Emotive and controversial it may be, but it’s a question many conservationists say needs to be addressed.
Are there too many elephants in southern Africa? If so, what can be done about it?
The devastation in our reserves, many in KwaZulu-Natal, the vista of broken trees lying uprooted and torn vegetation, is evidence, some believe, that elephant populations require urgent management.
The dilemma is of increasing concern to wildlife managers, with reports of serious elephant-induced damage to fragile wilderness areas in our big five game reserves.
In some cases the destruction of habitat, coupled with diminishing food resources, is driving out other species, threatening the tourism value of many of the province’s wildlife reserves.
Kruger National Park has about 15 000 elephants, twice as many as it had a few years ago. In an effort to reduce the numbers, orphans from culls were sent to other parks in SA, including many in KwaZulu-Natal, resulting in relatively young, fast-growing populations.
As a result, pressure on reserves and wilderness areas, many in KZN, has reached a stage when interventions are needed.
No one knows this better than Rob Slotow, director of the Amarula Elephant Research Programme in the School of Life Sciences at UKZN.
The scenario applies not only to KZN and SA, but also to neighbouring countries that rely on wildlife tourism, such as Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, where more than 250 000 elephants are known to exist in areas that can barely support a third of that number.
Slotow and fellow researchers know that with no man-made boundaries and management interventions, elephants develop their own birthing clock.
“Severe drought or food shortages, for example,” he says, “will stretch the period between calving. It’s a natural form of contraception.”
However, once the adverse conditions are removed, as in managed and fenced reserves where waterholes exist and food is provided, the calving periods are shorter, resulting in more elephants being born.
Immuno-contraception done on a rotational basis is, Slotow believes, an effective and sustainable answer. The process involves darting female elephants with a vaccine that gets the body to make antibodies which target sperm receptors on the surface of the egg cells.
“Contraception programmes, such as these which exclude hormonal elements, are not new for elephants,” says Slotow. “What is new is the way the vaccine is administered, on a rotational basis with careful monitoring.”
Elephants, he says, are a social species with strong maternal instincts.
“There is a risk that preventing them from having babies might cause depression or abnormal social behaviour.”
He said rotational intervention was an attempt to mirror a natural adverse environment and increase the interval between calving. The females would still have babies, but not so often.
Slotow and his team, working in KZN’s Munyawana Conservancy (Phinda Private Game Reserve and two neighbouring reserves, Zuka and Mziki), set out to demonstrate that culling could be avoided.
It has taken six years to prove a point that is now being taken up by some of the world’s top research journals, including Scientific American.
The journal last month highlighted Slotow and his research group’s point that “raising babies is an important part of herd bonding. If females are kept from calving for extended periods, they can become depressed.”
Slotow’s model allowed a calf into the herd intermittently, to keep the elephants happy. Even with the occasional birth, after 20 years of immuno-contraception, the model showed the age structure could even out and population growth could be slowed.
“By doing so, you also decrease the need to manipulate the herds through relocation or culling,” he says. “The more natural the population, the less you have to interfere.”
Scaling up could cut costs, he says.
“A single elephant could be treated for about R420 a year. That is a lot less than the potential damage caused by overpopulation down the line.”
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