It’s a hot, sticky afternoon in northern Kruger, and Mashagadzi is thirsty. Trouble is, some idiots have parked their safari vehicle on his game track down to the Shingwedzi river. That would be us. Some 12,467 elephants to choose from, and we’ve managed to get in the way of one of the biggest tuskers in the park.

Mashagadzi is simply huge, a magnificent bull with a beautifully matched pair of tusks that almost scrape the ground as he walks. Right now we’re more concerned to examine his temples – is there that tell-tale trickle of viscous fluid from his temporal glands that indicates a bull in musth? We’ve had some hairy moments with testosterone-fuelled elephants and here we’ve no escape route. But it’s OK, Mashagadzi is in a forgiving mood. With a lightness of foot that belies his five tonnes of body mass, he ambles past our vehicle, filling our nostrils with that distinctive dusky smell of elephant we’ve come to love. Then he heads down the steep incline of the bank, and moments later is slaking his thirst at one of the residual pools of water in the sandy Shingwedzi river bed.

We’re not far south of Crook’s Corner, a small tongue of land between the great, grey-green greasy Limpopo, and the Luvuvhu River, where the borders of Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe meet. Back in the late 1800s this area was a safe haven for gun runners and poachers, an easy hop across the river to evade police or game guards. The ivory trade flourished, and in the space of a few short decades the local elephant population was all but wiped out.

Today the situation could scarcely be more different. Around Shingwedzi Rest Camp we encounter dozens of bulls, drawn, like Mashagadzi, to the rapidly receding river, where they drink from the few remaining pools or dig in the sand for fresh water. Further south, where the Letaba and Olifants rivers are still flowing healthily even in the height of the dry season, it isn’t just dozens of elephants we see, but hundreds: breeding herds; mothers with Dumbo-like babies, all floppy-trunked and shy; troublesome teenagers, chasing anything smaller than themselves for the hell of it; and young bulls, testing their new-found strength against one another with bouts of trunk-wrestling and shoulder-presses.

For safari-goers and wildlife photographers this is elephant heaven. But there’s trouble in paradise, and only two days later we’re brought to earth with a sickening thump. In the drab, institutional offices of Kruger’s scientific services HQ in Skukuza, we listen as Dr Ian Whyte tells us of the park’s plans to slaughter hundreds of elephants every year – all in the name of conservation.

Dr Whyte is in charge of Kruger’s large herbivore program. He is an imposing, burly figure, but talking to him it quickly becomes clear he’s a man who loves elephants. He talks of their intelligence, playfulness, compassion and tolerance. All the more shocking then, to hear him say Kruger must cull its elephants again or risk serious environmental damage. “It’s a tough call, culling is pretty awful to contemplate, but if you’re going to lose other species, then you’d better brace yourself”, he says.

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According to Dr Whyte, Kruger is already showing signs of environmental damage wrought by elephants. In moderate numbers, elephants benefit the ecosystem by opening up dense woodland and spreading seeds in their dung. But at high population levels they can cause massive damage to vegetation. In the past few years over two hundred baobabs in northern Kruger have died due to the combined effects of drought and bark-stripping by elephants. Some of these trees were over a thousand years old. Baobabs provide the only known nesting site in Kruger for two bird species, Böhm’s spinetail and the mottled spinetail, and the preferred site for two others, mosque swallows and Cape parrots. Mature knobthorns, favoured by Wahlberg’s eagles, tawny eagles and small goshawks, are suffering from ring-barking (whereby elephants destroy a band of bark running right around the trunk) and marula trees, an important source of fruit for many creatures, have decreased in number.

Dr Whyte draws a comparison with East African parks such as Amboseli, where a high density of elephants has led to a huge decline in woodland, the disappearance of lesser kudu and bushbuck, fewer gerenuk, giraffe, baboons and monkeys, and the loss of many baobabs.

The problem, according to Dr Whyte, is that Kruger simply has too many elephants. It’s a difficult concept to accept for those of us brought up on stories of bloody poaching, illegal ivory trading, and the collapse of Africa’s elephant population to less than five per cent of its former numbers. But in recent years, thanks to the ban on ivory sales and more effective conservation, elephant numbers in southern Africa have boomed. Kruger itself now has more than 12,000 elephants, and with numbers rising by seven per cent a year, this could double in a decade.

Unless drastic action is taken that is. Last September, South Africa National Parks (SANParks) proposed just such action. In a report to the country’s Environment Minister, it proposed a program of annual culling which would see hundreds of elephant shot each year. The report proposed a sophisticated elephant management strategy, dividing the park into zones according to botanical value and ecological vulnerability. It contained a raft of different elephant control measures, but it was the dreaded C-word – culling – that provoked a predictable storm of protest.

Culling in the name of conservation isn’t a new concept for Kruger. Over the course of three decades more than 14,000 elephants were culled in the park as part of a former policy to maintain the population at around 7,500. But culling was suspended in 1995, in the face of local and international pressure from animal welfare groups. Those same groups have reacted furiously to the prospect of a return to the elephant killing fields.

“Culling is cruel, unethical and a scientifically unsound practice that does not consider the welfare implications to elephant society as a whole”, says Jason Bell-Leask, director of Southern African operations for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). “SANParks simply doesn’t have the science to support its demands to kill elephants.”

In this contention IFAW has the support of some eminent elephant experts. At a round-table convened by the South African government in January, scientists advised there was “no compelling evidence to suggest the need for immediate, large-scale reduction of elephant numbers”. Instead it called for further research, but it warned that some form of intervention to control burgeoning elephant numbers was “inevitable”.

Cynthia Moss, director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, says killing elephants to reduce local population density is “unnecessary, unimaginative, and inhumane” and will at best only provide a temporary solution to the problem. “Artifically maintaining elephant populations at low levels relative to plant resources removes the environmental constraints that drive natural population self-regulation. The result is birth and survival parameters encouraged artificially to levels commensurate with rapid population growth”, she says.

“Management of nature by killing animals is the solution of a command-and-control mindset”, she suggests. “This outdated view assumes the ‘natural’ state of ecosystems is a stable equilibrium and conditions must be kept constant in this perceived ‘desirable’ state to conserve biodiversity.”

Will Travers, CEO of Born Free Foundation, agrees: “The role of elephants in ecosystems, the way they change and modify habitat and their impact on biodiversity are now better understood, and the idea that a landscape should be maintained so that it always looks a certain way, aesthetically pleasing to tourists or park managers, has increasingly lost credibility within the scientific community.”

As well as their ethical objections to culling, organisations such as Born Free are concerned about the implications for the trade in ivory. “Should culling be approved it is likely that South Africa will want to re-open the international ivory trade, so that they may sell off any ivory that results from the cull. If the ivory trade is re-opened poachers will undoubtedly take advantage, which could have a devastating effect on elephants in extremely fragile situations such as in West and Central Africa”, says Will Travers.

Ian Whyte is adamant that culling would and should only be carried out for ecological reasons: “There should never be a profit motive.” But with Kruger being perhaps the only national game park in the world that has its own elephant meat processing plant on-site, SANParks is certainly vulnerable to criticism that it is, in part, commercially motivated.

According to Michelle Pickover, of Elephants Alive, a coalition of animal rights organisations, there may also be a commercial pressure on South Africa’s government to approve culling. “There is a lot of pressure from the other Southern African Development Community countries to begin to kill thousands of elephants. They feel South Africa is dragging its feet in joining up to the common SADC policy on culling elephants – all the others are itching to get going.”

Whether ivory sales really are a motivating factor is open to debate. But at a meeting of senior state wildlife managers from around Southern Africa, instituted by the SADC in May 2005, there was certainly consensus that culling should be available as a management tool, and what was needed was one country to break the impasse and lead the way. Given the much larger populations of elephants in the national parks of neighbours such as Botswana and Zimbabwe, the green-light for a cull in Kruger could well be a precursor to elephant slaughter on an even greater scale elsewhere.

However, opponents of culling argue that even if there were credible scientific evidence that Kruger really is overstocked with elephants, there are alternatives to killing. The worrying thing is that these all have flaws.

Contraceptive birth control has been tried with some success in smaller parks, such as Makalali Game Reserve, not far from Kruger, though this is still very much in the research phase. Adult females are vaccinated with porcine Zona Pellucida, pZP, an immuno-contraceptive made from the ovaries of pigs, and administered by dart. But, as Dr Whyte points out, the logistics of contraception in a game reserve the size of Israel are bewildering. Simply to stabilise the population would mean between 3,000 and 4,000 breeding females being under contraceptive treatment at any one time. Each would require three initial inoculations at three week intervals, then annual boosters after that. Each individual would have to be located, tranquillised and radio-collared for these top-ups – an expensive (at £300 a throw) and traumatic procedure. Even if enough frequencies were available for radio-collaring on this scale to work, the overall cost of maintaining such a contraceptive programme in a huge free-ranging population such as Kruger’s would be prohibitive. Future research developments might change that, but at present contraceptive control would only really be a viable option for smaller parks such as Addo National Park, where the elephant population is around 450.

An alternative non-lethal form of population control is translocation – physically removing entire elephant family groups to other protected areas. But where? Southern Africa has reached saturation point. Managers of other reserves are all too aware of the consequences of having too many elephants. “These days you can’t even give elephants away,” says Dr Ian Whyte.

Kruger’s two million hectares were recently joined by another one million hectares of the Limpopo National Park in neighbouring Mozambique, as part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. But any hopes that pulling down the boundary fence would see a mass migration of Kruger’s elephants across the border were swiftly dashed. Elephants are creatures of habit, sticking to their established home ranges, and colonisation of the Mozambique sector of the park is likely to be a very slow process. Indeed, when 25 elephants were translocated to the new area in September 2003, they simply turned right round and walked back to Kruger.

According to Professor Rudi van Aarde, director of Pretoria University’s Conservation Ecology Research Unit (CERU), what’s really needed is a complete U-turn in thinking on elephant management. “Managing numbers will not deal with the cause of the problem. It’s like taking a pain killer for a tooth-ache instead of visiting the dentist.” He believes Kruger is not overpopulated with elephants – “densities there are half the levelling-off densities elsewhere” – but is suffering from the effects of past bad management practices, such as providing artificial water points in the dry north of the park, which have skewed elephant distribution and reduced natural mortality during droughts. He is not alone in arguing that Kruger’s managers are still stuck in a mindset based on parochial ‘agricultural’ management approaches, rather than modern, dynamic ecological concepts.

Kruger, he argues, should not be considered in isolation, but as part of a larger patchwork of protected areas across the region. His vision is for a series of ‘megaparks’ stretching across Africa, ignoring political boundaries, and encompassing a broad range of habitats and conditions.

The idea of tearing down fences and expanding habitat for elephants is an attractive one, but with five million people living in the vicinity of Kruger, this may not be so simple. People and elephants don’t mix comfortably. And what do those people think of the elephant question anyway? As Dr Whyte points out, when it comes to deciding the fate of the park’s elephants, poor local communities might have rather different views on how to spend the sort of money that mass contraception or translocation schemes would cost, for example, than those from well-funded animal welfare groups overseas.

It’s a hugely complex issue. Talking to figures on all sides of the debate seems to raise more questions than it does answers and it’s hard to accept that killing such magnificent animals can be the way forward. Sometime very soon the South African government will have to announce its decision. Will culling return in Kruger? And if it does will other reserves in southern Africa follow suit?

As we drive back to camp, we encounter a small breeding herd of elephants blocking the road. One cow and a small male calf, perhaps three years old, are methodically stripping bark from a large tree, munching happily and oblivious to the controversy surrounding them. Is the little male a Mashagadzi in the making? Or is there now a bullet with his name on it?

Find out more

Amboseli Elephant Research Project www.elephanttrust.org
Born Free Foundation www.bornfree.org.uk
Care for the Wild International www.careforthewild.org
David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org
International Fund for Animal Welfare www.ifaw.org
South Africa National Parks www.sanparks.org
World Conservation Union www.iucn.org