[wild worlds]

The Kruger National Park in South Africa faces a major dilemma. It currently contains about 7500 more elephants that it can sustain long term. As elephants are renowned for their destructive browsing, they tend push trees over before eating the leaves; something has to be done to regain the ecological balance.
The options seem to be
1/ Contraception; has been tried before and worked with limited but reasonable success, the main problem being the long life span of the elephant. i.e. no more babies for a few years, but still a very high density of elephants for a good few years to come.
2/Translocation. Now far too many elephants to move.
3/ Cross border parks. Still struggling with the politics.
4/ A mass cull. Apparently effective if the ENTIRE herd is culled. Limiting grieving on loss of others.
I think that we have to agree that even in the most wild of places, mans intervention over hundreds if not thousands of years, political borders not recognised by wild life etc. means that we have a to manage these animals and their habitat with as little intervention as possible to ensure their survival for generations to come. .
What do others think should be done to correct this situation? WW

[goosey]

Cross border parks, is there a remote chance this could happen - what countries are envolved? It seems the best of the options stated.

I hate the thought of culling - I have seen on TV how elephants cry and grieve, that would be just awful. Do you know how they would go about on a mass cull of an entire herd - I don't see how the distress of the other elephants watching, seeing what is happening (which happens in some slaughter houses) could be avoided - it is an abominable prospect.
Out of interest, about how many elephants are in a herd? If whole herds had to be culled would this not leave a problem of interbreeding in the remaining herds?
It is a terrible dilema as you say, a very emotive subject.

[Rhino]

when they cull elephants they used to cull the adults and leave the young one's this lead to young males enterering Must to soon and they killed a lot of other animals as there was not older bulls to keep them in check and females to show them how to behave, but i think they have sorted that problem now.

[Atlascaproni]

I don't think culling is ever a legitimate option, especialy with an animal capable of such cognitive and social feats. I believe that the only long term solution to the lack of wildlands and competition between humans and other creatures is for private people to buy up as much land as possible in troubled regions to make sure that it stays safe.

[WildLife Warrior]

No No No No No....Culling is not the answer...as humans we do not have any right to govern what dies and we have no right to cull animals just because they do not fit into our plans.There are other ways as suggessted but at the end of the day humans always seem to opt for the easy option and it annoys me so much. If i could afford a plane ticket i would fly right out there and start knocking their heads together to make a plan work...after all...all it needs is effort and maybe a little money which again we humans are not exactly generous with. What right do we as humans have to go into a FAMILY and kill them all for no reason...come on...none of them would like it if someone came in and killed their family because they had got too large or had caused damage....so we have no right to be honest....they should be allowed to roam free...relocate if need be....they have a right to this plateou of earth just as much as we do...in fact maybe more since they were here before us.

[damiensharjah]

I can't beleive people are still opposing culling. Elephants have historically been culled in Southern Africa and their numbers have always been stable and in direct accordance to the carrying capacity of the land.

Then the conservation authorities bowed to the pressure of the emotional public element - The back-seat conservationists, and what happened? Very predictably, the quality of the bush dropped in perfect synch with the exploding elephant population.

In other words, to all the anti-culling folk out there, you had it your way for 14 years, it cost millions, it's caused severe damage to areas with a high rate of endemism, it's adversly affecting hundreds of other species and it has been categorically proven not to work.

At last some sound conservation practices can commence again