Zimbabwe will kill 200 elephants as it faces an unprecedented drought that has led to food shortages and tackles a growing animal population, the country’s conservation agency said on Friday.
The country has “more elephants than it needs”, Zimbabwe’s environment minister told parliament on Wednesday, adding that the government had tasked the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Service (ZimParks) to begin the culling process.
200 elephants will be hunted in areas where they have encountered humans, including Hwange, home to Zimbabwe’s largest wildlife reserve, ZimParks chief executive Fulton Mangwanya told AFP. Zimbabwe is home to an estimated 100,000 elephants and has the second largest elephant population in the world after Botswana. Thanks to conservation efforts, Hwange is home to 65,000 of them, more than four times its capacity, according to ZimParks.
Zimbabwe last killed elephants in 1988. Neighboring Namibia has already killed 160 people while culling more than 700 elephants to cope with its worst drought in decades. Zimbabwe and Namibia are among a number of countries in southern Africa that have declared a state of emergency due to drought.
However, the move to hunting animals for food was not universally welcomed. “The government needs to have more sustainable ecological methods to deal with the drought without affecting tourism,” said Farai Maguwu, director of the non-profit Center for Natural Resource Management.
“They risk turning away tourists on ethical grounds. Elephants are more profitable alive than dead.” He added: “We have shown that we are poor stewards of natural resources and our lust for ill-gotten wealth knows no bounds, so we must stop this because it is unethical.”
On the other hand, Chris Brown, conservationist and CEO of the Namibia Chamber of the Environment, said that “elephants have a devastating effect on habitats if they are allowed to increase exponentially”. “
They really damage ecosystems and habitats and have a huge impact on other species that are less iconic and therefore matter less in the eyes of the Eurocentric people who defend the seat of the city,” he said. “These species matter as much as elephants do.”
