The elephant in the room!

There is a fraternity of conservationists that call the lowveld region of South Africa home. They are a bush-wise, sun-bronzed, khaki-clad, well-meaning faction. They sit around board room tables, their agitated dialogue debating ad nauseum, the over-population of the African elephant. They are rigid in their stance believing that elephants must be culled, as occurred up until 1995, when entire family groups were taken out on the advice of the scientists of the day.  They believed that the carrying capacities of the region must be limited to approximately 7 000 animals in the 2-million-hectare Kruger National Park. This equates to between 4 and 5 elephants per 1000 hectares.

The fact of the matter, however, is that whilst exploding elephant populations looms large on all board-room agendas, numbers across Africa have plummeted! At the turn of the 19^th century, approximately 10 million elephants were roaming the African savannas. Savanna being the operative word! Today, their numbers have reached an all-time low of approximately 415 000, concentrated in the southern countries like Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and South Africa.

As the largest of all land mammals, African elephants play an important role in balancing natural ecosystems. They are efficient feeders and will adapt their diet according to the vegetation available. Although they will strip bark from large trees and browse on the leaves, grass remains their preferred diet, a vital commodity which has all but disappeared from the lowveld in the last 70 years.

From the earliest recordings of the 1800’s, large open tracts of savanna grasslands stretched from the escarpment to the Mozambique coastline. The tapestry of the bushveld changed however in the 1950’s with the advent of mixed cattle and game farming, which necessitated unforgiving fences and artificial water points. This created an invasion of woody bushveld through non-selective over-grazing in the confined areas, and slowly but surely the savanna grasslands of the lowveld  transformed from wide, sweeping plains to dense, grassless woodlands.  Can you imagine the Voortrekkers with their cattle-drawn wagons moving through the woody bushlands of today?

The ill-conceived veterinary control fence that was erected along the western boundary of the Kruger National Park in the early 60’s, ostensibly to control the spread of Foot and Mouth disease is a patent example of a conservation disaster.  Not only did this control fence misread the script for which it was built, but it also halted the east-west zebra and wildebeest migration, depleting the numbers of these important herbivores. The restriction on their movements created unselected over-grazing, the animals could not enjoy their historical free-range playground, and a continual densification of the bush occurred whilst zebra numbers plummeted by 85% and wildebeest by an eye-watering 90%. Free-ranging herds of sable and roan antelope all but disappeared from the lowveld. Approximately 34 years after the fence had gone up, I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Bosman, the head of the South African Department of Veterinary Services, who confirmed in no uncertain terms that the fence was completely ineffective and a waste of time and money! It was a poor decision that had been made by his predecessors.

In April 2022,  WRSA (Wildlife Ranching South Africa) Chairperson, Gerhard Heyneke, delivered a commentary on Pretoria FM on the so-called elephant overpopulation in the Kruger National Park.

Mr. Heyneke, like most conservationists, is of the dogmatic view that the elephant population in the Kruger National Park is ‘’destructively out of control and causing immense damage to the biodiversity within the park.’’ He recalled, with horror, a study that was completed at Satara, which revealed a massive decline in the number of mature trees per hectare, the others having fallen victim to the elephant population. What he and the conservation world at large fail to grasp is that the elephants are simply farming the land on a great scale, desperately trying to return it to its former grassland glory.

My personal observations on the Thornybush Nature Reserve, after the removal of the northern and eastern Timbavati boundary fence in 2017, which allowed for the free movement of Kruger elephants, show seedbeds naturally flourishing beneath the protective wooden cages that the fallen tree trunks and branches provide. These “elephant cages” create a giant mulching  green-house effect for the young seedbeds to prosper, the soils are kept cooler, and all sorts of micro-organisms prosper below the fallen branches. The seedbeds are secured from the smaller herbivores, giving the grasses time to grow, and allowing seeds to disperse before being eaten.  I have been involved with the Thornybush Nature Reserve for the past forty years, and I can safely say that I have never seen the grasses on the reserve look better, which is all thanks to the fence removal and farming operations of the Kruger elephants, ably assisted by the vast buffalo herds that traverse the reserve.

Considering this unnaturally changing lowveld landscape, I am adamant in my belief that the solution to the supposed over-population of elephants is to create corridors stretching from the escarpment through the vast inlands of Mozambique toward the coastline, avoiding densely populated areas. This will allow these mega-herbivores the freedom to traverse and farm the land as they so successfully did throughout the grasslands of Africa in the previous centuries. Funding on the international stage to fence off the populated communities and establish consistent water points along the corridors will be raised with ease, and the elephants will be able to continue with their large-scale farming activities for the betterment of all flora and fauna, without threatening the rural communities. This is a far more acceptable solution, as opposed to the unpalatable answer of murdering family-groups of this keystone species.

Grass is the doctor of poor soils and returning the land back to the savanna grasslands that they once were, will improve the soil quality, the root foundations of a healthy environment.  The regional water shortages will also be reduced, as this is exacerbated by the thirsty trees competing to survive in the dense woodlands that have engulfed the historical grasslands during the last 70 years.

In 1995, culling of elephants in the greater Kruger region was halted due to international pressure by green activists. This was without the current indispensable modern-day social media accessories that consume every waking (and walking) moment of most millennials. I can only imagine the damage that would be done on the world stage to South Africa, especially the tourism industry, should a culling policy be adopted again, especially as the solution to this man-made problem is a very feasible one, with wide-reaching positive consequences.

There is also the option of repopulating the countries to the far north of us, whose anti-poaching activities are up to scratch. Relocations of entire elephant herds in the past have been hugely successful.  This would also send out a positive message to the many international NGO’s that support countless conservation activities in Africa. I hear it said so often by the various NGO spokespeople that Africa does not know what it wants: on the one hand it sends out a begging bowl to save a certain species, but on the other hand it advocates killing them!

We simply cannot continue to peddle the rhetoric of culling, whilst our ecosystems, dependent on this keystone species, are altered by a man-made storyline.

Like us, elephants live in family groups, their emotions reflect those of our own. They play, they love, they dream, they grieve. They are as we are!  They don’t need us, but we undoubtedly need them if our fragile lowveld ecosystems are to survive!

 

Trevor Jordan

Conservationist

January 2023