Threatened species of Loxodonta africana
- Threatened species of African elephant
Nature
The destruction of the African elephant does far more harm than the reduction of a species to a few thousand protected in parks and zoos. It means the end of a major force that shapes the ecology of forests and the savanna woodlands. While the whole elephant population throughout Africa is declining, some countries in southern Africa have the opposite problem: too many elephants. The future of the elephant in Africa is a complex issue that will need to resolve overpopulation in some areas and underpopulation in others.
Background
African elephants are found in the forests, grasslands, marshes, scrub, and semi-desert areas of sub-Saharan Africa. There is a distinct sub-species, the forest elephant, found in the tropical forests of central Africa. In an elephant's constant search for around 140 kg of vegetation every day, it kills small trees and underbush and pulls branches off big trees as high as its trunk will reach. This creates open spaces in both deep forest and in the woodlands. This patchwork of vegetation in various stages of regeneration, in turn creates a greater variety of forage that attracts a greater variety of other vegetarians than would otherwise be the case.
Incidence
Half the world's elephants were killed by poachers in a single decade. As recently as the 1930's there were 10 million African elephants. In 1980 there were 1.2 million; in 2000 an estimated 500,000. In the 1980s alone the kill rate reached 200 a day. Poaching and loss of habitat has reduced this to 650,000 in 1989. At the present rate of killing, some 70,000 a year, there will be no African elephants at the turn of the century.
In 1997, eight years after the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species put the African elephant on its "most endangered" list and successfully banned worldwide commercial trade in ivory, convention members amended that pact to allow three Southern African to begin selling less than half their stockpiles of ivory to Japan. The three, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, having large elephant populations and solid conservation records, needed also the millions of dollars that their stockpiled tons of ivory would bring to them. Several countries that supported the ban in 1989 voted this time to carve out an exception. That dangerously reopened what has always been the world's most insatiable ivory market, Japan, and provided a powerful incentive for poachers throughout Africa to resume the killing in the hope that their illegal ivory could safely be commingled with the legal ivory from the three African countries.
Claim
The wanton destruction of the African elephant was one of the 20th century's grim monuments to human stupidity and greed.
The most insidious and irreversible threat to wildlife in the world is the loss of habitat. In Namibia, more than half of the elephants wander outside national parks, into human habitat. Only if the elephants are worth more than the damage they do - only if they are seen not as a pest but as an asset - will conservation stand a chance. The only way forward is through a modus vivendi for man and animal.
When an elephant is shot there is immediate distress on the part of the family or herd. Elephants share with humans a strong sense of family, and a sense of death. They will mourn and an individual will occasionally return to the body and reach out to touch it. Research on orphaned young elephants showed they had nightmares for three to four months after their parents were shot.
Counter-claim
It is loss of habitat through encroachment by desperately poor farmers that is the major threat to elephants. Banning the ivory trade means that there can be no opportunity to use the elephant as part of a developing economy, so that it can survive the more insidious threat to its habitat, and enable the people to climb out of poverty.
Ivory trade ban should be selectively lifted in countries where the elephant is not endangered. In 1997, Zimbabwe was home to 66,000 elephants, although its ecosystem could support only 40,000.
Western concern for the elephant amounts to ecocolonalism. It is necessary to resist the recolonization of African countries under a facade of programmes to safeguard the global environment.
The Western love with the pachyderm is nothing else than enviromanticism. The Greens have positioned the flora and fauna of the Earth as the new oppressed proletariat.
"Elephants are nice animals," an African peasant was overheard saying, "but they are bad neighbours".
In the 19th century South Africa had 200,000 elephants; that fell to 120 by 1920. Through vigilant protection, the numbers have increased to 11,000, a level the authorities were seeking to maintain through culling in 1995. Any more elephants, they insist, would cause large-scale ecological damage.
Broader
SDG
