Sahara, Namib, and Kalahari. Wide areas of the Niger, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea,
Somalia, and Kenya are semi-deserts. Much of Namibia, Botswana, parts of
Angola, and the Karroo of South Africa are the Southern Hemisphere equiva-
lents. Cycles of drought have been evident in these regions for many thousands
of years. Accounts in the Bible of 7 years of famine and 7 years of plenty in
Egypt are testimony to this cycle. Many scientists, notably Tyson (1986), have
documented the existence of this cycle using existing rainfall records.
Add to the limitations of African climate the lack of both surface and artesian
water, together with poor fertility in the bulk of African soils and the constraints
imposed by the continent on the number of animals (human as well as others)
it is capable of supporting become apparent. In fact, it might be argued that the
pre-European distribution of fauna and flora might represent near optimum
utilization of that continent’s natural resources. Adaptation by animal popula-
tions, including elephants to this dry and fluctuating climate, is manifest in their
extensive migration routes. It has been these adaptations to climate and food
resources that have permitted these animals to survive. Disruption and destruc-
tion of the long-established seasonal use of resources will collapse the system.
We as modern humans might do well to recognize what evolution has dem-
onstrated and take heed of that guidance. Instead, as human populations con-
tinue to grow, malnutrition and starvation will continue to affect both humans
and animals. Without limitations curtailing human populations, the current
prospect for the survival of African wildlife is bleak indeed.
As humans have come to recognize the value of natural systems in main-
taining a viable world, the complexity and diversity of this world have become
increasingly obvious. Seemingly unimportant and even insignificant parts of
the system turn out to be critical and the task of conservation grows in complex-
ity. Nevertheless, attempts at conservation were begun with the formation of the
first national parks in the late 19th century in Australia and in the United States.
In 1898, President Kruger of the Transvaal Republic proclaimed part of
what is now the Kruger National Park (KNP) in South Africa, a national park.
Even this seemingly farsighted act of wildlife preservation was not fully moti-
vated by the need to conserve the rapidly disappearing natural world of South
Africa. Wildlife in South Africa, as in much of the rest of the world, was viewed
as a resource to be exploited. Preservation was pursued as a strategy to maintain
wildlife as a resource for future human exploitation. Furthermore, the areas that
Them and Us Chapter | 14 109
were set aside for wildlife were by and large not suitable for human habitation
at that time. Endemic diseases such as sleeping sickness or in animals, ngana,
malaria, and foot and mouth disease, and an extreme climate made many of the
early game reserves unsuitable for human occupation.
Loss of habitat due to human encroachment together with European ideas of
land ownership and agricultural practices progressively and rapidly displaced
wildlife over much of Africa. The limited areas designated as wildlife preserves
meant that animals were restricted to a specific area. Once this was done, hu-
mans are required to “manage” the animal populations within the designated
areas. Management, as scientists and conservationists have learned, is a complex
and difficult task. Viewing the area as an integrated whole, where the nature and
the strengths of the connections between the living and physical systems occu-
pying the designated space are unknown, was found to be far more difficult than
the caretakers ever imagined.
Managing within such an environment of a large social herbivore such as
an elephant has presented multiple serious problems, not the least of which has
been attempting to decide the number of animals that a given area can support.
Once restricted, the population now can exceed the capacity of a given area to
support it. If hope is placed on serendipity, then hope can easily be dashed, as
happened when the population of elephants in the Tsavo National Park of Kenya
was allowed to grow unchecked.
If, on the other hand, wildlife managers attempt to control a population, nu-
merous other difficulties arise. Early attempts at managing elephant populations
were disastrous when individual elephants were shot in a herd. Herd dynamics
were disrupted, the remaining animals were subjected to extreme stress, and
the method recognized as being impossible to carry out. The current alternative
strategy has been to kill all of the elephants except the very young in a given
family group. Without even considering whether such action would be noted by
or affect other elephants in other families or groups, it was not initially believed
that the infants saved would suffer ill effects from this horrendous experience.
The routine culling procedures in the KNP were carried out with military
precision. Helicopters were used to first find and select the family group of
elephants to be targeted. Ground crews in vehicles were positioned relative to
the chosen group. These included rangers armed with high-powered magazine
rifles, game trackers to assist the rangers, and an entire cadre of butchers to
dismember the fallen animals and prepare them for processing in a large abat-
toir especially built for the purpose. It was emphasized by park authorities that
all parts of the elephant were used, the greatest bulk going into canned meat for
human and animal consumption. In order to reduce the chance of spoilage, the
entire operation was carried out in the late afternoon and early evening when
the heat of the day was abating. This was done either in ignorance or in disre-
gard of the fact that at this time of day all sounds from helicopters, vehicles,
gunfire, and elephant distress calls, as well as human voices, would be trans-
mitted the greatest distances under the rapidly forming nocturnal temperature
110 Elephant Sense and Sensibility
inversion. The low-frequency sounds generated by the helicopter rotors, rifle
fire, and vehicles would be audible to other elephants over distances of many
miles reaching animals in far distant parts of the park and in the many adjacent
private game reserves. The screams and frantic calls of both adult elephants
and young would be heard by other elephants at least 10 km or 6 mile away,
meaning that all elephants within an area of over 300 km2 (112 mile2) would
be witness to the slaughter and be traumatized by it. As though one needs to
add any more horror to the scene, the young calves that were to be saved were
tied with ropes to their dead or dying mothers. Bradshaw (2009), in her book
Elephants on the Edge, speculates that the trauma experienced by these calves
remained with them and manifested itself in abhorrent adult behavior many
years later.
While these carefully planned and logically argued operations carried out
for the declared purpose of preserving the elephant and in the name of conser-
vation were and, unf
ortunately, still are being carried out, they represent but a
small fraction of the inhumanity of man perpetrated against elephants.
Elephant slaughter carried out by hunters, poachers, and undisciplined
paramilitary and military personnel equal and greatly exceed these culling
operations.
Direct violence done by humans to elephants has greatly exceeded the hor-
rors of culling operations. The record as recounted by Bradshaw of the treat-
ment of elephants in circuses and zoos in the 18th and 19th centuries has
appalling examples. The record of modern-day zoos is only marginally better
in demonstrating that any humanity is being extended to these animals. As re-
cently as 1988, Paul Hunter, a San Francisco zookeeper, stated, “You have to
motivate them (elephants) and the way you do that is by beating the hell out
of them” (Bradshaw, 2009, p. 18). To get elephants to comply to the will of
humans, they are starved of food, denied water, kept in isolation, restrained to
the point of being immobile, beaten, gouged, and torn with iron bars or metal-
tipped instruments. Deprived of contact with other elephants, they lose all sense
of normality. For an animal born into a close family group nurtured by sound,
smell, touch, taste, and sight and within close contact with the environment, the
conditions of even the best forms of captivity are totally debilitating. Bradshaw
(2009) cites evidence (p. 104) that in the global captive population of elephants
the median life span of African elephants is 16.9 years compared to 56 years in
free-ranging Kenyan elephants. Lest one underestimates the number of captive
elephants, Bradshaw quotes numbers on the order of 9000 for the globe as a
whole. Nicol (2013) puts this number at 5000 based on the Swedish Elephant
Encyclopedia but points to the additional salient fact that the average number of elephants per holding is less than two, making it obvious that many live without
a single companion of their kind.
Elephants subjected to trauma, particularly at a young age, or deprived of
care by mothers and close kin as well as social contact, suffer all the manifes-
tations of what is now recognized in humans as posttraumatic stress disorder
Them and Us Chapter | 14 111
(PTSD) (Bradshaw, 2009, p. 112). When subjected to prolonged and repeated
trauma, PTSD does not fully describe the condition of the victim. Judith Hennan
(Bradshaw, 2009, p. 147) proposed complex PTSD to cover this condition.
It may now be argued, as Bradshaw does, that the cumulative effect of
modern humans on elephant populations has been such as to effectively trau-
matize the entire species. Violent behavior between elephants and between el-
ephants and other species including humans is believed to have occurred at
levels unknown in the past. In the Pilanesberg case cited earlier, the young
bulls killed 100 rhinoceros. In Addo National Park in South Africa, conflict
between translocated adult African male elephants has resulted in deaths ap-
proaching 70–90%. In contrast, in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya, Moss
reports only four deaths in elephant male-to-male conflicts in 30 years. Young
males transferred to the KwaZulu-Natal park of Hluhlwe have been reported
to deliberately stalk and attempt to attack tourist vehicles. While generaliza-
tion to the entire elephant population may not be justified, evidence that there
is a link between abhorrent elephant behavior and traumatic dislocation of an
elephant’s early development is a valid hypothesis. Whatever the nature and
magnitude of the cause and effect is, the question of why and how it is possible
that the human species can inflict such trauma upon another species remains
unanswered.
In confronting this tragic relationship between humans and another spe-
cies, there are at least two rays of hope: sanctuaries that have worked and an
evolutionary history that ultimately may prevail. In 2006, the total population
of elephants in Africa was estimated at just under 700,000. Of this number,
about half reside in Southern Africa (Angola–Zambia and southward, with the
South African population numbering between 17,800 and 18,500) (Scholes and
Mennell, 2008) (Figure 14.1).
South Africa, with its checkered history of race relations and apartheid, has
received little credit for its effort to recover from a disastrous beginning in wild-
life conservation. When what was to become the KNP was first established
in 1902 (delayed by the Anglo-Boer War from its proclamation in 1898), al-
most all elephants had been destroyed in South Africa. Stevenson-Hamilton
( South African Eden, 1993, p. 191), in his survey of the incipient park, saw only seven bull elephants, which in all probability had crossed into South Africa from
Mozambique (Figure 14.2). In the two fragmented areas in the Cape, Addo and Knysna, only a remnant of the southern-most population of African elephants
remained. By 2006, there were four viable populations of elephants in South
Africa: KNP (12,500), KwaZulu-Natal (1100), Northwest population (760), and
Addo Elephant Park (450) (Scholes and Mennell, 2008, p. 23).
The Kruger and Addo populations are growing rapidly and both parks have
embarked upon large-scale expansions. The preexisting KNP covers an area
of approximately 20,000 km2 (7800 mile2) or roughly the size of the State of
Massachusetts. The plan now is to add the Parque National do Limpopo lying on
the northeastern border of the Kruger to form the Great Limpopo Transfrontier
112 Elephant Sense and Sensibility
FIGURE 14.1 Elephant distribution and population trends in Africa. After Scholes and Mennell (2008).
Permission courtesy of the University of the Witwatersrand Press and authors Scholes and Mennell.
Park, effectively doubling the area of the individual parks and opening up an-
cient migration routes across the Limpopo (Figure 14.3).
The Addo Elephant National Park is being increased in size more than six-
fold to include both mountainous and coastal terrain. The size of the original
Addo Elephant Enclosure of about 220 km2 (80 mile2) will be increased to ap-
proximately 1380 km2 (500 mile2), with an additional 128 km2 (50 mile2) of
coastal parkland and over 1240 km2 (450 mile2) of coastal ocean including Stag
and Bird Islands. The ultimate goal is to connect the inland park area to the
coastal region, allowing elephants to regain access to the sea. Early observations
document elephants entering the ocean when access to the sea was open to them
(Figure 14.4).
While conflict between elephants and humans has occurred where elephants
have been recently translocated, conflict within established populations has
been very low. Scholes and Mennell (2008, p. 222, Table 14.1) shows 19 human fatalities over 6 years for all situations in which elephants come into contact
with humans. Thirteen of these fatalities have occurred in protected areas, with
two of the remaining six in theme parks or elephant-back safaris. Except for
newly introduced elephants raised from captured calves, as described earlier,
Them and Us Chapter | 14 113
FIGURE 14.2 KNP bordering Mozambique to the east, measuring some 400 km (240 mile) from north to south and averaging about 65 km (40 mile) east to west, roughl
y the size of the State of Massachusetts. (See also Figure 1.2 in Chapter 1.)
elephants show extreme tolerance of humans in close contact in the South
African parks. In fact, the overwhelming impression in watching elephants in
these parks is the sense of complete relaxation and absence of any signs of
aggression or even concern about human presence. Here the elephant is seen
“as a symbol of strength, gentleness, wisdom, and perhaps most importantly, the
frailty of the natural world.… In the presence of elephants, the innocent within
us is restored” (Christo and Wilkinson, 2009, p. 11).
Humans, in the presence of elephants, almost universally experience a
deeply felt awakening of their connection to nature, adding yet another facet to
the value of this animal.
114 Elephant Sense and Sensibility
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FIGURE 14.3 Limpopo National Park bordering the KNP, measuring some 200 km (130 mile) north to south and about 90 km (60 mile) east to west. When combined with the KNP, as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, it almost doubles the size of the original reserves. (See also Figure 1.2 in Chapter 1.) Similar conditions of coexistence exist in Namibia, Botswana, and parts
of Kenya. In the Amboseli National Park in Kenya, the Amboseli Elephant
Research Project (Moss and Lee, 2011, p. xi) has worked in close contact with
elephants for more than 40 years. Despite sharing the park with grazing compet-
Elephant Sense and Sensibility Page 17