Back to Index

Elephants slaughtered at alarming rate in Zimbabwe
Violet Gonda, SW Radio Africa
August 18, 2008

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news190808/elephants190808.htm

Zimbabwe's once thriving wildlife and tourism industry is under serious threat as authorities continue to kill elephants and other animals at an alarming rate.

Johnny Rodrigues, the chairman for the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, said the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management has embarked on what they are calling an "Elephant Population Management Programme". But the authorities are deliberately targeting elephants with the largest tusks, which has nothing to do with population control.

Conservationists believe the Parks authorities are killing the animals for money, under the guise of animal control. Hunting tenders are not going to locals and as a result of the lawlessness caused by the economic and political crisis, foreign hunters are using the crisis to abuse the system. Rodrigues said there is a huge market for ivory and tusks can go for as much as £65 000 in some cases.

He said the ivory and skins are not being sent to the Parks central stores and nothing is being recorded. Unscrupulous hunters from South Africa are working with some of the Chinese nationals in the country, who are in cahoots with corrupt government officials.

This uncontrolled slaughter is destroying the gene pool of Zimbabwe's wildlife and threatens the future of the tourist industry which, until recently, was a very large foreign currency earner for the country.

Conservationists are also very concerned about the manner in which the animals are being killed. With the lack of expertise and control many animals are not cleanly killed and are just wounded. These animals then become very dangerous and can end up attacking people.

The so called 'culling' that is illegally taking place is targeting whole family groups. The adults are slaughtered for their ivory and the traumatised young are sold on to unscrupulous users.

This is happening in contravention of international trade regulations that Zimbabwe has signed up to and once you decimate herds and kill the biggest and the best, it takes generations to repair the damage.

In Hwange National Park alone authorities have killed over 1800 elephants and plan to slaughter at least another 1000. It seems that Hwange is often used as a killing ground, because in the early 1990's the army were given free reign and all the white rhino in the area were killed.

Parks say there are over 100 000 elephants in Zimbabwe, but conservationists have long believed that these figures are artificially inflated to try to justify Zimbabwe's regular requests to CITES for permission to sell its ivory. The Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force estimates there are actually less than 50 000 elephants.

Once again Zimbabwe's crisis targets the most innocent - in this case, our wildlife.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP