I played with elephants today.
I’m on a private reserve just outside Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, and the team here at Wild Horizons has three herds of elephants. They’re all rescues from the atrocious culls several decades ago that saw the elephant population diminished. A team of dedicated professionals look after these elephants. They have become become accustomed to human encounters, which is why I was able to interact with them today without causing harm to either of us.
While I’m here, I’d like to tell you a tale of two elephants. The elephant who lives wild in the Knysna forest, and the elephant who lives within the boundaries of a national park—protected round the clock from would-be poachers, and what each of them can tell us about the sad state of our relationship with these gentle giants.
A Cautionary Tale
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Dutch settlers pushed east from the Cape Colony to the dense Knysna forests. For generations, they eked out a rough existence in the thicket. Uneducated and living in absolute poverty, constructing crude timber shelters in the forest where they plied their trade, cutting wood for exploitative timber merchants. They hardly ever interacted with other people, and the only real threat to their way of life so deep in the forest were the herds of African elephants. The elephants roamed free in these woods, generally terrorizing the woodcutters and trampling their shelters in their destructive wake. (Elephants always use the same path, and if a woodcutter was hapless enough to built his home in the elephant’s path, well, he’d soon find out the hard way.)
Today, the wild elephants are all but gone, and only one—Oupoot (named after the elephant in Dalene Mathee’s novel Circles in a Forest), remains in the forest. It was thought that it would be too traumatic to remove her from her home, so she was left in the forest where she will one day die, if she has not already, and her entire kind with her. She will be a lamentable testament to failed conservation efforts.
Conservation Efforts at Work
Further east of the Knysna forests lies the Sundays river Valley—a fertile strip of soil that produces South Africa’s citrus fruits. The elephants here have also had a testy relationship with people. You see, the elephants love oranges, and they used to rampage across farmland, trampling crops and any poor soul who got underfoot, to get at the tangy fruits. The Eastern Cape granted Major P.J. Pretorius, a notorious elephant hunter, permission to shoot the elephants that were destroying crops, and in a matter of years there were only eleven elephants remaining. In the 1930s the wanton destruction of the herds finally stopped and naturalist Sydney Skaife dedicated first section of Addo Elephant National Park. Since then, the elephant’s numbers have grown to over 600.
Preserving the Balance
It warms my heart to see herds of elephants flourishing, when for so many years they’ve been hunted for their ivory or shot as pests as they were by Major Pretorius. As much as I enjoyed my time with these playful creatures at Wild Horizons, feeling their leathery hides, feeding them treats of jungle oats, soya beans and molasses, it was nevertheless a sobering experience. African elephants are a vulnerable species per the World Wildlife Fund. Between 1930 and now, the elephant population decreased from ten million to just 400,000. Of those, 100,000 roam in Zimbabwe, where their numbers pose a threat to the delicate ecosystem. So which is it? Are they endangered? Or are their herds becoming too big?
Clocking in at ten tons, African elephants eat over 300 pounds of vegetation every day. They use their tusks to gore bark from trees to get at the soft, chewy wood inside. Thanks to man-made borders, they can no longer roam the continent freely and their never-ending appetites are destroying the health of the forests where they spend their lives sequestered. Zimbabwe—which has the second largest elephant population worldwide—is, for the first time in decades, considering another cull.