South Africa culling fields are close at hand

No one, least of all the wildlife rangers who spend their lives traversing the vast, dusty national parks of South Africa, enjoys an elephant cull. Apprehensive matriarchs and their young are tracked from the air, then herded and gathered to die in family groups.

Vultures settle on surrounding trees. Hyenas take up speculative positions.

When South Africa culled elephants in the 90s, a practice to which it is apparently about to return, Wayne Lotter, a long-time ranger in the Kruger, hated it: "It was something I did just because I had to. But I tried to avoid it. It was my love for animals that drew me into conservation. To then have to kill the same animals is something I hate. The separation of the family units - usually a group of 12 to 15 - is the most emotionally difficult part of the killing."

A high-velocity 7.62 bullet is generally fired into each elephant's brain, behind the ear. The creatures' throats are cut and fragments of tissues and organs extracted for research purposes. Then the ranger returns from the wild to a chorus of angry complaints from conservationists and animal rights activists. Expert research shows the culling process is deeply traumatic not only for the animals killed but for those members of herds that are left behind.

For the past 11 years in South Africa this grisly ritual has been outlawed after pressure from groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, but the result has been a level of elephant-inspired mayhem that means the rifles and the death squads are about to re-appear.

There are now 300,000 elephants in southern Africa, three-quarters of the total African population. The herds are more unmanageable, the ravaged vegetation more sparse. In some national parks, rhinos have been trampled in the competition for food.

Hector Magome, the director of conservation services for South African National Parks, says enough is enough: "We need to reduce the population now in the short term while we look at long-term solutions. We want the public to digest this hard fact." This generated unfavourable headlines. But the facts are alarming.

At Kruger Park there are more than 13,000 elephants, 6000 more than the optimum level. The park was fenced to protect farmers, but within the perimeter there's a desperate animal struggle for survival because of ever-diminishing resources. Other species, including rhino and antelope, are being deprived of necessary vegetation by the largest rivals in the food chain.

Across the range, desertification has taken hold in vast areas of a park the size of Israel. Other parks facing similar crises include the Hwange in Zimbabwe and several in Botswana.

Inevitably, the calls for a cull are multiplying. It is not only Magome who believes that South Africans and their neighbours must face up to a bitter necessity. Dr Robert Paling, an ecological expert from the University of Utrecht, agrees that a return of the cull is the only way to avoid a catastrophe. "It is a controversial conclusion but there is no other option. Either the elephants will die of hunger - and in the process destroy the vegetation and other species - or we have to act."

Michelle Pickover, an animal rights activist with Xwe African Wildlife, is incensed: "I wonder why they use the word culling. It's killing and murdering elephants and they should just say that."

But ruthless action is imminent. In secret, given the sensitive nature of the subject, plans have already been drawn up for a South African cull, which experts believe will claim as many as 1000 elephants a year. The aim is to reduce the species population to 1992 levels. Government sources say the likely starting date is next October.

Fortunately for lovers of the African elephant, a long-term and somewhat extraordinary alternative to the brutal executions may exist - contraception. An extreme solution, perhaps, but not, at least, a fatal one.

Rather than reducing elephant numbers by putting herds to death, conservationists such as Douw Grobler, a senior veterinarian at Kruger Park, have been experimentally putting elephant cows "on the pill".

The "pill" strictly speaking, is a vaccine developed at Kruger Park. Twenty-four unsuspecting elephant cows, injected in the flank with an immunocontraceptive vaccine, have been tracked and examined. To the delight of the researchers, none became pregnant. Animal rights activists argue that if elephants can be rendered infertile, then perhaps a cull can be indefinitely postponed.

The pig zona pellucida (PZP) vaccine prevents sperm from penetrating the egg. The elephant is not rendered permanently infertile and scientists have observed no adverse side-effects.

For supporters of elephant contraception, the success of the PZP project carries a message: if the sex-lives of elephants can be monitored and controlled, the high-velocity rifles should be put away and the vultures and hyenas can look elsewhere.

Those resisting Magome's call for an elephant hunt also argue that death toll will provide a flourishing black market in ivory.

Yet even among Kruger Park's researchers, not everyone is convinced that birth control for elephants can work. For one thing, it is not cheap. To provide contraceptives for each female elephant at Kruger would cost $225 a year.

Then there is the fearsome prospect of monitoring the elephant cows. Each would have to be darted, and given a dose of PZP, fitted with a radio collar, and given a booster shot four weeks later. But cows already pregnant would still give birth to their unborn calves, meaning that a cull might, in any case, be necessary.

More importantly, some conservationists argue that the sex "solution" might be crueler in the long run. Elephant mating is a complicated, arduous and sophisticated affair, beginning with a chase in which the bull isolates the on-heat cow from the maternal herd.

If conception takes place this will occur once every 48 months. But cows that fail to conceive repeat the same ritual every 15 weeks. The prospect of herds of elephant cows permanently in heat, mating every four months, fills many experts with horror.

Then there are the carefully structured relationships within the herd. During the experiments, two elephant calves were abandoned to die by their apparently confused mother.

Grobler says: "If you look at an elephant herd, a family group, there are the little ones, there are older brothers and sisters, there are aunts and uncles ... and you see how they work in their relationships ... the older sister brings up the small one. The behavioural patterns are taught in that way. Contraception could mean a gap of perhaps 8 or 12 years. I don't know if that is fair to the elephant."

Elephant lovers persuaded by that argument point in desperation to the recent joining of Kruger Park to the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique. If Kruger's elephants have another 10,000sq km in which to roam, why a cull? The problem, say conservationists, is that elephants tend to stick to their home ranges.

The South African National Parks Conservation Service will make a final decision in October, but next month it will offer its formal opinion. The contraceptive solution, at least on a large scale, is likely to be ruled out by the Ministry for the Environment on grounds of cost. But the possibility of a wide-scale cull will bring activists onto the streets of South Africa in their thousands.

The debate will be highly charged. For nearly three decades, starting in the 1960s, Kruger Park managers kept elephant numbers steady by means of culling. The target population of 7000 was based on research done at the time by park biologists. Now apparently, that work has been undone.

Whatever is decided, the good times are definitely over for the African elephant.

- Independent