Game Changer. Glen Martin
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systems of dams and pools that attracted nesting waterfowl and other birds. In short, Yellowstone’s ecology was significantly enriched by reintroducing an apex predator long absent from the region.)
Unfortunately, all efforts to control Kruger’s elephants since the cessation of general culling have failed. Relocation and contraceptives have been tried. Both are expensive, extremely stressful on the animals, and, in the final analysis, ineffective. The elephant population swelled to almost 12,000 by 2004 and then to 15,500 by 2006. A new plan was refined between 2008 and 2010, dividing the park into discrete blocks. The scheme is, frankly, complicated. The basic idea is to manage each block separately for vegetative cycles—that is, to allow habitats to “degrade” or “recover” from elephant impacts at varying levels. This, ideally, will result in a wide range of niche habitats for varying species and minimize the need for elephant culling. But the plan may well be doomed simply because it has so many variables. Complex wildlife management schemes are difficult to implement successfully anywhere, all the more so on a huge preserve in Africa—even South Africa, which has well-developed infrastructure and a relatively responsive political system. Critics of the scheme abound. Some of the most incisive writing on the issue comes from Ron Thomson, a legendary former game warden.
Thomson worked as a ranger and warden in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for twenty-four years. During his duties, he killed five thousand elephants, eight hundred buffaloes, more than fifty lions—including six man-eaters—and two hundred hippos. He supervised a culling team that killed twenty-five hundred elephants at Gonarezhou National Park in the 1970s. These kinds of credentials, of course, don’t necessarily impress animal rights advocates. But Thomson’s work with black rhinos would certainly earn their plaudits. Thomson was an early pioneer in the live capture and translocation of rhinos. Over a seven-year period in the 1960s and 1970s, he led Rhodesia’s black rhino capture team, tranquilizing and moving 140 of the great beasts. Because a rhino stalk usually requires absolute silence, Thomson usually worked alone, armed only with a tranquilizer dart gun. Animal rightists may well disparage Thomson’s CV, but no one can dispute his deep and intimate knowledge of Africa’s game and the habitats they require to survive.
At this point, Thomson is thoroughly disenchanted with conservation policy across Africa. CITES, he feels, is an abject failure, especially when it comes to preventing the trade in elephant and rhino products. Poaching, he says, is driven by poverty—specifically the poverty in the communities surrounding the great parks. To stop poaching, the poverty must be alleviated, and that inevitably will involve the regulated taking of “surplus” animals within the parks.
Kruger’s new management plan is thus unworkable for a number of reasons, says Thomson. It treats elephants as discrete quanta—entities separate from elephants in other blocks, from the park as a whole, and from the surrounding countryside, including the villages full of poor hungry people on the border of the park. The idea that you can effectively manage Kruger’s elephants and improve biodiversity by juggling vegetative canopies—allowing elephants to devastate some blocks while culling to prescribed numbers in others—looks good on paper, Thomson avers on a Web site devoted to African game management and hunting issues, but applying the plan effectively will be next to impossible. Parts cannot be substituted for the whole; the forest cannot be ignored for the trees. And by the way, a lot of elephants will still be killed under the new plan:
In the new Kruger elephant management model it has already been decided that the northern and southern elephant management blocks will initially have their elephant populations reduced at the same rate at which they are now expanding. This will entail reducing each year’s standing population by 14 percent. The first 7 percent will take off the annual increment. The second 7 percent will represent the reduction. The number making up the 14 percent, therefore, will get smaller and smaller as the population size diminishes by 7 percent each year.
In those populations that are being culled, therefore, the population will be halved—and halved again repeatedly—every ten years. And in those populations that are not subject to culling, the populations will double their numbers every ten years. Ironically, the new elephant management plan for Kruger National Park—although it came about because of animal rights objections to the culling of elephants—will probably end up killing more elephants every year than was the case before.
The hard reality, then, is that elephants must be somehow controlled if Kruger is to maintain its biological richness. As Ian Parker noted, elephants are engines superbly designed for changing landscapes. If allowed to reproduce freely, they would change Kruger’s landscape right down to the hardpan, leveling every standing tree. And despite its threatened status, the African elephant is hardly a shy breeder: when not subject to culling, Kruger’s elephant population typically grows at 6 to 7 percent a year. Contraception and translocation, it is now known, are ineffective. Creating transnational parks to accommodate more elephants, as the International Fund for Animal Welfare and other groups advocate, is certainly a good idea, but opportunities are limited. Ultimately, effective elephant management must rely on a bullet. As Thomson observes, lethal force will remain the cornerstone of Kruger’s new elephant policy—a policy that was developed in direct and sincere response to protests from animal rights advocates. There is simply no alternative, except for a complete cessation to all culling and trophy hunting, habitat degradation notwithstanding. And this may well happen. For many people of good conscience, including some with extensive backgrounds in wildlife issues, the specter of shooting any elephant for any reason is too horrible to countenance—to contemplate, even. To them, the elephant is sentient—more than that, intelligent—and killing sentient and intelligent creatures is murder. Better, perhaps, that there are fewer elephants, worse habitat, less biodiversity, as long as there is no murder. It is thus not a matter of conservation; it is a matter of essential morality, of civilized behavior.
Certainly, organized resistance to hunting is growing, particularly in the United States and Europe. Trophy hunting, especially, is drawing concentrated fire. A 2004 white paper titled The Myth of Trophy Hunting as Conservation, submitted to the British environment minister Elliott Morley by the League against Cruel Sports, limns the battle lines in no uncertain terms. The report inveighs thunderously against sport hunting, dismissing as lies any claims that hunting can be effectively employed as a conservation tool. And while the paper acknowledges that trophy hunting inevitably will continue in Africa for the foreseeable future, it suggests another strategy—depriving hunters of a major incentive for killing charismatic game: “While it may not be possible in the short term to prevent hunters from travelling around the globe to kill endangered animals, it is possible to deny them the perverse pleasure of bringing back a stuffed, mounted trophy of their kill.”
Further, the report casts the argument as a conflict between good and evil, as a struggle between wealthy “pale males” (white hunters) and poor disenfranchised people of color who are the natural beneficiaries of ecotourism. Nor can there be any compromise, the report warns: “It is virtually impossible for these two groups to co-exist. The hunting industry, and the governments they have wooed, are battling against eco-tourism operators and local communities for control over the planet’s endangered species—and are often winning.”
At a certain point, vetting the arguments of both the pro-and anti-hunting camps feels utterly futile; to paraphrase Mark Twain, it becomes a matter of trying to separate the lies, the damn lies, and the statistics. More charitably, both groups can make compelling arguments for their respective positions on the consumptive use of game in Africa and elsewhere.
Only one group, however, can claim ascendance. Just as the hunting ethic was considered an integral component of the social contract in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so its obverse is now true. A general opposition to hunting now prevails in the urban centers of the developed world. This anti-hunting sentiment has combined with a larger sense that cruelty to animals in general, including simple neglect, is anathema to civilized people. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, between 1975 and 2006 the number of hunters in the United States (e.g., people who had purchased hunting licenses) declined from 19.1 million to 12.5 million. That figure is expected to plummet to 9.1 million by 2025. Some states—most notably those with large rural populations—have shown relatively slight drops, but the decline in others has been profound. In California, the decline was 38 percent;