When is enough, enough!

One of the more frequent questions asked on safari these days is “when will they start culling elephants again?”, and the truth is there is no easy answers to this problem.

When I attempt to answer this question, I am generally forced into going back to basic ecology that I learnt in my first years as a student. All populations grow in a typical S growth curve, basically populations grow slowly at first then accelerate under ideal conditions until conditions deteriorate and population pressures get too great and the population hits a plateau and then slowly drops off to start the cycle all over again. Now why is this important, well simply put when you cull a fairly large portion of any population the birth rate increases to cope with the sudden drop off in number and as such you are constantly in a state of rapid birth rates as the population never feels that there is a need to slow the birth rate. That is only one small problem in the bigger picture, you see, there is a carrying capacity on all land on this planet and what we do is fence off and protect these areas for the preservation of biodiversity, but in essence what we do is create Islands.

Biogeography is the study of how ecology developed across the globe and how the geographical position aided or hindered in the success or failure of species. One place though where evolution is sped up is on Island. Island seem to be the fast forward version of evolution, due to size, population pressures, predator pressures or lack of predator presence, all these factors greatly alter the course a population follows. With this in mind what we do as modern day conservationist is create Island for wildlife to prosper, but in essence we are more than likely sending certain species to an early extinction.

Elephants are one of those species that can have huge negative effect on other species and as such there is a need to control the movements of these animals. Water provision in areas like the Kruger create unnatural supply through drier months meaning game are staying put when they should be migrating to better grazing and to water sources further afield. Another issue with the Kruger Specifically is the fact that the area is 360km long and only about 90km wide, now our rainfall doesn’t vary on a North South basis but on an East West basis and therefor there is not much rainfall variation and therefor not much impetus to migrate.

Fire is also a policy that is somewhat controversial as we know Africa is a fire driven ecology but we also know that most weather patterns globally are in 18 year cycle, 9 years above average rainfall and 9 years below average rainfall. Now I would imagine it would therefor make sense to only burn areas ever 9 years to ensure the health of an area, the Kruger burns every 4 years, thus often killing saplings trying to replace older mature tree’s that are often the target of elephants. So the problem isn’t really the destruction of old trees but the rejuvenation that should becoming from younger trees.

Now by now you are probably thinking get to the point and my point is this, the only way we can truly help protect these areas and the biodiversity within them is to get these systems back to their natural balances, and the only way to do that is to create corridors linking these areas up. We need a mental shift away from idea’s such as Animal/Human conflict to Animal/Human coexistence and start taking a back seat, we need to stop interfering and tinkering and allow nature to play out whatever she needs to in order for these systems to survive. My personal belief is that if we can create these areas for game to be able to move we will see far more natural culling methods such as drought, disease and natural die off taking place, we must just show the constitutions to sit back and allow these necessary hardships to go ahead unhindered.

Culling will not solve any problems we face with growing populations and yes I agree there needs to be a resolution to these issues but let us expend our energies putting pressure on our political parties to create these wildlife corridors and lets try and leave something for future generations to inherit!