Zimbabwe will cull 200 elephants to tackle food shortages caused by southern Africa’s worst drought in decades, the wildlife authority said Friday, following Namibia’s recent lead. The country has “more elephants than necessary”Zimbabwe’s environment minister told parliament on Wednesday, adding that he had ordered the cull to be carried out by the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Authority (ZimParks).
The 200 elephants will be hunted in areas of conflict with human populations in the Hwange Nature Reserve, the largest in the country, ZimParks CEO Fulton Mangwanya told AFP. The number of elephants in Zimbabwe is estimated at 100,000, the second largest in the world after Botswana. ZimParks says there are 65,000 in Hwange alone, four times more than the park can accommodate.
Namibia announced in early September that it had begun culling more than 700 wild animals, including 83 elephants, in what the government said was a bid to feed the drought-hit population while easing pressure on drought-scarred pasture and water resources. Zimbabwe and Namibia are among the southern African countries that have declared states of emergency due to the drought.
“More environmentally friendly methods”
“The government should find more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways to deal with the drought”said Farai Maguwu, director of the Natural Resources Management Center, an NGO. “We must stop this because it is not ethical”he added.
Chris Brown, an environmentalist and head of the Namibian Chamber of Environment, nevertheless points out that “Elephants have a devastating effect on the natural habitat if they are allowed to multiply exponentially”. “They damage the ecosystem and the natural habitats (…) of other less emblematic species and which therefore matter less in the eyes of armchair environmentalists sitting in the city.”he denounces, “These species are as important as elephants”in a context where habitats and water resources are severely tested by drought.
The last elephant cull in Zimbabwe was in 1988. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) estimates that there are only about 415,000 elephants left on the continent (compared to 3 to 5 million at the beginning of the 20th century). Both Asian and African elephants are considered endangered, with the exception of the populations in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, which are considered only “vulnerable”.
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