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Advice on How to Manage Wild Elephant Populations & Richard Leakey’s Thoughts on Elephant Culling.04/04/2008 14:11:12Advice on How to Manage Wild Elephant Populations & Richard Leakey’s Thoughts on Elephant Culling. Richard Leakey's Thoughts on Elephant Culling. Repugnant - But Potentially Necessary
WHAT’S HAPPENING: IUCN, through its African Elephant Specialist Group, is publishing a new report on how to control locally overabundant populations of African elephants. The report looks at the pros and cons of a range of options to manage elephants, including moving them to other natural habitats, increasing the area of land available to elephants, contraception and culling. WHY IT’S HAPPENING: Until now, there has been no comprehensive review available to African elephant-range states explaining the options for managing wild populations of elephants. This report looks at past examples of what has worked, what hasn’t, and provides a summary of the main technical considerations. SPOKESPERSON: Holly Dublin, Chair of IUCN’s African Elephant Specialist Group and the Species Survival Commission, says: 'Some of the most important decisions in wildlife management in Africa revolve around elephants, but a lot of the information is not readily accessible to conservation authorities. Much of it is scattered in diverse reports and scientific papers or as part of the body of unwritten expert knowledge.' HOW IT’S HAPPENING: The report is being distributed to governments and conservation authorities in African elephant-range states.  The ecological impact of elephants The African elephant is capable of extensive habitat modification and it has been shown that even at low elephant densities there can be significant effects on trees in some habitats. This modification, commonly termed elephant impact, mostly takes place through elephants toppling (including pollarding) whole trees, by breaking and removing branches from their canopies (i.e. the elephants mechanically change the structure and composition of the canopy of trees, and by extension they change woodlands) and by preventing or reducing recruitment and regeneration20. In such processes, browsing elephants commonly remove more material (biomass) than they finally consume21. Moreover, elephants commonly strip bark off tree trunks, which is likely to result in the eventual death of the tree once fire or wood borers enter the exposed heartwood. These factors (i.e. browsing that affects the structure of a plant, ‘wasteful’ feeding and bark stripping) mean that an elephant population may have an effect on woody vegetation and biomass loss beyond what would be predicted by the physiological needs of the animals. This disproportionate effect is what leads to the recognition that elephants are a keystone species. The relationship between elephant density and ecological impact of elephants is complex and likely to depend on various interacting ecological factors, some of which are poorly understood and which include: Options for reducing the undesirable ecological impacts of African elephants Non Intervention While non-intervention in the management of elephants has often been by default, it has been justified in one or more of the following grounds3. • Protected areas are set aside as ‘natural’ areas excluding human influence. They cannot serve as undisturbed control areas against which human activities can be measured, if they are managed. Within the value system implied by such policy, no proactive management interventions are permissible. • Natural regulatory mechanisms, both density dependent and environmental forces, should be left to maintain the integrity of ecosystems by allowing elephant numbers to vary in time and space. • Managing an ecosystem to keep its components constant may weaken processes that enable it to resist change on its own account, decreasing its stability and resilience. • Species richness may be maximized by the spatial heterogeneity and temporal variation that result from unhindered ecosystem processes. • Present vegetation composition and structure have developed in the absence of some herbivores (such as elephants) and is now being returned to its ‘natural’ state by the increase in number of herbivores. • A population crash may result when animals are overstocked, but after the crash a healthy population will emerge from those individuals that are better adapted for and that have survived harsh environmental conditions. • Knowledge of the ecosystem is inadequate to justify interventions that may lead to undesirable outcomes. IUCN/SSC AfESG Review of Options for Managing the Impacts of Locally Overabundant African Elephants 35 • Use of some management options, especially lethal ones, may result in negative publicity and reduce the tourism potential of an area. Direct management interventions have been justified on the following grounds : • Intervention may be necessary to achieve management objectives. • Undesirable changes in the ecosystem can result from an overabundance of elephants and management is necessary to maintain biodiversity and to prevent loss of other species of plants or animals. • There is no such thing as ‘natural’ because human populations influence conservation within and outside protected areas and have done so for generations. • Creating a national park or protected area from which human influences are excluded is in itself a management action that subsequently results in the necessity for environmental management of one form or another. • Knowledge of ecosystems is indeed inadequate but intervention may prevent undesirable outcomes of non-intervention such as erosion20 and loss of biodiversity in plants and animals. • Management may or may not affect stability or resilience but the current situation may be unacceptable (exceeding the limits to acceptable change). • Allowing populations of animals to crash is wasteful and inhumane.
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