell-Leask, the southern Africa director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The fund has run an aggressive campaign against further elephant killings in South Africa.

Hennie Lotter, an ethicist and philosophy professor at the University of Johannesburg, has called elephant culling “a just war nobody wants.” Elephants rank close to the top of the hierarchy of animals that merit human respect, he said; elephants appear to have an elementary language, mourn their dead and raise their young in ways that humans can recognize.

Mr. Lotter said that the government’s new plan appeared “to be the responsible thing” but that its success depended on how it would be carried out.