IWMC  World Conservation Trust

Florida, 16 December 2005
Letter to Editor St. Petersburg Times, Florida

Subject: Elephant Contraception Project in South Africa

Dear Editor:

Your December 13, 2005 editorial in support of an elephant contraception project in South Africa expresses an opinion based on inadequate and extremely biased information. This opinion, that the management of the elephant population in the Makalali game preserve is an appropriate model for all African elephant management, is incorrect. The editorial leaves out crucial facts: For millennia, Africans have lived with the game animals in their environment through selective hunting and through harvesting them for their meat, hides, and other by-products such as ivory. While the historically uncontrolled ivory trade is blamed for elephant depletion, the situation today is that over-protection of this species is having an extremely adverse impact on southern Africa and on its people. Southern Africa is drier now than in the past, and both human and elephant populations have grown. Responsible African governments now argue for sustainable use of their elephants, including renewed and controlled sale of ivory products, in order that modern conservation and traditional use of elephants and other game shall result in balance in a changing environment.

Your editorial cites the work of a biologist whose job is to keep a very small population of elephants on private property from reproducing in a normal fashion in an artificial environment. Audrey Delsink is a biologist who works on a 30,000 acre private game preserve. The Makalali preserve is a tourism business, catering to the whims and expectations of foreign visitors who come to look at a collection of African wildlife, and to stay in luxurious accommodations while probably believing that they are seeing a true picture of "life in the bush". The "birth control by dart injection" project is touted by you as an ideal solution to elephant numbers in this area where uncontrolled breeding would threaten the existence of other species that use the same habitat. You state that the alternative to artificial birth control for elephants, which is killing them, would be "worse". This is a statement of western cultural preference, not an undisputed "fact".

In reality, this solution on a private estate is a business decision, and is not practical or appropriate for management of elephant numbers in other areas. The more than 400,000 elephants in southern and part of eastern Africa must co-exist with people and other game animals, through modern decision making about the biological consequences of over-crowding, habitat depletion, and the cost of funding modern conservation programs.

Many African communities need the protein that elephant meat provides, and they wish to sell traditional ivory carvings from animals legally hunted. Some animals are professionally culled because they are identified as rogue animals that are known to attack humans. The local people assert their rights to utilize these animals for both their own sustenance and for the money that sales of their ivory can bring to the community. Some communities encourage targeted hunting of large ivory bearing elephants by foreign trophy hunters. This results in income that supports local community projects for health, education and general welfare. Western media often criticize this, while ignoring the role such hunting plays in the health of people, animals and the entire environment. We have no right to enforce our "humane" preferences on people whose needs we neither understand nor respect.

IWMC World Conservation Trust encourages all media to thoroughly research topics such as this before espousing solutions such as artificial elephant birth control in lieu of sustainable and traditional use through legal hunting, whether that hunting is by local people or is done with their blessing, for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.

Kind regards,

Eugene Lapointe
IWMC President
Former Secretary General of CITES (1982-1990)
Accredited Observer to the International Whaling Commission

Promoting the Sustainable Use of Wild Resources
- Whether Terrestrial or Aquatic
- as a Conservation Mechanism