OutdoorsFebruary 12, 2004

Jim Peek

The African elephant will capture your imagination like no other living thing, if you have a chance to spend enough time with them.

Their size, up to six tons and 12 feet tall, is enough to get your attention, and it isn't difficult to recognize how intelligent they are as well.

And if we think the controversies over our native wildlife are serious, the conflicts over management of the elephant are international, centering on ivory poaching and habitat destruction.

The forests in South Africa and Botswana I observed last November looked like they had been bombed. The elephants uproot mature trees to strip the bark from the roots and break off limbs to eat their leaves. If left to pursue the destruction, the acacia and mopane forests are converted to grasslands and the tremendous diversity of flora and fauna is seriously reduced. Game parks such as the Amboseli have been extensively modified by elephants to where other wildlife has been dramatically affected.

The demand for ivory is insatiable, and where poaching is not controlled, elephant and rhinoceros populations have been seriously reduced.

But the southern African nations have reduced poaching, resulting in increases in elephants and rhinos. They have not been culling elephants recently, a grim remedy for overpopulation, because of agreements and a general public revulsion to the practice.

Now the damage to habitat is widespread. Those opposed to culling urge capture and restoration of elephants to other areas, such as Mozambique, as an alternative. But a meeting in Zambia of wildlife officials from southern African countries last November to address the overpopulation means culling is being seriously considered.

Elephants respond to heavy poaching and indiscriminate culling by producing smaller tusks or none at all. When the poaching and indiscriminate culling is stopped, observers look for evidence tusk sizes increase.

We have witnessed some of the same reductions in antler sizes of deer from hunting that seriously reduces the numbers of adult animals or prohibits taking of spikes.

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So if culling of elephants is again implemented, it will likely be targeted at specific individuals in order to minimize reductions in tusk sizes.

This leads one to wonder whether forest damage by elephants is a natural phenomenon that occurred prior to so much human influence. After all, 17 percent of Botswana is set aside as game preserves, and huge areas in the other countries are reserved for wildlife as well.

My feeling is elephants probably uprooted trees to feed on roots and leaves prior to white man's colonization of their habitat, but whether it was so extensive is the issue.

I imagine prolonged widespread drought might have promoted extensive damage. However, elephants are known to make long migrations and would be expected to move huge distances, hundreds of kilometers, when water dwindled and forage became scarce. Unrestricted movement would tend to reduce forest damage.

Today, even the huge areas set aside for elephants are probably not enough to accommodate them. So it is likely that measures to keep their numbers in check will be a continued part of elephant conservation and management.

Are there situations in the United States where enough country is set aside to provide habitat for the largest species under all conditions? I think the central Idaho wilderness areas are possible examples.

The Selway and the Salmon are large enough to contain elk populations, and now wolf packs, entirely within the wilderness area boundaries. These are the resident species that have the largest home ranges in the region. With fires allowed to burn under many conditions within these areas, we have the makings of entire ecosystems that are not too far from the original.

The big wilderness areas in Idaho that are large enough to potentially sustain the entire natural wildlife complex adds to their value, and can serve to help us better understand our effects on wildlife elsewhere.

There are few places like these left in this world, especially in the United States.

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