Stop elephant poaching – the state will be doing it anyway in South Africa
South Africa is doing a China. While the latter, even as the
whole world looks on, has not shied of a frantic and fierce crackdown on unarmed freedom hopefuls, South Africa is proposing to sentence a perfectly healthy population to its death, merely for having survived long enough to add up to a sizeable count. South Africa is possibly doing worse thus, for elephants don’t protest.
In the last week of February this year, the Environment Ministry of South Africa issued Norms and Standards towards Elephant Management in the country to be effective from 1 May 2008, which includes among other things culling, none the better quoted as “the option of last resort”. Currently a strength of 20,000, the last time jumbo populations were discussed was in 1995 in a contrasting scenario – instating a ban on elephant killings after their numbers had whittled drastically owing to poaching and habitat encroachment. Eliciting a furious backlash from animal welfare groups, the debate has been particularly jacked up with renowned conservationist Richard Leakey voicing his no-objection to the cull in his very own WildlifeDirect blog, warning against “serious problem unless some key populations are reduced and maintained at appropriate levels.” Michele Pickover of Animal Rights Africa however argues that “…neither the Minister nor any of the pro-culling lobby has been able to produce one shred of evidence to show that there is an ethically or ecologically defensible reason to kill even one elephant in South Africa.”
Both scientifically and ethically, says Raman Sukumar, consummate authority on the Asian elephant and director of the Asian Elephant Research and Conservation Centre, the cull is hardly a remedy. “Next to the primates and cetaceans, the elephants are highly intelligent animals that are sensitive and capable of emotion. To be subjecting a society like theirs to a cull can be traumatising and is certainly not recommended. Besides,” Sukumar explains, “our ecological systems are dynamic in nature. For us to assume the carrying capacity of the land and conclude that x number of elephants in y area is ideal, is unrealistic estimation.”
The debate goes back to the 50s and 60s when relative abundance of elephants resulted in clearing up of woodlands into grasslands. Gradually the jumbos were pushed into smaller and smaller pockets of habitat, where the increasing density of the animals made it difficult for vegetation to replenish at a proportional rate, setting off the spiel on ‘over-population’. “Now, what if there was a drought like the one in Tsavo National Park, wiping out the numbers that we condescend to spare in the cull,” Sukumar reminds us of Nature’s ways of checks and balances. In 1970, a particularly dry period seared dead much of the flora and fauna in the area, establishing the eternal efficacy of Natural Selection as a tool to restore ecological equilibrium, over any man-made “toolbox of options” as Minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk made sound of in his policy statement.
While India has yet to find itself in such a quandary to date, South Africa claims to have learnt its lessons from the last cull, promising to adhere to a “culling plan… with the assistance of (…) a recognised elephant management specialist.” What remains to be understood is that no amount of jargon can disguise the doom inked for the benign beasts, or reason the meddling with the concerns of the already weary Mother Nature.
South Africa is doing a China. While the latter, even as the
whole world looks on, has not shied of a frantic and fierce crackdown on unarmed freedom hopefuls, South Africa is proposing to sentence a perfectly healthy population to its death, merely for having survived long enough to add up to a sizeable count. South Africa is possibly doing worse thus, for elephants don’t protest.In the last week of February this year, the Environment Ministry of South Africa issued Norms and Standards towards Elephant Management in the country to be effective from 1 May 2008, which includes among other things culling, none the better quoted as “the option of last resort”. Currently a strength of 20,000, the last time jumbo populations were discussed was in 1995 in a contrasting scenario – instating a ban on elephant killings after their numbers had whittled drastically owing to poaching and habitat encroachment. Eliciting a furious backlash from animal welfare groups, the debate has been particularly jacked up with renowned conservationist Richard Leakey voicing his no-objection to the cull in his very own WildlifeDirect blog, warning against “serious problem unless some key populations are reduced and maintained at appropriate levels.” Michele Pickover of Animal Rights Africa however argues that “…neither the Minister nor any of the pro-culling lobby has been able to produce one shred of evidence to show that there is an ethically or ecologically defensible reason to kill even one elephant in South Africa.”
Both scientifically and ethically, says Raman Sukumar, consummate authority on the Asian elephant and director of the Asian Elephant Research and Conservation Centre, the cull is hardly a remedy. “Next to the primates and cetaceans, the elephants are highly intelligent animals that are sensitive and capable of emotion. To be subjecting a society like theirs to a cull can be traumatising and is certainly not recommended. Besides,” Sukumar explains, “our ecological systems are dynamic in nature. For us to assume the carrying capacity of the land and conclude that x number of elephants in y area is ideal, is unrealistic estimation.”
The debate goes back to the 50s and 60s when relative abundance of elephants resulted in clearing up of woodlands into grasslands. Gradually the jumbos were pushed into smaller and smaller pockets of habitat, where the increasing density of the animals made it difficult for vegetation to replenish at a proportional rate, setting off the spiel on ‘over-population’. “Now, what if there was a drought like the one in Tsavo National Park, wiping out the numbers that we condescend to spare in the cull,” Sukumar reminds us of Nature’s ways of checks and balances. In 1970, a particularly dry period seared dead much of the flora and fauna in the area, establishing the eternal efficacy of Natural Selection as a tool to restore ecological equilibrium, over any man-made “toolbox of options” as Minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk made sound of in his policy statement.
While India has yet to find itself in such a quandary to date, South Africa claims to have learnt its lessons from the last cull, promising to adhere to a “culling plan… with the assistance of (…) a recognised elephant management specialist.” What remains to be understood is that no amount of jargon can disguise the doom inked for the benign beasts, or reason the meddling with the concerns of the already weary Mother Nature.
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
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