Contraception may prevent elephant culling

Birth control could provide protection for a growing elephant population in Africa's Kruger National Park

By Environmental News Network staff

Wildlife managers in South Africa's Kruger National Park are tackling a problem of elephantine proportions.

Once nearly extinct in the area, elephant populations are threatening the survival of myriad other species in the park. Elephants spend 18 to 20 hours a day consuming up to 500 pounds of vegetation.

While elephants are essential to the regeneration of the ecosystems they inhabit, the volume of their diet can upset that balance when populations become too large. Trees that take generations to mature are toppled overnight. Closed woodland becomes open grassland.

Historically, elephants had larger ranges, roaming for hundreds of miles before they returned to a particular area. This allowed vegetation within elephant habitat to recover.

Confined by park fences and human development, elephants have less room to wander. Consequently, their ecological footprint is heavier.

At the outrage of the conservation community, Kruger Park officials began culling hundreds of elephants on a yearly basis in 1967 to maintain a stable population of 7,500 to 8,000 animals in the area. The last elephant cull in Kruger Park was conducted in 1994, when 312 elephants were darted with tranquilizers and then shot. Many of the carcasses were ground up and canned for immediate sale.

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Richard Fayrer-Hosken witnessed such events in his own homeland as a child.

"They select a particular family and shoot each member," he recalled. "Not every shot is a lethal shot. You can imagine what that sounds like."

Fayrer-Hosken has devised another solution to jumbo elephant populations. For the past five years, he has used Kruger National Park as an outdoor laboratory for the world's first advanced field tests of elephant contraception.

Richard Fayrer-Hosken injects a wild elephant with a pZP immuno-contraceptive

A professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia, Fayrer-Hosken has developed a birth control device that can be administered in the field on a population of wild elephants. His work is reported in the Sept. 14 issue of the journal Nature.

Only two alternatives to culling exist: translocation or contraception.

Moving a 14,000-pound load, or several hundred such loads, is easier said than done, Fayrer-Hosken notes. Translocation is expensive, requiring drugs and expertise, and various problems can result.

Because elephants are territorial, they become disoriented when they are translocated. Finding food is often a struggle.

Fayrer-Hosken's birth-control method reduces elephant pregnancies by as much as 70 percent. Because the drug lasts about a year, park mangers can continue to breed elephants if the population faces a sudden decline.

Overpopulation is one of the major arguments used to promote the sale of ivory and other elephant products.

In 1997, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia used this argument to secure a one-time limited sale for elephant parts.

Allan Thornton, chairman of Britain's Environmental Investigation Agency, called this decision the biggest conservation blunder of the 1990s. "It is EIA's view that a legal ivory trade provides a cover for the black market, a view confirmed by the upsurge in both elephant poaching and illicit ivory seizures," he said.

Fayrer-Hosken hopes his research will reduce culling and help curb international trade in ivory in the process.

Copyright 2000, Environmental News Network, All Rights Reserved

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Kruger National Park
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