The trouble with elephants

Michael—Thursday

Anyone who cares about animals at all loves elephants. It’s easy to understand why. They have interesting personalities, the females are excellent mothers, protecting and caring for their calves, and they have apparently complex communication including infra-sound rumples that are transmitted through the ground. They also seem happy to interact with humans, provided they are given space and respect. Many of these are documented in the late Laurence Anthony’s book The Elephant Whisperer (that I reviewed HERE). There are even some hints in the book that suggest a relationship between Lawrence and his elephants (or between the elephants and their Lawrence) that transcends normal communication.

Unfortunately, like most happy stories, there’s an intrinsic tension, and I wrote about that HERE in Condoms for elephants. Elephants require an enormous amount to eat—something like 350 lbs of vegetation every day. They have seven complete sets of teeth, and once those are gone, they starve to death. It must be challenging to be always hungry, and they usually rest during the heat of the day in order to use most of the cooler night for feeding. They have essentially no natural enemies—other than man—and tend to be successful if relatively slow breeders. Left to their own devices, elephant populations grow slowly but surely, with the herds led by their matriarchs wandering over vast areas in search of food. They sense rain and head to those areas for the new growth.

The problem is what happens in drought conditions. The elephants move through the bush devastating it, eating everything they can find. That includes any tree bark that they can reach, and once the tree is ringed, it dies as nutrients can’t reach the leaves. Worse, elephants will break off large branches or push over trees altogether in order to reach a few mouthfuls of leaves that they fancy. And they do this even if there is no shortage of food. It’s a strange behaviour, because most animal species (present company excluded) interact with their environments quite well, and certainly don’t go about destroying their future food supply. There isn’t a convincing theory about why they behave this way—and apparently always have. Surely it’s not a successful evolutionary trait.

Of course, now elephants are severely restricted in their movement. In the seventies there was a horrendous die off of elephants in Kenya. The conservation authorities there believed that given their large and connected conservation areas, leaving the elephants unmanaged was the correct and natural strategy. Unfortunately, drought conditions led to the loss of thousands of elephants who died miserably of starvation and left behind devastation that seriously affected other species such as the black rhino.

In more recent times the relentless demand for ivory, drought, and the restriction of their range has led to a decrease in elephant numbers by about two thirds over the last fifty years to below half a million world-wide. And now politics has entered the fray.

Under Ian Khama, Botswana banned trophy hunting and the transport of trophies overseas. His policy has always been that the best way of exploiting Botswana’s superb wildlife resources is through high-end tourism with a relatively small numbers of visitors who support a variety of jobs and do little harm. The strategy has been a contributor to Botswana’s success. However, Khama’s successor—President Masisi—sees things differently, and that’s probably not independent of his feud with Khama. Their personal animosity led to Khama leaving the governing party and supporting the opposition in the last election. Khama was accused of elitism and lack of concern for small farmers in areas where crops were often attacked by hungry elephants. He was also berated for the loss of hunting revenue to the country. There were mutterings about corruption. Masisi reintroduced trophy hunting, citing the overpopulation of elephants in the country.

It's become a huge issue in Botswana with the local people on both sides. While it is true that elephants certainly aren’t currently endangered in Botswana, it’s unfortunate that the issue is now being argued against the background of personal animosity and party politics.

As for the longer term, elephant populations are decreasing in most African countries and climate change will almost certainly devastate some of their natural feeding ranges.

Enjoy them while you can.