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S. African Proposal to Cull Animals Sparks National Debate
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, South Africa -- A short, dusty stretch of road near the heart of South Africa's premier national park once featured three massive, healthy baobab trees. No more. One has lost nearly half of its bark. A second has a gouge in its trunk large enough for a person to stand in. The third is now a pile of rotting pulp.
The baobabs, which can live for thousands of years, are victims of Kruger National Park's burgeoning population of elephants, whose growing destructiveness has sparked an emotional national debate over whether to return to the controversial practice of culling. That would mean shooting entire families and butchering them for their meat, practices that animal rights activists denounce as barbaric and unnecessary.
Because of their size and ability to grow new bark, the baobab trees are relatively resilient to the ravages of elephant tusks. But other trees are not as fortunate: Acacias and marulas, for instance, are sometimes crushed and chomped to death in a matter of hours.
The elephants win the battle for the bark and vegetation that remains, leaving little to sustain the antelopes, giraffes and other animals that depend on the trees for nourishment. The landscape, meanwhile, gradually shifts from woodland to grassland, altering the ecosystem permanently, park officials say.
"These things are such wonderful animals," said Ian Whyte, 59, a courtly, ruddy-faced elephant researcher for Kruger, "but they give you such headaches."
Since its founding in 1898 along the country's eastern border, Kruger has grown from a chunk of disease-prone, castoff land to one of southern Africa's favorite tourist spots, drawing more than 1 million visitors a year to an area nearly as large as New Jersey. The elephants have discovered it, too. Few lived here a century ago; now there are 12,500.
Elephants, which often live to be 60 years old and eat more than 300 pounds of leaves, bark and grass a day, are a major element of the park's appeal.
They have a nature that to many visitors seems almost human: They travel in large, matrilineal families; they play; they mourn. Elephants often look directly into the eyes of humans and flap their giant ears, yet they rarely attack. In Kruger, many walk right by carloads of tourists, the only noise being the gentle padding of their massive feet on the pavement.
They are not so bewitching to the park's neighbors.
Herds of elephants break through Kruger's meager fencing to rampage through fields of corn, pumpkin and watermelon, eating what they can and crushing much else. In the village of Nsavulani, about six miles from the Kruger border, elephants visited most days last month, often in packs of six or eight. Never before, villagers say, has the problem been so bad.
"It's very dangerous, those things. You can't chase them away," said Daniel Hatlane, a 44-year-old farmer, after elephants tore down the fence around his field and ate much of his corn crop. "It's why I say the elephant is not my friend."
Kruger culled more than 14,000 of its elephants between 1967 and 1994, when animal rights groups demanded a moratorium. Park officials grudgingly agreed but have since watched Kruger's population grow from 8,000 to 12,500. While parks in neighboring countries have a greater density of elephants -- throughout southern Africa, there are about 270,000 -- Kruger now has enough to cause major damage to a fragile ecosystem, park officials say.
Last year's announcement that the park might resume culling drew a fierce, immediate reaction from international animal rights groups, including threats of boycotts. Park officials again backed off but continue to study the issue, with a decision due this year.
Opponents argue that better management practices, including newly discovered methods of birth control, could solve Kruger's problems without a new cull.
Rudi J. van Aarde, a University of Pretoria zoologist who studies elephant habitats, contended that Kruger's size and long, narrow shape mean the animals are all the more destructive. Elephants, van Aarde said, like to migrate seasonally along rivers, but because Kruger is oriented north to south and its rivers run west to east, the elephants' range is sharply limited. Their impact is concentrated in small areas.
That problem will be eased when Kruger eventually joins with neighboring game parks in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, giving elephants three times more room to roam. Closing Kruger's man-made water holes also would encourage elephants to migrate in search of water, van Aarde said
"Twenty-seven years of culling did not solve the problem," he said, speaking from his office in Pretoria, South Africa. "Are we now to carry on and not solve the problem?"
Whyte is skeptical. He calls contraception costly and impractical for large herds such as those found in Kruger, and he calls van Aarde's ideas speculative and unworkable.
Without some form of effective population control, park officials say, Kruger will have 34,000 elephants by 2020 -- far more than it can handle without dramatic changes to both the landscape and the mix of plants and animals that can survive.
Kruger officials won't say how many elephants would need to be killed to reach a sustainable population, but the number, they acknowledge, almost certainly is in the thousands.
A successful cull -- which likely would include the sale of lucrative tusks into the highly regulated international ivory market -- also might encourage South Africa's neighbors to follow a similar policy. Botswana alone has more than 120,000 elephants.
As senior South African officials study the issue, Whyte has come to his own conclusion: Without culling, Kruger will change forever, and not for the better.
"If the objective is biodiversity, you don't have a choice," he said.
Whyte had to observe years of culls and once himself had to shoot several elephants. It was in 2000, a year with major flooding and some related fires. During a helicopter flight to count the park's wildlife, Whyte saw a group of elephants burned so badly that their outer layer of skin had fallen off. Instead of dark gray, the elephants were left a pale, peachy color.
The animals, he said, were in such excruciating pain that they could barely walk, and soon they would have died of infections. Hovering only a few feet above, he fired a rifle at the base of the skull of one elephant. Six more times that day, he did the same.
Though Whyte regards a new cull as necessary, he said the blame lies not with the elephants. Their destructiveness comes not so much from their nature, he said, as from the decisions by men confining them to limited spaces as growing human populations use more and more land.
"There's not too many elephants," Whyte said. "There's too many people."
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