Africa: Continent's Plan to Save the Elephant - The East African Standard
Thu, 2008-02-14 11:18 — Hans
Nairobi, 11 February 2008
Philip Mwakio
Seventeen African countries, including Kenya, have signed a document for the establishment of a coalition to save the elephant.
It was also agreed that a global elephant action plan that will fight illegal killing and trade in ivory be implemented.
It also paved way for an elephant conservation fund to be known as the African Elephant Coalition, says Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) Assistant Director for Biodiversity, Research and Planning, Mr Patrick Omondi.
He said Mali, where the meeting was held, was elected chair of the coalition. Kenya is the co-chair.
The member countries are from West, Central and Eastern Africa countries.
"The body will raise funds and seek donor funding that will help States with weak enforcement and anti-poaching abilities," Omondi told The Standard. …
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As an animal lover and
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.
it's an interesting viewpoint but...
I'm not sure that I would agree that the best way to express love for elephants is to cull them. I'll admit that your posting is the first time I've heard of elephants in South Africa suffering from malnutrition and disease -- to what area are you referring, exactly? But the more fundamental point is that wild populations of ALL animals have always faced food limitation which, through reducing reproduction and survival rates, has served to limit the size and density of populations.
Certainly it is sad to see individual animals in distress, and we would all wish to avoid unnecessary suffering on a large scale, but as conservationists we have to decide when to intervene and when to "let nature take its course", which is shorthand for saying "let ecological processes proceed with minimum interference". Natural populations are not the same as our farm animals or pets and our first instinct should not be to fiddle with ecosystems, but rather to judge whether what is going on is "normal" or unusual.
In South Africa, people held elephant populations down, well below food supply limits, by culling for decades until the mid-1990s and now that they are increasing again, there will certainly come a point when they experience occasional food shortages and increased mortality. The Amboseli population has never been culled, although there was some hunting in the 1970s and there has always been a low level of killing by local people for sport, in defense of life or property, or for other reasons. But our unique long-term records, over 30+ years, have shown that survival, especially of young calves, decreases during drought years and with increasing population density. Reproduction also varies in response to rainfall, with very few calves born after drought years.
It is important for us to recognise that, when we are able to look closely into the lives of wild animals, we must take care not to bring with us the value systems that are more appropriate to our domestic companion animals. Wild lives are different, with different rules and consequences, and that's what makes the chance to understand them so special.
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KL
Even from the tourist's point of view …
Even as a tourist I would think twice whether I want to see a managed park or whether I want to see primordial nature. I strongly prefer the latter (if I can find it at all these days).
To me, wildlife management and nature conservation appear to be two different, irreconcilable choices.
Wildlife management FOR nature conservation...
... is not an oxymoron, and the two are not really irreconcilable. It's just that the thinking behind wildlife management has (or should have) moved on from the old days, when it meant behaving like a farmer and controlling all aspects of animals' lives. It turns out that trying to control populations for reasons of, say, saving pretty trees from being eaten or keeping every animal young and healthy often had unintended effects on the functioning of the ecosystem. And it locked managers into HAVING to keep on controlling and controlling, as the changes they were trying to avoid became ever more likely.
Interestingly, in Kruger Park they found that even with intensive elephant culling over 30 years, the tree populations still continued to change while the elephants reproduced at the maximum rate (a population explosion just waiting to take off), since they were prevented from regulating themselves through food limitation. Nowadays, the wildlife managers have stopped culling all species, allowing populations to fluctuate, and the government has been involved in a long debate over whether, when and how it might allow intervention to control elephant densities. They have just released their conclusions, which state that culling should be considered only as a last resort, when all other options -- including contraception, waterpoint manipulation, range and corridor expansion, translocation -- have been thoroughly considered.
There are few, if any, places where nature is "primordial" if that means untouched by people, since people have shared landscapes with elephants for thousands of years, and our ecological footprints can be found everywhere these days. So ecosystems are always being managed in one way or another, but increasingly managers need to consider how to work with nature and its processes, rather than against them.
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KL