Elephants decimate other animals

Staff Writer | Monday March 25, 2013 00:00

 

The Auditor-General has found that failure to control the elephant population has led to an upswing in numbers resulting in increasing damage to crops, farm fences and water supplies and changes in woodland composition and structure.

Moreover, there is scientific evidence linking changes to woodland composition to increased or reduced diversity and abundance of some species, the Auditor General's report says. For example there was 44 percent decrease in the number of steenboks in elephant areas from an estimated 42,990 steenboks in 2001 to 23,992 in 2005.While there were 1,056 roan species in 2001, the number fell by 93 percent to 70 in 2005.

This is contrary to the overall goal of elephant conservation and management in Botswana which is to 'conserve and optimise elephant populations while ensuring the maintenance of habitats and biodiversity, promoting the contribution of elephants to national development and the communities within their range at the same time minimising their negative impacts on rural livelihoods'.

The audit report says that though Botswana adopted a Conservation and Management Plan of Elephants in 1991 that was supposed to cap the population of the animals at 60,000, the numbers have shot to over 150,000. The 60,000 cap was arrived at based on the carrying capacity of the  wildlife protected areas,  including Wildlife Management Areas (WMA). The 1991 plan proposed the removal of about 3,000 elephants per year as a way of ensuring that the 60,000 upper limit is not exceeded.

'The main objectives of these interventions and elephant management in Botswana are inter alia to prevent, reduce or reverse unacceptable elephant induced environmental changes and optimise the socio-economic benefits from sustainable utilisation of elephants,' the audit says.

The prevention and reduction of unacceptable elephant induced environmental changes was to be achieved by bringing the impact of the animals within limits of acceptable change. Another method was protecting samples of habitat types that are threatened by elephants to preserve parts of the original vegetation diversity and create species seed banks for the future.However, the Department of Wildlife National Parks had not implemented some of the management interventions meant to conserve the environment and its animal species in diversity. For example, the population of elephants was not controlled through removal or culling as proposed. As a result, the population grew rapidly from 55,000 in 1990 to 155,000 as at the time of audit in January 2010.

According to documents reviewed and interviews with management, the elephant population control measures were not implemented because Botswana is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade on Endangered Species of Animals (CITES), which barred the country from trading in ivory. In addition, the DWNP was sensitive to the proponents of animal rights who considered culling, one of the proposed methods of controlling elephants populations, as cruel.