Cape Town - Ten days ago, 200 Maasai
“warriors”, in an act of vengeance, randomly speared a dozen elephants,
10 buffalo and a lion from Kenya’s Amboseli National Park – East
Africa’s second most popular reserve.
They complained they received too
little spin-off from the park, yet had to put up with elephants damaging
their crops and taking lives.
A month before, six lions from Nairobi National Park were speared to death by disgruntled locals.
The raids echoed the recent
assault on one of SA’s most attractive reserves – Ndumo in KZN – when
angry farmers destroyed the fence and moved in with their livestock and
ploughs.
African communities are becoming
fed-up with wildlife – elephants in particular. And elephants are
showing increasing signs of being fed-up with humans.
Specialists in animal behaviour
believe that after years of being abused and of being more and more
constricted, translocated and poached, elephants are hitting back.
African
and Asian elephants are killing about 500 people a year, according to
Brian Handwerk of National Geographic. He says it’s because they are
being pushed into smaller and smaller pockets “and increasingly they are
pushing back”.
From SA to the Sudan there have
been so many fatal conflicts between elephants and people as well as
crop damage that scientists have set up a Human Elephant Conflict
programme as part of a worldwide Human Wildlife Conflict initiative
backed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
A paper – Human-wildlife Conflict
in Africa, published by the Food and Agricultural Organisation in Rome –
reported that the antipathy among rural Africans towards elephants
“goes beyond that expressed for any other wildlife”.
It said people living in central
Africa “fear and detest” elephants; that farmers in Zimbabwe display
“ingrained hostility” towards them. “(They) are the focus of all local
animosity toward wildlife.”
There’s evidence that today’s
elephants are suffering from chronic stress brought about by prolonged
habitat reduction, ceaseless poaching, culling and mass translocations.
People who have had experience with these intelligent creatures know
that elephants, like whales and dolphins, are sociable animals with
strong family bonds and have an ultra long-range communication system
outside of human hearing. As a result, dealing with the elephant
overpopulation in parts of southern Africa is proving to be extremely
complex.
Dr Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist
and ecologist at Oregon State University who is involved in their
environmental sciences programme concerned with Human Elephant Conflict,
says: “Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between
elephants and people has dramatically changed.
“What
we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and
elephants lived in relatively peaceful coexistence, there is now
hostility and violence.”
Bradshaw and her colleagues, in a
2005 article in the science journal Nature titled Elephant Breakdown,
say elephants are displaying increased animosity.
Human Elephant Conflict threatens
the future of Africa’s game reserves. Unless rural people who live among
wild and dangerous animals derive tangible benefits from their
situation – and soon – they will continue to support poaching. Most
non-government wildlife organisations are blissfully unaware of the
seriousness of the human-wildlife conflict.
Eighty percent of Africa’s
wildlife lives outside protected areas, yet those who live among them
have no say in their management and receive little or no benefit from
the tourism that Africa’s wildlife brings.
Elephants are behaving in a way
never before encountered because, says Bradshaw, “stress has so
disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which
young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which
established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now
witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant
culture”.
She says they are showing signs of a societal breakdown.
It appears we are driving elephants mad.
In many regions of Africa there is
an increasing human toll caused by elephants as well as increasing crop
damage. There is also an increasing toll of elephants themselves –
mostly by Far Eastern ivory smugglers who fund African poachers and
bribe government officials and ministers.
The IUCN says an average of 104
elephants are killed daily in Africa – close to 38 000 a year.
Recognising the increased tensions between elephants and humans, it has
launched a worldwide project to hopefully alleviate some of the
suffering – on both sides.
Human Elephant Conflict poses
serious challenges to wildlife managers, local communities,
conservationists worldwide and to the IUCN’s African Elephant Specialist
Group and its Asian counterpart.
Between 1900 and 1984 Africa’s
elephant population was reduced by 93 percent and is now found in only 5
percent of the continent. Its numbers have fallen from 1.3 million in
the early 1970s to about 450 000 today. This recent sharp decline in
numbers has mainly been due to poaching.
Wildlife because of “eco-tourism” –
viewing wildlife, wilderness trails, wildlife photography and hunting –
is in parts of rural Africa the only “cash crop”. Properly managed, it
is a self-sustaining high-employment industry – and the African elephant
is its star attraction. - Weekend Argus