The elephants browsing in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park move slowly, with an air of mournful wisdom. They seem to know that for all their size and strength, their future lies in the hands of others, who are smaller, cleverer and more resourceful.
Wildlife campaigners believe that Zimbabwe's department of national parks and wildlife management will soon launch a new cull, slaughtering up to 4,000 elephants in the country's parks. This week members of the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) have been meeting to decide what response to make to a proposal from South Africa that the trade in ivory should be allowed to resume.
A fearful battle is brewing over the heads of the elephants. At issue is the question of what to do when a species that has suffered a calamitous decline begins to make a recovery. Can the killing start again? The prospect sickens those who did so much to alert the world to the elephant's plight, but there are others, equally devoted to the elephant, who say that game management really means doing your best for the species, not preserving every single member of it.
Ironically, it is the nations that have done best in looking after their elephants Zimbabwe and South Africa against whom the fury of the conservationists will be directed if the ivory ban is overturned. The growth of elephant populations in the national parks of both countries has put heavy pressure on the environment. The worst effect is the loss of mature trees, destroyed by browsing elephants who push them down simply to nibble a few leaves.
The destruction of trees impoverishes the habitat for other wildlife, depriving them of shade and nesting sites, and increases the rate of soil erosion. A park with only scrub vegetation and no full-sized trees is also far less attractive to visitors.
The answer, the southern African states have always believed, lies in regular culls of elephants to keep numbers within bounds. Culling has gone on for 30 years at Kruger National Park in South Africa, where elephant numbers are maintained at 7,000. Culling has also been used, more discreetly, in Zimbabwe, whose national parks department produced a scientific report in 1989 justifying the policy.
The need for culling to preserve the parks, itself controversial, has now coincided with another argument, forcefully put by some conservationists. The preservation of wildlife, principally to provide something for tourists to look at, has often been at the expense of local people. Chased from the land and offered no share of the income brought in by tourists, the people of Africa have little to thank the conservationists for. In this view, wild animals are a luxury enjoyed by the rich in the West at the expense of the poor in Africa just another form of colonialism. From poverty to poaching is a short step.
The answer, according to a growing number of environmental economists, is to change the basis of wildlife management and give the animals an economic value to local people. At last year's general assembly of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, this view was put forward strongly by Graham Child, who works for the IUCN in Saudi Arabia, and Brian Child, from Zimbabwe's department of national parks and wildlife management.
The Childs believe the failure to protect wildlife results from "centrally regulated management of game, relying on protectionist devices and policing", which provide no incentives for local people to co-operate. The answer is to decentralise the system, and give ordinary people a reason for protecting the animals rather than poaching them.
The same argument was taken up by Professor David Pearce, of University College London, and three of his colleagues in their book "Elephants, Economics and Ivory", published earlier this year by Earthscan. Pearce has served as an adviser to the environment department, so his views carry weight. They were heard with horror by the elephants' self-appointed friends.
He concluded that the crucial factor in the decline of the elephant was not the ivory trade per se, but the failure of some states to use it constructively. "The ivory trade ban must be considered an interim measure, not a solution," he wrote.
What is needed, in Pearce's view, is to generate a flow of revenues from a diverse range of wildlife uses including tourism, hide, meat and ivory in order to create a safe niche for elephants. To do so, his calculations showed, depends on the maximisation of aggregate value, which in turn depends on exploiting the value of the ivory. In short, the best chance of preserving the elephant is to use the ivory trade, not try to suppress it.
This view is music to the ears of Zimbabwe, South Africa and Botswana, the three states that are leading the fight to resume controlled sales of ivory at next year's Cites conference, but it infuriates others. Dr Richard Leakey, director of Kenya's wildlife service, has been touring the world to warn of the consequences, and British conservation groups have held secret planning meetings to ensure they can create a united front.
"Once there is a change in the rules, then Hong Kong and Japan will be back in the business of buying ivory," Leakey says. "That will definitely force up the price, because the southern African states alone cannot produce enough. The minute that happens it will be funnelled by more poaching. Then we're right back where we were."
In Kenya, at least, the elephant was in a spiralling decline. "We had gone from a population of 65,000 elephants 20 years before, to 16,000," Leakey says. "You can't sustain that sort of loss to the breeding community it's the big elephants with the big tusks that are going, the matriarchs and the bulls, and you can't do that and keep the herds viable. That is my concern."
Bill Travers, chairman of Elefriends, is equally alarmed. "The ivory ban has been in place only two years, and when it came in we said that it would take 15 years for elephant populations to recover. To talk of resuming the ivory trade now is premature, based on the figures we have."
The figures, of course, are another source of controversy. Travers admits that statistics of elephant numbers in Zimbabwe and South Africa are sufficiently reliable at least to make a case, but he is sceptical about Botswana, and says: "Lord knows what's happening in Zaire, Cameroon, and the Congo, the forests that used be thought of as the last safe refuge of the elephant."
Counting elephants, despite their size, remains an inexact science. Zimbabwe estimated that in 1989 it had 51,700, with 21,600 of them in the Hwange National Park alone, at a greater density than at any time this century. Populations are continuing to grow. Elephants are efficient breeders, they have no effective predators but man, and they no longer die in large numbers during droughts. Water holes in the national parks are topped up artificially, and the control of fires makes enough food available to sustain the elephants through dry periods.
By last year, some estimates put the number of elephants in Hwange at 27,000, almost double what the park authorities reckon to be its elephant "carrying capacity" of 15,000. The last cull at Hwange was five years ago, since when the damage to the trees has become more obvious. In many places the only tall leadwood and mopane trees are those that date from before the growth in elephant numbers. More recent trees are broken off, to form a dense and shapeless scrub.
A beautiful animal but not a very efficient one, the African elephant spends 16 hours a day feeding. This is hard on the teeth, so elephants grow six sets, one after another. When the last set wears out, at the age of 60 to 65, the animal can no longer feed and will die a natural death. Apart from those that die as calves, and the few that are killed in fights, there seems no reason why most elephants in the national parks should not survive for their full life span.
Until, that is, the culling parties move in. One of the terrible things about culling is the way it must be done. Picking off the old and infirm, or allowing wealthy European hunters to take pot shots at elephants close to the end of their last set of teeth, does almost nothing to control numbers. The only way to counter the natural growth rate is to take out whole herds, eliminating extended families in a single lethal fusillade.
While adult male elephants may function as loners or link up with others to form bachelor groups, younger males and females of all ages travel together in breeding herds under the guidance of a senior female, the matriarch. Research has shown that they communicate using sounds too low to be heard by the human ear, which can carry for six miles or more, to warn of danger or to signal distress. Populations cannot be reduced by killing only males, because there will always be enough left to continue breeding. In parks where visitors expect to see a natural population, shooting only the older elephants is ruled out because it would disturb the social balance and alter the age structure of the population. Shooting part of a herd, leaving the rest to scatter and spread distress throughout the whole park, is equally unacceptable. The only effective method is the elimination of entire breeding herds.
The hunters gather with their guns and start by shooting the matriarch. Deprived of her leadership the group panics and is quickly picked off with a series of fast, accurate shots. Any escaping or wounded animals must be followed and killed. In about three minutes, an entire herd of 60 to 100 elephants lies dead.
Nobody pretends that this is a pleasant business, and the national parks department in Zimbabwe suggests, redundantly perhaps, that: "Culling should not be done near tourist areas or roads." With the defenders of the elephant ever ready to spring to its defence, the chances of keeping a cull quiet are negligible. The fear in Zimbabwe is that tourists will shun a country that is seen to kill its elephants, even if the need to do so has only arisen because they are well protected.
Travers takes the view that the need for the culls has not been proven. He believes that, left to their own devices, the elephants will find their own level, expanding in numbers until the habitat is so changed that it can no longer support them. Then the population will crash as thousands die, before the cycle starts again. Even if true, this pattern of events seems hardly kinder to the elephants, and allowing them to starve to death in national parks would attract even worse publicity than culling them.
Other alternatives are to try birth control, shooting or injecting contraceptive pills into the elephants. The Zimbabweans say that contraception has not been tried, and doubt whether it is practical for wild elephants.
Leakey, although not opposed to culling in principle, believes that selling the ivory from the elephants that are killed will be a disaster. Once the trade begins again, the poaching of elephants will follow. "If the value of the ivory is really so important to Zimbabwe, and if they are going to lose, say, รบ5 million of revenue from a sustained take-off of ivory, then we should get the international community for the next five years to buy the ivory off them to keep it off the market," he says. "They'll get their money, but the ivory trade mustn't resume. To buy it and destroy it would be cheaper than fighting a poaching war across Africa. It's very costly and very difficult to fight a guerrilla war, and a guerrilla war that is aimed at animals in national parks is almost impossible to win."
Leakey believes the ivory ban has been a huge success, reducing the incentive for poaching and enabling the game wardens in Kenya to get a grip on the problem again. "It's not because we've got the bigger guns, it's because the poachers aren't in the parks, because where are they going to sell the ivory?
"They can't sell it. Who wants to walk for five days without food and water to make $2 a kilo? For the moment, the poachers have turned to banditry." If so, then once again it is the local people who will suffer: the elephants' gain will be their loss.
The Worldwide Fund for Nature has yet to make up its mind where it stands on the issue, but Simon Lyster, a senior conservation officer for the organisation, has no doubt of his own opinion. While he agrees that culling may be "a horrible necessity", he says that it is far too soon to resume the trade in ivory. "The last thing we want is to risk the resumption of poaching in countries such as Zaire," he says.
A possible compromise, in his view, is to resume trading in products other than ivory, principally elephant skin, which can be sold to the United States to be made into cowboy boots. Skins could raise only half as much as ivory, but would provide some revenue. "Nobody poaches elephants for skin," Lyster says. "It takes too long to remove and prepare to be worth the poachers' while."
Like the whale, the elephant is proving an interesting test case of what we really mean by conservation. The old game wardens had no doubt; they culled old animals to sustain a healthy population that could then be shot by hunters or, later, simply gazed at in awe and admiration. If individuals had to die to maintain the health of the species, that was a cruel fact of nature.
The modern animal-lover has a much more sentimental approach. Mass-marketed concern about animals has detached them from their context, by suggesting that everything in the jungle is lovely and only man is vile. Left alone, we are encouraged to believe, wildlife would flourish in an atmosphere of co-operation and mutual respect. In fact, most wild creatures have always died unpleasantly from hunger, disease or predation.
The difficulty is that, for many people, it is impossible to love a species while acknowledging that individual members of it are dispensable. By turning animals into people, with individual rights, we risk closing off the very options that may be needed to maintain the same animal as a species. In addressing this problem, the conservationists have some difficult choices to make.
