The problem with elephants is that they don't display significant density-dependent population regulation - i.e. they destroy habitat, eat themselves and everything else out of house and home and still their population carries on growing at 6-7% per annum. The serious studies that I've read show that at high densities they either destroy habitat to such an extent that they starve en masse, they are forced to move away from their home ranges, or they get killed by people who come into conflict with them.

In much of Africa they can't move somewhere else (i.e. out of protected areas) without coming into conflict with people. Elephants destroy crops and trample children - it's not a joke. People get angry and shoot them.

No one I've ever met in the conservation sector in SA relishes the thought of killing elephants - they simply don't see another option if they are to preserve the basic structure of the habitat that so many other species are reliant on in our big parks.

The contraceptives that have been tried are a) insanely expensive to administer and b) cause serious behavioural change in the animals (mother elephants trampling youngsters to death in fits of rage etc.) New contraceptives are being tested now that may work better - but they're not yet proven viable.

i find the protests by the so-called animal rights and animal welfare groups around this issue disingenious and in many cases fraudulent. IFAW, for one, has raised a fortune in international donations around the issue, but their role within the country has been extraordinarily counterproductive - and it's a mystery as to where the money they've raised has really gone. they stand up at conferences and abuse scientists who are trying to figure the issue out - they aren;t fond of any form of rational argument. When the science goes against their narrow views, they pay other scientists to counter those views with some of the worst, most poorly thought-out 'scientific research projects' that I've ever seen - one claimed to show that elephants, in fact, DID naturally slow their population growth as their densities increased. the only problem was that the data cited included parks in East Africa where poaching was rampant - any drop-off in population growth was due to the ellies being nailed by AK-wielding gangsters, not natural density-dependent population regulation...

South Africa has been extremely good at protecting its megafauna from poachers. It has generally managed parks very well. As a result the parks are bursting at the seams with now-abundant elephants (and even the increasingly abundant rhinos of two species the country single-handedly saved from extinction). This is a problem. Somehow, we need to reduce the numers of elephant in our parks, and we cannot just put them all on trucks and send them away - because, usually, there is no away, and getting there is beyond our budgets. The expansion of the Kruger Park into Zimbabwe and Mozambique has run into walls of problems (least of all, mega biofuels farms) and even if a million hectares were added to the Park it would only soak up a few years' population increase.

Gristers would do well to realise that there aren't perfect solutions to all problems, and to ignore the shrill sound of the IFAW fundraisers at work. If a non-lethal, financially- and practically-viable solution to the problem of elephant overpopulation were to come along tomorrow, the national parks would leap at it.

Again, no-one in the parks wants to kill elephants. The implication that they're bloodthirsty monsters is offensive and incorrect.

Cheers

Whiskerfish (in southern Africa)

Whiskerfish

There are far too many deer; they destroy forest ecosystems by overeating vegetation, they get killed on our roads every day (and are a significant hazard to drivers) and when a bad winter comes through, many of them starve to death.

No one who cares about animal welfare wants to see a beautiful animal shot down; but who wants to see them starve to death and hit by cars?  No one wants to introduce their natural predator (wolves), so the painful choice is to let them overrun and starve, or to organize hunts.

It's a crappy choice, make no mistake, but I think any concerned animal lover should think beyond the knee-jerk reaction of "No!"

I don't know how many natural predators the elephant may have; lions, I guess?  Are there simply not enough of them in the protected parks to keep the elephant population in check?  

And I see we've got another human worshiping poster who's so rabid he can't even make a rational argument or even statement about the human overpopulation problem.  Welcome Whiskerfish.  Answer this:  How could human overpopulation NOT be the problem when elephants have existed in nature for tens of thousands of years without a problem?  This is strictly a human-created problem, not one of nature's making.  By reducing their habitat, humans have created a situation where elephants don't have enough to eat or enough room to roam.  Reduce human population, leave enough room for the elephants, problem solved.

Kaela, you are sort of right to compare the overpopulation of elephants in SA to overpopulation of white-tailed deer in the US Northeast and elsewhere.  You are sort of wrong, though, because African elephants are quite different, behavior-wise and, perhaps, intelligence-wise, from white-tailed deer.  We KNOW that the elephants' family connexions, of several kinds, mean a great deal to them; we KNOW that they suffer greatly when a relative is killed; we KNOW that they review and retouch, with great solemnity, the bones of killed relatives.

I have nothing against white-tailed deer, nor do I have any wish to underestimate their intelligence.  But we do not have evidence of profound sociality, as we do in the case of elephants.  "Bambi" aside, the deer strategy seems to be, the better that more of the others get killed, because that means more to eat for me and my fauns.

But that is not the elephant ethics at all.  See Barbara Gowdy's "The White Bone," a novel in the tradition of Jack London that I have recommended a few times already in Gristmill.

As for "culling": The word is a lie.  It connotes the harmless picking of pretty flowers.  Serious people ought to excise it from their vocabulary.

As for IFAW: Having read Gristmill for a couple of years now, I am more and more disturbed by how BINGOs, with excellent ethical foundations, have managed to disturbed local activists in conservation and animal welfare.  A recent commenter in Gristmill, Geraldine, a saluki breeder in California (?), whom I love and admire greatly, has disturbed me greatly by her accusations against Wayne Pacelle and the HSUS.

With both IFAW and the HSUS, it makes no sense to condemn them wholesale.  They may make decisions about funds allocations which are controversial; they may make decisions that are locally destructive; they may seem to be influenced too much by ideologues; they may become insensitive to local sentiments and consultations.  That is indeed a very serious problem, which it is our responsibility to let them know about, in no uncertain terms.  But it is certainly not a reason to denounce them utterly.

As for Wolverine: So far from burying him in a cave, I would gladly make him front-page editor of the New York Times.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

1. Right - we all know that human overpopulation is the problem. My point - that neither of you seem to have grasped - is that short of both of you coming over here with a few Gatling guns and a really big pile of ammunition and splattering half the people in my part of the world to bits, there is no realistic chance of reducing the human population around (and IN) the areas (parks) that elephants currently occupy for the next century or so. If you don't feel like machine-gunning people, you can get down on your knees and pray that the AIDS epidemic in these countries expands and the people die in agony away from your hand - y'know, to keep your nose clean.

2. Within the next few years elephant populations will have reached the level that they will have changed the structure of the habitat within parks so that whole communities of species will have gone extinct. By retaining elephants you will in effect have signed the death warrant for a dozen large eagle and vulture species which need tall trees to breed in, and which cannot survive outside large parks like Kruger (elephant have already caused localised extinctions in smaller parks bordering Kruger, like Timbavati).

3. If you'd done any real research into IFAW, Canis, you'd realise that they pay their top people insane amounts of cash, that their founder (Davies) loves animals so much he squeezed millions of dollars of 'marketing rights' out of his organisation when he left, and now lives in a sickeningly large mansion in Florida from where he likes to commute by private jet. The founder of the South African arm of IFAW (Barritt) was an advertising man with no experience with animals who rose to fame by being the spokesperson and PR agent of South Africa's biggest fraudster (Brett Kebble, killed under suspicious circumstances a few years ago). Also, they bleat about cruelty to animals, but when offered the chance to buy out the Namibian sealing rights for a trivial sum to end the truly cruel seal 'harvest' that takes place annually there, they turned the offer down (their American donors don't really know where Namibia is, and without the annual gruesome slaughter there would be no outrage to raise more money off).

4. Elephants have no natural predators (aside form one renegade pride of lions in Botswana that has leaned to bring the big beasts down). There is now archaeological evidence that for tens of thousand so of years their numbers have been regulated by (ta da) humans. Yes folks, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, co-evolved with elephants, and long ago learned how to kill them... What do you say to that? Elephants have quite probably evolved their bizarre density-independent and very fast population growth to cope with aeons of human predation!

5. We know elephants grieve. That's why modern culling operations take out whole groups in a matter of minutes - so that there's no-one left to grieve.

6. If you have the solution to human and elephant population growth in southern Africa please come on over here and sort the problem out. I can assure you that loads of people have spent decades trying to do just that in the most humane and practical ways possible. Do you have the foggiest clue how much money it takes to move tens of thousands of elephants thousands of miles to reserves in say, Angola (pretty much the only country in the subregion with a low elephant population)? Do you know how much stress and trauma that causes to the animals? Even if the 1 million hectare Limpopo Park were effectively added to Kruger's 2 million hectares it would take LESS THAN TWO DECADES for elephant population numbers in the area to have shot beyond the limit where other species start being wiped out due to profound habitat change?

You're asking for the perfect answer. You're asking for some sort of ideal world without suffering. You're living in a dream, as only those in privileged societies where few have to truly fight to survive.

Go and speak to the woman who just lost a child to an elephant in the Limpopo Park of Mozambique - an area where I've recently travelled - and tell her she needs to move off her ancestral land because the Americans want to come and take pictures of wildlife. Please go - and then we'll talk.

Cheers

Whiskerfish

Perhaps I was misleading before:  

I have NO answer just yet, and no confidence that I could come anywhere close to giving an answer that is even halfway "perfect."  I agree generally with Wolverine that human overpopulation is the biggest part of the problem, as seen at large scale; but that hardly helps us come up with a solution RIGHT NOW, to there being lots of elephants, lots of people and lots of other critters, all needing to use the same space, water, trees, etc.

I am certainly not ignorant of one hugely important thing that Kaela (KMP) warned about.  She is very right, that the proliferation of elephants in some parts of Africa, and the proliferation of white-tailed deer in some parts of North America, are quite comparable, with regard to the consequential destruction of plant life in a number of ecosystems, which puts great stress on very many plants and other animals.  Because of human conduct, deer and elephants now have come to look like "pest species" in many areas.  And that, needless to say, is very sad.  Thanks for the advisory about the endangered eagles and vultures, about which I did not know.

I do not condone the actions or decisions of IFAW, or of any other conservationist BINGO.  I have glimpsed Africa from a ship in the Strait of Gibraltar, but have never been there; nevertheless, formally, I know where Namibia is.  And I regret if a seal slaughter could have been stopped there, but was not, because that would have meant some hypocritical rich people's losing a bit of money.  I remember very well your complaining in the past of conservationist BINGOs' doing far too little to save the northern population of the White Rhino.

That said, I continue to believe that there are plenty of lower-level people in BINGOs who understand what needs to be done, and who are effective at getting something done.  Also, the desire of donors to help by giving bespeaks a great goodness which cannot be crushed.

And it would be highly desirable for an up-and-coming environmentalist journalism outfit such as Grist to do an investigation of the leading ten or twenty environmentalist or conservationist BINGOs, inquiring about such matters as: who are the people in charge, how well off are they, how are decisions made on allocations of funds, how honest are the fund-raising appeals, and so forth.

I would not know what to say to a human mother whose child was killed by an elephant from the neighborhood.  I would very much like to meet her, and to listen to her.  But I would not know what to say to her.  I certainly would not tell her that her family were foolish for living where they were living.

But by the same token, killing elephants is NOT going to be the simple answer.  In the short term, sure: one side in a competition wins, the other side loses.  Whatever "side" is supposed to mean.  But elephants and people have hearts, and have memories.  In the long term, people are destroying themselves, by allowing themselves to believe that they can always end their land-use problems by killing a herd of elephants, or killing any other kind of inconvenient animal.  This is a great evil, and I will not stop speaking against it.

As I said above, I am not prescribing an answer, of any kind.  But I know that killing canNOT be the answer.  And that does not at all mean that I am granting a greater privilege to elephants than to humans or to other animals.  Indeed, it strikes me as bitterly ironic, that trying to look out for the welfare of elephants might be interpreted as an unwarranted privilege at everyone's expense, when in fact human beings have for millennia been assuming that privilege for their own species, such that any counter-quibble is considered to be evil, monstrous and unnatural.

The verb "to cull" is defined thus in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary:
<<

1. to select from a group : choose ("culled the best passages from the poet's work")
   
2. to identify and remove the culls from.
   

And the noun "cull":
<<
something rejected esp. as being inferior or worthless ("how to separate good-looking pecans from culls" -- Washington Post).
>>

Reasonable, honest, courageous people should not resort to euphemisms.  "Cull," standing for the slaughter of a select group of animals, is a euphemism.  I.e., a kind of lie, to yourself, and to others.  Be honest enough to call that action what it is: thoughtful, pre-meditated slaughter.  And let us eliminate such cold and brutal euphemisms as "cull" from our vocabulary.

As for "modern culling operations," sympathetic to the grief of elephants: That makes no ethical sense whatsoever.  You have an ethical problem, a child witnessing the death of its mother, which experience is now impressed in its heart: so the solution is, murder the child after you have murdered the mother?

As I said above, I have no answer.  And I most certainly see that transportation of elephants is highly stressful.  Whether that remains the only option -- and God knows what the destination of the transplanted elephants might be -- , is quite obscure.  Nevertheless, one thing is plain as day: Killing is NEVER going to be the answer.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

There is an essential difference between the human conduct that has allowed deer to become 'pests', and elephants to become 'pests'. In the case of the deer, it was the destruction of their natural predators. In the case of elephants, it was protection of the animals themselves.

If you want to call animals 'pests' - which I will follow for the sake of this argument - then this is key.

A 'solution' to the deer 'problem' could be to reintroduce natural predators to the northeastern USA, where they are now extinct. In other words, to make the ecosystem they inhabit more 'natural'.

However, it is precisely by making the ecosystem more 'natural' and excluding 'human' factors (like humans themselves, and the modifications they bring to the landscape) that they have ben alowed to thrive.

When the Kruger Park was established about a century ago there were no known elephants in it - none. They had all been shot by ivory hunters. Over the years, elephants from neighbouring Mozambique moved into the area (being rather intelligent, they realised they were safer there than in Moz where they were still being hunted). Today, despite decades of culling by the Park authorities that stopped only in 1994 (at least 400 animals were killed every year) elephant numbers in the park are heading for 20 000. That's the result of excluding most of the human interference in their environment. If you look at studies of east African parks where elephants ahve been shielded from poaching (very few parks have succeeded in this) you'll see the same pattern - insane population rises, until there are no trees left except of fenced-off ones.

In other words deer become pests when humans interfere with the ecosystems they inhabit, and elephants become pests when we leave their habitat 'to nature'.

I don;t see how you can be so sure that killing is not the answer. Perhaps - we don;t know for sure - it 'always' was.

Cheers

Whiskerfish

To avoid having dangerous and deranged beasts rampaging through the veld it's now thought better to ensure that the whole social group is killed at once.

Again, if this sounds sick or perverted, I understand. Like I've said before, I've never met anyone in the parks service who likes killing elephants.

But when last in the US I stumbled upon an ESPN 'sport' hunting channel that showed an ego-maniacal American getting very excited about it. He really enjoyed killing his elephant.

Cheers

Whiskerfish

However, it is precisely by making the ecosystem more 'natural' and excluding 'human' factors (like humans themselves, and the modifications they bring to the landscape) that ELEPHANTS have been allowed to thrive.

Cheers

Whiskerfish

I'm assuming you catch the human angle of your observation regarding elephants' growth rates being irrespective of surrounding resources.  The fact is, this behavior quite precisely mirrors human patterns.  I'm sure that conflict between two dominant species with 'insane' population growth rates is inevitable.  I disagree with your analysis of the solution, but cannot see how this conflict could not happen.

That said, how can the slaughter of entire social groups be an acceptable solution?  You repeat that no one takes joy in this alternative, but I don't see how having a workmanlike attitude towards wiping out whole families of highly intelligent and sensitive creatures makes things 'better'.  We're not talking about a species where one has to grasp at straws to create anthropomorphic sympathies - surely you must see why the proposition of culling is distressing to discerning individuals.

As for preferring elephants over humans or other such nonsense, turn your keen mathematical sense the other way.  Human populations continue to grow unchecked, creating conflicts over shrinking resources and all but guaranteeing long periods of starvation and war in the future.  Humans have always come in conflict with one another as well as other species, but humans have not always has the capacity for such broad scale slaughter.  Even if one does not care about elephants or rhinos or other charismatic megafauna, it's just a matter of time before the human question must be dealt with.  Once every other mammal on the planet larger than a rat has been eradicated, we will only have one another to turn upon.  Is the solution 'culling' human social groups to prevent this from happening?  Or is that too abhorrent to contemplate?

As canis has said, killing cannot be the answer.  The conflict with ever-expanding elephant populations is hardly the first or the last of its kind.  If we intend on learning to share this planet with more than dogs and cats, we need to LEARN how to manage populations - our own as well as others - effectively.  Perhaps contraception is not a great option at this point, but eventually it must be.  Otherwise we will be forever locked in an infinite spiral of destruction, contemplating all living creatures - human or otherwise - as either tools or nuisances that must be dealt with accordingly.

As to having sympathy for people who've lost loved ones from elephant attacks (talk "to the woman who just lost a child to an elephant"), why don't you go talk to the elephant who just lost family AND habitat due to extreme human overpopulation.  There's absolutely no comparison between elephant and human populations.  Despite some elephant "refuges," in which they are still not adequately protected from humans, elephant populations are far lower than they were before humans overpopulated, while human population has reached the level of being a cancer on the Earth.

Finally, Whiskerfish apparently does not understand that elephant populations were fine until humans began ruining or removing their habitat.  Elephants populations were in ecological harmony with their surroundings for thousands of years, and whatever slight difference the small number of human killings might have made cannot possibly explain this fact.  It is absurd to posit that a few human killings of elephants could control their population.

1. The CURRENT human population is the issue, among other things - reducing it requires a machine-gun or something else - contraception etc. will take decades to make any noticeable difference. By which time the elephants will have stripped the large protected areas bare.

2. You clearly didn't read the earlier emails - and you also have a non-African prejudice about 'how things were before humans arrived' (you also clearly don't understand this thing called evolution - i.e. there was no 'original state' where animals all lived in some sort of Disneylike harmony - their physical make up ('genes'), behavioural makeup ('memes') change all the time as circumstances change. To re-iterate: Humans evolved in Africa a very long time ago: Given the evidence we have & elephant's strange, density-independent and very rapid population growth it its likely that humans have been their main population regulator (i.e. humans have been killing them) for a very long time, like tens of thousands of years. So yes - elephant populations may have been 'fine' (whatever that means) - but they were 'fine' in the context of people (hunting them) and fire (burning them) and occasional bouts of mass starvation... their current population growth has probably to do with the removal of human predation, and the protection of most herds form truly gigantic and inescapable bushfires (the national parks traditionally burn small areas) ,etc.

If you choose to look into the human influence in the recentish evolution of entire African ecosystems - particularly grassland and savanna systems - you might have your eyes opened just a little bit - without people, it's likely that the great grasslands of the Serengeti would never have formed - those millions of ungulates have, over thousands of years, evolved to take advantage of a human-created system - had early people not been around to set fires, the place might still have been a very dense woodland - with no zebras or wildebeests in it!

N America lost large numbers of large species to the first wave of human colonisation approx 20-30 000 yrs ago. this thing about native Americans being in 'harmony' with the natural environment is garbage. When the european settlers arrived they found 'native' people in 'harmony' with an environment they (natives) had largely shaped - without many of the species that had been there before they (natives) had arrived (like N American cheetah - why does the pronghorn run so fast?). So your views are very narrow in terms of their time perspective.

think about that - and then think about the implications for elephants in Africa.

Cheers

Whiskerfish

Why would African elephants have evolved this aggressive way of interacting with humans had humans not been an 'enemy' for a very long time? It took less than a thousand years for very primitively-armed early human colonists of South America to wipe out that continent's FIVE known species of native elephants - probably because they elephants do not see humans as a threat...

Cheers

Whiskerfish

By the way, I earlier put "pest species" quite by design in inverted commas.  The term "pest" I find morally questionable, since the connotation is "You are obliged to shoot (or otherwise destroy) members of this species on sight; you are justified in using all kinds of cruel methods to eradicate them."  It works for pathogenic microbes, to which "cruelty" does not apply.  And it works, perhaps, for certain invertebrates, e.g. some insects.  But it does not really work for any vertebrate, not even cane toads, snakehead fish and rats.  We might be able to justify quick killing, but never cruelty.

Unfortunately, your linked site on historic relations between humans and elephants does not want to open up for me; perhaps it is the wrong time of day.

I believe you, when you have said more than once that human beings can kill elephants, and have been able to do so for a few thousand years.  But I would be very surprised if humans in Africa regularly preyed upon elephants, or indeed had occasion to kill them often.  Prior to the introduction of firearms, killing an elephant was doable, but was not at all easy.

Here in North America, it is still a matter of controversy, whether the coincidence of the appearance of weapons-wielding human beings with the extinction of many members of the Pleistocene fauna is meaningful.  Having a huge distrust of archeologists' big pronouncements (though of course I generally have great respect for them), I would rather hold off on judging the human beings to be responsible for an extinction event.

The co-evolution of the very swift American cheetah and the very swift pronghorn antelope is often commented on.  It strikes me that the persistence of the pronghorn is excellent evidence AGAINST the hypothesis that human hunters were responsible for the Pleistocene extinction event.  The hunters might indeed have been hunting pronghorns (and certainly not cheetahs!); but pronghorns would not have been easy prey for human hunters, having neither horses nor firearms; therefore the demise of the American cheetah was due to neither the disappearance of pronghorns -- because they did not disappear -- nor to their being hunted by humans -- who it would be unreasonable to think hunted them.  So, what happened, which killed off the poor cheetahs?

I do not think that our ideas about the religious regard of people in hunter/gatherer societies, including the Cro-Magnon cave-painters, and both prehistoric and historical Native Americans, toward animals, should be allowed to become overly simple.  "Nuance is good!," is a motto of mine.  In this country, many of us have sentimentally come to believe that Native Americans are great friends and protectors of animals.  Well, yes and no.  The "buffalo jump" indicates that Native Americans could be quite ruthless and thoughtless, regarding the suffering and death of animals, with no foresight into the health of the bison.  But there are many other accounts of animal killing done with careful selectivity and sensitivity.

Great thanks to PBrazelton, for her many observations of great sensitivity.  On the vulnerability of elephants, and their recently learned dread of human beings, at personal cost, I cannot help recommending yet again the very well researched novel, "The White Bone," by Barbara Gowdy.

Thanks again to you, Whiskerfish, for testifying to the anguish of the armed park personnel, assigned with the task of killing elephants, a task most distasteful to them.  We animal-rightsists (typical of all kinds of activists) have got into the habit of leaping too hastily into demonization-mode.  We are wrong; we MUST appreciate the deep feelings, concerns and interests of all human beings.

And thanks to the ever-brilliant Wolverine -- who refuses to say whether he has named himself for the much-feared, persistent, dauntless, malodorous, ever-ornery Mustelid of North America, or the homonymous X-Man played by Hugh Jackman -- especially for his terrific closing remark, that "culling operations" against elephants obviously cannot work, really, in any wise way, because in a matter of time there will just be more elephants in the same unhappy situation.  PBrazelton made a similar point.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

1. The link was a news story about an unarmed park ranger who was killed by an elephant yesterday here in South Africa. He had apparently done nothing to provoke the animal. Unarmed rangers of experience (as he was) have enormous respect for elephants and don't screw about with them - but ellies behave unpredictably sometimes. We think of humans with guns as a dangerous menace - fast- moving beasts weighing several tons and fronted with dangerous tusks are also lethal!

2. African cheetahs are extraordinarily sensitive beasts. They are extremely vulnerable to habitat disruptions (because of their hunting methods, they need open spaces of certain kinds) and the way they den makes their young very easy to find and, thus, for predators (inc lions and humans) to kill. This is the main reason why they are so rare in Africa today, versus lions that are still fairly common in some areas and leopards, which are very good at evading detection and move at night and thus survive even on the edges of big cities. If American cheetahs were equally sensitive - which they probably were, given the similarity - they would have been very vulnerable to humans and human changes to the landscape. So I think it entirely possible that humans contributed to their demise. African cheetahs are also not very dangerous to humans, vs lions which are.

3. Killing elephants is certainly do-able without firearms - dig a pit trap in a gorge, set a fire to scare them, and chase the beasts in. Elephant meat is still hugely sought-after in many African communities. (All the meat from the previous culls in Kruger was either given to local communities fresh or canned and sent all over Africa.) Although killing ellies is harder than killing small antelope, the rewards in terms of meat yield and prestige to the hunters make it worthwhile.

4. I don't buy the thing that elephants have 'recently learned' a fear of humans - it's sentimental claptrap. Today, in areas where elephants aren't bothered by humans, you can walk within 20 yards of them before they get pissed off or worried. In areas with high poaching, you can't get near them without them running off or charging you. They're very smart and adapt behaviour to circumstances. We've recently had a wave of very aggressive elephants coming over into northern South Africa, escaping rampant poaching in Zimbabwe's near-lawless south. The local elephants  are very relaxed around people.

5. Of course culling isn't a once-off, permanent solution to elephant overpopulation. But - here's what the IFAW crowd deliberately miss - neither is expanding parks, because the elephants will just carry on expanding (in numbers) to fill them, and then overfill them - check out that population growth curve, folks!

Whiskerfish

"how things were before humans arrived"?

Who said anything about how things were before humans?  All I said was that it's implausible that pre-agricultural humans could have killed enough elephants to have a significant effect on the latter's populations.  Perhaps I'm mistaken (even a wolverine isn't perfect), but it would take very strong evidence to convince me of your theory, which sounds absurd.  Moreover, I fully realize that humans evolved in the tropical savanna of Africa, which, BTW, excludes South Africa.  Too bad for the rest of the planet that humans didn't stay there.

"(you also clearly don't understand this thing called evolution - i.e. there was no 'original state' where animals all lived in some sort of Disneylike harmony"?

Again, I didn't say anything about living in harmony, I said their population was in harmony with their natural surroundings.  In other words, they were in ecological balance regarding their numbers.

"if national parks would let a million acres burn at a time - like used to happen - and hundreds of ellies fried to death - IFAW & HSUS and Wolverine would be all over them for their barbaric management practices"?

You couldn't be more wrong.  I strongly oppose artificial suppression of natural wildfires.  Those wildfires are not only natural, but are a necessary part of the ecosystems where they occur, and unnatural suppression has led to much ecological damage, including unnaturally large and hot fires due to "fuel" built up from suppression.

"this thing about native Americans being in 'harmony' with the natural environment is garbage"?

I didn't say a word about Native Americans.  That said, traditional indigenous people all over are far more in harmony with nature than modern humans.

Caniscandida, to answer your query, I'll just say that I know of the comic and movies, but I didn't name myself after a fictional character.

I like your point about our all being Africans really, which I make in class from time to time.  Whether it was tragic that our ancestors moved out of Africa and settled other continents is hard to say.  Certainly they brought much sorrow and destruction.  But often enough there seems to have been a kind of punctuated equilibrium in their traditional, land-based lifestyles, in which they adapted to their environment, and other living creatures in that place -- the survivors at least -- adapted to them.

Whiskerfish,
I am sorry to hear about the death of the unarmed park ranger.  There have been a considerable number of reports lately, haven't there, of elephants behaving with unusual aggression, not only against people, but even attacking rhinoceroses and cattle.  My understanding is that behaviorists' explanations tend to emphasize the unusually great pressure of human populations, especially poachers but not only them; but also, the decimation, by poachers, of many of the older generation who should be there to teach the young ones traditional elephant wisdom and etiquette, in the absence of which instruction the young elephants become undisciplined thugs.

I was just reading in a newsletter from the New England Aquarium that some of their specialists in the highly endangered northern right whale, Eubalaena glacialis, of which only 400 remain, last year visited the Auckland Islands off the southern tip of New Zealand, to observe those waters' large and stable population of southern right whales, E. australis.  The two species may not even be fully separable yet, even if they are far sundered; they are certainly very closely related.  Therefore, the people from NEAq were stunned by how healthy, plump and unscarred the southern whales were, and also by their exuberant curiosity in coming to examine the research vessels.  By contrast the northern whales are mostly scarred and beat up, by entanglements in one or another kind of line or cable, or by encounters with keels and propellers; and they tend to be timid and mistrustful in the presence of boats.  But the contrast is not hard to explain: the northern right whales live in what the NEAq people call the "urbanized North Atlantic," off the coast between Florida and Nova Scotia; but the southern right whales rarely come into contact with human beings at all.

We may note in passing that the NEAq give an honorable mention to IFAW for helping to fund their conservation efforts on behalf of the northern right whale.

On the American cheetah: Yes, I see your point.  The African cheetah is said to have a hard time defending its prey from lions, leopards and hyenas; and the American cheetah would have similarly been put under stress if human hunters made a concerted relentless effort to deprive them of their kills.

Still, the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna must have been a very complex episode.  So far as large cats go, it may be reasonable to speculate that Smilodon spp. were overly specialized on the very large hoofed animals (proboscideans) who also went extinct at this time.  But why did the American lion go extinct?  It ought to have done very well with all of the hoofed animals who have survived to the present.  My guess is that it was outcompeted at least as much by the gray wolf as by human beings.  It was probably gray wolves who drove the dire wolf to extinction too.

On expanding parks not being the answer for dealing with increasing numbers of elephants: Yes, that is a good point.  As an interim solution, though, it is still better than killing, even though the parks will necessarily look less and less like true wilderness, and more and more like a maintained terrarium.

I allow that human beings of traditional African cultures with pre-industrial technologies may have hunted elephants more often and regularly than I suggested before.  But I find it hard to believe that their predation would have been a major limiting factor affecting elephant numbers.  There must have been more going on, keeping elephants from crowding every corner of the continent.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

1. re elephants in 'harmony with natural environment' - elephants' "natural environment" has included significant numbers of humans for (at least) tens of millennia. i.e. human predation has been part of the environment that our present-day elephants have evolved to live in. Very early pre-humans may have evolved in east-central Africa but their followers spread all over the continent very rapidly after something approximating early Homo sapiens / post-Homo erectus came into being. Trying to say that southern Africa is somehow different is bollocks - we have archeaological evidence from the Sterkfontein Cave and from Blombos Cave (near Cape Town) that all sorts of humanoids have been far south for very long. The frequency of large fires has also been raised by the presence of humans for a long time. So humans are and have been a major source of elephant mortality.

2. Given that humans raise the frequency of fires, they've also lowered their intensity (fuel does not build up as much) - again, for tens of thousands of years, humans have done in Africa the opposite of what they have recently done in North America. Think on the implications of that.

3. Do a websearch on some recent big fires on Kruger and the outpouring of international sympathy for the burned elephants that were found wandering around with strips of skin hanging of them and which were euthanased or rehabilitated at great expense instead of being allowed to die in agony over weeks (which is what would have happened 'naturally'). Now go figure what would happen if our large parks would deliberately set large - more 'natural' - fires and this would happen to hundreds of ellies every year. Never mind what you think of large fires - HSUS and IFAW and their fellow carpetbaggers have the political and financial muscle to make things very shitty for southern African park managers.

4. The parks try to avoid large fires because fires cause localised extinctions (think like tortoises and other small animals get wiped out within the fire zone). Since so much netural habitat has been destroyed in teh past century many parks are now islands of natural habitat surrounded by agriculture or urban areas or whatever. e.g. if you kill off all the tortoises in a park there are no tortoises nearby to repopulate the park after the fire - so if you want to maintain species diversity in teh park you are limited to small fires - which generally don't kill elephants.

5. If modern parks are to maintain biodiversity - as many wild species as possible - they have to be managed. This means that certain keystone species need to ahve their numbers manipulated. This means fires have to be carefully planned and restricted in area. This is an unavoidable reality. The world is diffent now tahn it was just 100 years ago. We have to understand islands and start applying the lessons of island biogeography to park management. It's no accident that islands have lost such a phenomenal percntage of their species in the last 2 000 years, as humans have colonised them - we've got to stop this happening to our parks.

6. re 'traditional indigenous people all over are far more in harmony with nature than modern humans' - you mised my point - they appear to be in harmony with 'nature' because it is a 'nature' that they shaped before the previous version was recorded! There is more and more evidence that even very early humans profoundly altered natural environments in virtually every colonisation. Go read about how Australian aborigianls have been fire-managing that continent for 40 000 years - and how modern wildlife managers are having to emulate their human-set fires to maintain biodiversity - because so many Australian animals are adapte d to human-set fires! Australia looked very diffrent before the aborigianls arrived.

6. Even if you wanted to, you cannot go killing off humans. Never mind the moral aspect - humans themselves will stop you killing them off. You will not succeed in your mission. Think about that.

7. Knowing what we know about elephants I would like to see them managed as humanely as possible. Besides the earlier points re maintaining biodiversity and large fires, I don;t think it's humane to conrol ellie populations by burning them in mega-fires and letting many die in agony, even if that more natural than shooting them. A top marksman with a large-calibre rifle can kill an elephant very quickly - and national parks has some extremely professional marksmen at their service. During the pre-1994 culls they tried to consistenly improve their techniques to make the cull as humane as possible - tehy tried various euthanasing drugs instead of shooting with bullets (until Scoline was discovered to be painful) and by 1994 had refined the technique so that a team of trained marksmen in helicopters and on the ground could kill a whole social group in under 2 minutes. Many farm animals die more cruelly in modern 'humane' abbatoirs. Of course, some sort of contraception would be an even better option - but the current contraceptives, as I've said before, cause behavioural changes in elephants that make them kill and harass other elephants - which is also not humane. They are also very expensive. Science has not yet produced an affordable contraceptive that does not cause social chaos among the animals. When such a drug does appear, I'm sure national parks will grab it
   

My general point is that we live in a world that is profoundly different to that of even 100 years ago. Thinks that would have been practically and politically possible then are not now, and vice versa. Within our current world there is no 'going back to nature'. IF we wish to amintain as mcuh biodiversity as possible we need to manage the remnants of 'wild' and semi-wild systems as best we can. Within that process there are unavoidable tradeoffs - and you don't seem to have understood that at all. There are financial, political and skills limitations that North Americans can't seem to come close to grasping unless they've spent time here. We have to work within those.

Cheers

Whiskerfish

http://www.iucnredlist.org/search/details.php/12392/all.

An article in the latest issue of Best Friends Magazine (which is available at bestfriends.org, but only if you have a membership) highlights the work of Dr. Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle.  Wasser wants to do what he can to help law enforcement agencies in Africa stop the poaching of elephants, motivated by the illegal trade in ivory and engineered by criminal organizations in China and Japan.  He collected DNA samples from populations of elephants in many African countries, and was therefore able to trace the tusks and ivory cylinders which were recently seized in large amounts in Singapore and Hong Kong to Zambia, and to another country whose name he is not free at this time to disclose.  Already the government of Zambia has taken steps to correct mismanagement and corruption there.

Wasser observed the elephant population of Tanzania's huge Selous Game Reserve and ecosystem plummet from 100,000 to 30,000 just between 1979 and 1989, in which year the ban on the international ivory trade was agreed to.  Cf. also Peter Mathiessen's 1981 book "Sand Rivers," on the Selous.  So there seem to be places outside of South Africa where many more elephants used to live, quite recently.

It is certainly fair of the World Wildlife Fund's spokesperson to show appropriately generous understanding of the position of the South African park officials.  Whether she is right to be confident that the "culling" -- that dishonest euphemism! -- will be carried out "humanely" is another matter.

The idea of capturing some related herds of Kruger elephants and transporting them to the Selous, there to release them, strikes me as extremely difficult.  Nevertheless, ideas along those lines should be considered.

Meanwhile, the IFAW's idea of creating "transfrontier parks" should not be dismissed, as Whiskerfish seems to want to, as being short-sighted, as though giving elephants more land in which to roam will just allow their numbers to increase even more, and they will end up eating up more vegetation and destroying more habitat.  The IFAW people instead are envisioning allowing the elephants to redevelop a tradition of seasonal migration, in which they would not have to remain in one location long enough to eat up the vegetation there.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

1. are not IFAW's idea, despite them (in tehir typical style) claiming credit for them

2. are not getting off the ground well despite years of trying and millions of dollars of investment

3. Will quickly fill up, as the existing parks have. Please do yourself a favour and read about the Botswanan elephant herd, how numbers have skyrocketed and how they have destroyed habitat DESPITE being unconfined and free to move across park, provincial and country borders. Again, if you read the specifics you'll see how deeply flawed the transfrontier idea is in that respect - it's a very good idea for lots of other reasons, though.

Whiskerfish

As an ecologist, I understand that the killing of elephants is likely necessary, but it is just so terribly sad.  Your arguments all seem right, Whiskerfish, and I appreciate your local, "on the ground" information and perspective.  And I can hear canis and Wolverine's grief underneath their righteous indignation.

But whatever happened to mourning, folks?  Isn't it okay to grieve without assuming that the reason for the sorrow must be changed/stopped?  Why the "denial of death" that leads to unrealistic views of the natural world?  Animals die.  Other animals, fire, weather, and people kill them.  People die too, at the hands of other humans, animals, starvation and disease (overpopulation?).  These are sad events, especially when we love the beings that die, or when it seems brutal or unnecessary.  But to say "killing canNOT be the answer" either 1) denies that animals should kill each other (how to stop that, I wonder?), 2) thinks that humans should behave differently from animals, even though we are animals, 3) or rejects all death as bad and wrong.  And that is possibly the most anti-nature thing a person could believe, in my opinion.

Here's a related article about elephant-caused habitat depletion (and subsequent starvation) in the 1960s in east Africa.  It leaves the question open regarding the need for managed killing.

Here's to the elephants, and wishing we humans could be less ravenous.

Dave