Elephant Management 

KNP 71 Poached Elephants

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According to an article in the United South African the Kruger National Park (KNP) elephant poaching has reached an all-time high with 71 deaths in 2018 for their ivory.

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Comment by Ron Thomson
71 Elephants out of a population number 32 000 elephants (according to Dr Salomon Joubert) = 0.222 percent of the total elephant population of the Kruger National Park .

71 Animals are not a lot – especially when Kruger is currently carrying some 10 times too many elephants anyway.

Poaching will never be eradicated and 71 animals simply are not worth even mentioning in the greater scale of things at Kruger. In fact, the poachers are doing a better elephant management job in Kruger than are all the government game managers put together.

We should ask the poachers to come and carry out the elephant population reduction management work that must be done at Kruger – but which SANParks are not doing.

There should be nothing strange about “elephant range states” (states in which elephants live) working together towards achieving a common purpose.

And their common purpose is (or should be) to shed themselves of the burden of CITES – a corrupt organisation that has been captured by the convention’s accredited animal rightists NGOs – who all want to ABOLISH man’s management and man’s use of elephants and their products.

All these countries, therefore, have a legitimate cause to do what they want to do.

CITES is supposed to regulate trade in wildlife and wildlife products but, because of the animal rightists’ influence at CITES, CITES has turned into an organisation that PROHIBITS trade. This is “not on”.

Elephants are part of the legal wild living resources of the states of southern Africa in which they live – and their ivory, hide, and hair are all legitimate products that belong to those states, too.

Except for the fact that they agreed to abide by the articles of CITES in 1975 the “range states” SHOULD have the sovereign right to manage their elephants as they see fit; and to sell their elephant products as they see fit, too.

No country or organisation anywhere in the world should have the right to tell sovereign “elephant range states” how to manage their elephants and how to market their elephant products.

But CITES does; and the elephant range states meekly comply. So, they only have themselves to blame.

I am tired of reading about CITES and IUCN and how they are “concerned” with the well-being of elephants all over the continent. They have stated how they worry about how management applications to elephant populations in southern Africa might impact badly on elephant populations elsewhere on the continent.

The truth of the matter, however, is that CITES and the IUCN have caused all the elephant populations of southern Africa to become EXCESSIVE; they have stopped all vital elephant management programmes on elephant populations everywhere; and the result has been massive habitat destruction and the elimination of the biological diversities in all elephant sanctuaries in southern Africa.

What needs to be done is to write an exposure about what is happening to the elephants of southern Africa BECAUSE OF CITES’ AND IUCN’s interference.

There are so many elephants they are destroying every single aspect of the national parks that currently succour them.

 

 

 

Ron Thomson

I am NOT a ‘trophy hunter’ - and never have been. I am not involved in the trophy hunting safari business. I am also not a game rancher. But I have ‘administratively controlled’ professional hunters and safari outfitters in my capacity as a government game warden. I am an 80 year old ex-game warden with 60 years of continuous experience in hands-on wildlife management, and national park management, in Africa (1959 to 2019). In breakdown, I have 24 years experience in the management of national parks in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe - and in the management of the wild animal populations that lived inside those national parks; one year as the Chief Nature Conservation of the Ciskei in South Africa; three years as Director of the Bophuthatswana National Parks Board in South Africa; and I worked for three years as a professional hunter in the South African Great Karoo (taking foreign hunters on quests for plains game trophies). I discovered, however, that professional hunting was not my forte. I worked as an investigative wildlife journalist for 30 years in South Africa. I have written fifteen books and hundreds of magazine articles on the subject of wildlife management and big game hunting in Africa. Five of my books are university-level text books on wildlife management. I am a university-trained ecologist; was a member of the Institute of Biology (London) for 20 years; and was a registered chartered biologist for the European Union for 20 years. I have VAST experience in the “management hunting” of elephants, buffaloes, lions, leopards and hippos (as part of my official national park work in the control of problem animals); and I pioneered the capture of black rhino in Zimbabwe’s Zambezi Valley (1964 - 1970). My university thesis was entitled: “The Factors Affecting the Survival and Distribution of Black Rhinos in Rhodesia”. Look at my personal website if you want any further details about my experience: www.ronthomsonshuntingbooks.co.za.

Ron Thomson has 271 posts and counting. See all posts by Ron Thomson

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