A Continent of Ghosts
At the start of the twentieth century, Africa’s elephant population numbered anywhere between 3–12 million, but this was already a fraction of the tens of millions that likely existed only a few hundred years before. And now? Recent surveys have shown that there are only 415,000 African elephants left. The number of elephants in Africa has fallen by more than 90 per cent in little over one century. What on earth went wrong?
Many of the problems that elephants have faced in the past few hundred years are encapsulated in the example of what is now Addo Elephant National Park, in South Africa. Lying on the southern Cape coast close to Port Elizabeth, Addo was first inhabited by Khoesan people, then by the nomadic Xhosa tribe. That was until the Boers – white Dutch-descended farmers – arrived in the 1740s. The inevitable clashes between the three groups continued for almost one hundred years, until the Boer settlers finally drove the Xhosa and Khoesan out of the area. Throughout this time, elephant killing had been rife, with ivory trading being a major incentive behind the Boers’ desire to control the land.
By the early 1900s, only a few isolated elephant groups remained in the area, perhaps as few as 130 animals – significantly down from the tens of thousands that had been present centuries before. Then in 1919, the professional hunter Major P.J. Pretorius was appointed by government officials to shoot all the remaining elephants in the area, in an attempt to end the angry conflicts with the Boer farmers surrounding Addo, and to allow more space for agriculture. Pretorius’s actions resulted in the deaths of 114 elephants in thirteen months. Only sixteen elephants were said to be left alive.
Fortunately, public opinion changed somewhat after this mass slaughter, and by 1931 Addo was proclaimed a national park to provide sanctuary to the remaining elephants. Over subsequent years, more elephants were lost in continuing conflict with farmers, and at one point the herd shrunk to only eleven creatures. But, as awareness about the very real threat to the survival of the species hit headlines around the world, the population did begin to rise again. In 1954, an ‘elephant-proof’ fence was designed and built, enclosing and protecting the then twenty-two-strong elephant population by preventing them from moving into the surrounding farmland.
Today, the population of Addo is slightly over 600 elephants, and the area of the park available to the elephants has been expanded to accommodate their growing number and reduce the amount of damage they are causing to vegetation within their fenced area.
The elephant population has grown rapidly, despite the fact that its genetic diversity was low, as would be expected from having grown from a bottleneck of only eleven individuals. Low genetic diversity reduces the evolutionary adaptability of a population and can result in a greater incidence of inherited diseases – much like the inbreeding that blighted royal families in the past – so in a bid to add some variety, adult males were introduced from Kruger in the early 2000s to try to counteract this problem.
The Addo story is typical of the plight of elephants throughout the twentieth century and highlights many issues: population decline due to heavy hunting and poaching, loss of habitat and conflict with people over land use, and management or manipulation of populations by humans. But before we think about these issues in more detail, we have to first understand something about demographics and population biology.
The size of any population or species increases with births, and immigration. And populations decrease because of death, and emigration. Longevity, age distribution, sex ratios, age of sexual maturity, gestation and weaning all affect population sizes, and the rate at which the population may grow or contract. If everyone in a population lives longer, so there are fewer deaths each year, and births continue to occur, the population size will increase, as does the growth rate.
But if there are too few females or males, or more specifically, too few of breeding age, birth rate will decline and the growth rate will start to drop, which could ultimately lead to a decline in population size. And of course, if many individuals die prematurely or emigrate, at a rate that is higher than the rates of births and immigration, the population size decreases, and the growth rate contracts.
In short, the size, age and sex structure, and potential for reproduction and growth – the demographics – of a population are key factors influencing whether it is vulnerable to extinction.
By looking at demographic factors such as average lifespan, age and sex distributions, and the length of time between each birth among females, the theoretical maximum rate of increase for an elephant population was calculated as 7 per cent. This means that – under the very best conditions – a healthy population of elephants could increase in number by 7 per cent each year, on average.
So, in a population of 100 elephants with a normal social structure, optimum balance of reproductively active males and females, and natural rate of deaths, we could see an increase to 107 individuals, in one year. And the population will increase by another 7 per cent in the next and subsequent years, so that ten years later the population could be as large as 184 elephants.
Of course, few elephant populations meet these ‘perfect’ criteria (although Addo did), and so observed rates of increase – or population growth – tend to be lower, typically no more than a 6-per-cent increase per year in very good environmental conditions. And any population that is increasing at a rate that is higher than 7 per cent per year – as some have been recorded – is likely doing so because of immigration. That is, other elephants from outside are coming into the population, swelling the numbers.**
We can use these theoretical and observed figures of population growth rates to calculate how many elephants can die before a population will start to shrink – the point at which we lose more elephants than are born each year. So, when we talk about elephant populations declining, it is a shorthand way of saying that the number of deaths (and emigrations) in the population is greater than the number of births (and immigrations). And of course, the starting size of the population is important in this calculation.
A population of 2,000 elephants can easily ‘afford’ to lose ten elephants a year – in fact, this is what we would expect to see based on average natural mortality patterns (at 0.5 per cent). But for a small, isolated population of only 100 elephants, the same loss of ten elephants in a year – or 10 per cent of the population – would be catastrophic, and way outside the sustainable number. Such losses in a small population would soon result in the extinction of that particular group.
It is therefore not surprising that the first areas to completely lose – or at least come close to losing – their elephants were at the northern and southern limits of their range, across North Africa (in the Middle Ages) and the South African Cape areas, including Addo (in the last century). Living in these areas was already difficult for elephants, given the habitats; arid in the north, rocky and exposed with a harsh climate in the south, so the population growth rates were probably low to start with. This means there was very little elasticity to withstand the onslaughts of intensive hunting that began with the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s, and the point at which hunting would have reached unsustainable levels would therefore have been much lower than in larger, more robust populations elsewhere in the continent.
The beginning of this book outlined how the Europeans arriving in Africa in the sixteenth century were the catalyst for subsequent population declines, setting off the scramble for ivory that continues to this day. Ivory had been coveted and used in many cultures around the world before this time, including some trade with Europe, ‘Arabia’ and Asia, but it was the early colonisers who have to take the credit for initially establishing the catastrophic levels of demand that persist. As early as the year 1670, John Ogilby wrote of the diminishing supply of ivory in Congo in his atlas Africa, presumably based on information he received from traders.
In the 200 years between 1500 and 1700, it is estimated that 100–200 tonnes of ivory were being exported from Africa per year. This figure exceeded 200 tonnes per year during the 1700s, and between 1800 and 1850, the figure was more like 400 tonnes per year. During the early stages of this mass export, the average tusk weight may have been as high as 12 kg. If we take this high figure – meaning one elephant could provide 24 kg of ivory – and an average export value of 150 tonnes per year, that gives an estimate of 6,250 elephants dying per year between 1500 and 1700, or 1.25 million elephants over that initial 200-year period.
That is a conservative estimate, using a high average tusk weight, and mid-point value for the number of tonnes of ivory being exported. Given that by the 1800s, average tusk weights had fallen considerably, a similar number of more than one million elephants were likely also slaughtered in the 1700s, and another one million again in the fifty years up to 1850. Considerably more than 3 million elephants were killed for their ivory in 350 years. But things got really bad in the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1850 and 1900, approximately 700–800 tonnes of ivory were being exported from Africa every year.
Let’s call that 750 tonnes, for fifty years, which equals 37,500 tonnes. Or 37.5 million kg. By this time, average tusk weight per shipment could be as low as 4 kg, but again let’s be very conservative and use a figure of 8 kg, so each dead elephant could contribute 16 kg to that total. That means well over 2 million elephants were slaughtered for ivory in only fifty years, probably more, as tusk weights decreased.
Given that there is evidence (from tusk circumference) that females were increasingly being shot in some locations during this period due to a shortage of large-tusked males, this number of dead elephants has to be an underestimate, as it does not account for the calves and family members that would have perished after their mothers and family elders were shot and killed.
The vast majority of this ivory being taken from Africa was imported into Britain. In some years of Queen Victoria’s reign, Britain was importing as much as 650 tonnes or more, and the figure averaged around 480 tonnes per year throughout her reign. Britain was using the ivory from around 30,000 dead elephants a year to make knife handles, piano keys, combs, and billiard balls. Big game hunting was all the rage and white elephant hunters would kill hundreds of elephants routinely. One man, the Scottish hunter Walter Dalrymple Bell, is reported to have personally killed over a thousand elephants during his safaris at the turn of the twentieth century.
Of course, it wasn’t all wanton greed and entitlement. The Victorian-era administrators did have some understanding of sustainability, with various regulations imposed at differing times in different regions to try to protect and maintain what was visibly becoming a scarcer resource, usually centring around minimum tusk weights that could be harvested. But as we can see from the numbers, these regulations did little to halt the plundering continent-wide.
A far more significant step taken during the late nineteenth century was the proclaiming and gazetting of parks or reserves, aimed at protecting the natural habitat, flora, and fauna of certain landscapes. Late Victorian-era administrators realised that for there to be anything left for them to hunt (and trade), they would have to start preserving some animals.
In areas such as ‘British East Africa’ (Kenya, today), protection of wildlife went hand in hand with hunting – a conservation model that persists to this day in many parts of Africa. From 1896, game reserves were established in British East Africa to protect the land and animals, so that European colonialists would still have something to shoot, and the Game Department was set up specifically to protect these exclusive hunting grounds.
The establishment of reserves had a different origin in southern Africa. By the turn of the last century, excessive hunting had virtually eliminated elephants from South Africa, as we saw in the Addo region. In 1898, President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal Republic (which falls in the north-east of modern-day South Africa, and against whom Britain fought the Anglo–Boer wars) thus proclaimed a no-hunting zone in an area in the far north-east.
The elephant population in this area was almost wiped out, with the numbers being not more than double figures. But by 1926, this no-hunting area had grown considerably in size; it was proclaimed a national park and renamed Kruger. It opened to public vehicles in 1927. At 350 kilometres long by 60 kilometres wide, this vast area – some 20,000 square kilometres – is about the size of Wales.
Despite its successes, Kruger National Park has faced many attacks to its vision over its history, with hunters lobbying for access to the park; farmers (such as soldiers returning from the First World War) wanting agricultural land to work; gold, copper and coal prospectors wanting to mine the land; and – around the turn of the twentieth century – vets calling forcefully for the mass slaughter of all wild animals in the area to halt the spread of diseases carried by tsetse flies.
Livestock sleeping sickness spread by tsetse flies was a big deal. Wildlife species are carriers of the disease but generally remain unaffected by the symptoms, while horses and cattle are highly susceptible. At the time, some claimed it was the biggest brake to development in the South African region, limiting transport routes and agriculture, as livestock could not survive in many areas. The argument was that if wildlife was culled – thus removing the carriers and food sources of the tsetse fly vectors – the flies would be eliminated, and the cattle could then move into new areas conveniently left vacant. But the warden of Kruger at the time strongly opposed this strategy, and managed to protect the animals in the park from the policy.
By 1935, Kruger’s elephant population had increased to about 135 individuals, and stood at nearly 1,000 by 1958. Today, Kruger has one of the most robust elephant populations on the continent, despite continued calls from wildlife managers and scientists in South Africa who vociferously warn of the potential damage of ‘too many elephants’, as we shall see in the following chapters.
One thing that the South African parks did have in common with those in east Africa, was the view about who owned the wildlife and who should have access to it. In both regions, parks and reserves served to ‘protect’ wild animals and their habitat from native populations. Africans were kept out of east African parks so that white people did not have to share their hunting grounds, and they were kept out of South African parks so white people did not have to share anything – remember, these parks were being established at the same time as apartheid policies were forming and snowballing.
This ownership of elephants by states and entities therefore signalled the beginning of the transition from the majority of hunting to fuel the ivory trade being legal, to illegal killing – i.e. poaching. But more significantly, these policies of ownership and exclusion have ramifications for conservation across the entire continent that still manifest today.
The actions of trophy hunting and trade in ivory hugely depleted elephant numbers up to the early twentieth century, but the very high population numbers initially across the continent meant the rate of decline was fairly low at first. Ivory prices and demand fell during the period of the two world wars, and there is some evidence that elephant populations across the continent began to recover and increase in number from around 1914 up to the late 1940s. But by the 1950s, demand for ivory increased again and the killing resumed, such that by the 1960s, the killing was at a level similar to the 1880s.
Our desire for ivory exploded even more in the 1970s, which is when the total elephant population began to fall dramatically. This coincided with the increasing wealth in the global north after the austerity of the post-war years, and a boom in the world human population – particularly across Asia, which in turn fuelled a new and expanding market for ivory in places like China and Vietnam.
Little scientific data on elephant numbers exists before the 1970s, and our population estimates up to this time are mostly based on calculations from ivory export information. Real, direct data on the sizes of elephant populations remained scarce until 1979, when Iain Douglas-Hamilton (the ultimate hero for all elephant biologists) undertook the first continent-wide survey of elephant populations. He pioneered the use of multiple aerial surveys to count elephants across their range, and his data from these counts combined with analyses of other kinds of survey gave an estimate of only 1.3 million elephants remaining across Africa in 1979. Worse still, these elephants existed in very fragmented populations – with few or no clear pathways connecting them.
As if the killing of elephants wasn’t already out of control, it was made significantly worse by the introduction of automatic weapons in the 1970s. This coincided with a number of wars, civil disturbances and guerrilla campaigns that were occurring as a result of decolonisation and the chaos that ensued.
The value of arms imports to Africa increased tenfold, to billions of dollars, in the space of one decade up to 1980. As the last vestiges of colonialism were overthrown and dozens of African countries got their independence, there was a surge in violence across the whole continent. Much of this was due to arms races meant to defend or protect against adjacent countries that were increasing their own military power.
As the Ugandan military expanded under Idi Amin, neighbouring Tanzania and Kenya felt compelled to better arm their own forces. An increasingly militarised Libya egged on Sudan to expand its capabilities, and similar actions can be seen with Somalia and Ethiopia. Armies in east Africa grew from fewer than 140,000 personnel in 1971, to 440,000 in 1980.
Sometimes, these armed soldiers were themselves responsible for the poaching. In other cases, weapons would have been lost, stolen, traded, or forcibly removed from defeated soldiers, to end up in the hands of poachers. Whereas in the first half of the twentieth century, poaching was mainly done with spears, arrows and antique firearms, from the 1970s the AK-47 became the weapon of choice.
In Chad, for example, the elephant population declined dramatically (falling by 80 per cent) within a few months of the outbreak of war in 1979. The long civil war in Mozambique, lasting from 1977 until 1992, had a devastating effect on elephants and other large mammals. Army, militia and the ‘resistance’ all poached elephants in the areas under their control, for both ivory and meat. In Gorongosa National Park alone, elephants declined from several thousand individuals before the conflict, to about 300 by 1992.
I’ve seen it myself in South Sudan, a country that used to have a vast and diverse range of wildlife, now almost wiped out because of poaching for trade and bushmeat during their civil war. The perpetrators are almost always militiamen armed with AK-47s and I’ve had to witness many occasions when youths thought it would be fun to fire a volley at a herd of antelopes or giraffe to see if they could get some extra meat for their dinner.
Similar stories can be found in many other African nations, and the effects of such conflicts can be so severe for wildlife that some conservationists have called recently for explicit safeguards for biodiversity during armed conflicts, with environmental damage cemented as a war crime under the Geneva Convention. They want international legal instruments to protect natural resources from armed conflicts, to regulate arms transfers to poachers, and to hold militia and military personnel accountable for the environmental damage they cause, be that destruction of megafauna, their habitats, or poisoning of natural water sources.
By 1987, elephants had been all but eliminated from areas of Sudan, Chad, Central African Republic, and Zaire (now DRC), and had been greatly reduced – and were still declining – across east, southern and west Africa. Only the populations in Malawi, Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa seemed robust at the time. Two years later, the continental elephant population had fallen further, to around 650,000 individuals. The number of elephants had halved in one decade, and the ivory yield was three times higher than the maximum sustainable level. The speed of the decline was so steep, because there were many fewer elephants to begin with than in earlier centuries.
By the late 1980s – when I was a young child – the situation was so severe that it was predicted that elephants could be extinct across Africa by the new millennium. I can distinctly remember campaigns such as ‘EleFriends’, and the ‘Babar says Help Save the Elephants’ window stickers, from the awareness campaign championed by Iain Douglas-Hamilton.
Luckily, the campaigns worked, and in 1989 an international ban on ivory trading was imposed. The ban had the desired effect, with demand for ivory falling almost instantly. The industrial-level killing stopped, and elephant numbers began to recover again. But of course, the ivory story does not end there. For reasons we explore more in the next chapters, demand for ivory began to increase again by the late 2000s, and intense poaching resumed. Around 30,000 elephants were being lost each year between 2010 and 2014, reaching a peak in 2011 with 40,000 elephants killed. And the killing continues today.
Taking up Iain Douglas-Hamilton’s mantle, Mike Chase, the founder of Elephants Without Borders (where I visited the orphanage in Botswana), undertook the Great Elephant Census (GEC) between 2014 and 2016. It is the largest count of elephants to date, with aerial censuses occurring over eighteen savannah elephant range countries. Mike aimed to count around 90 per cent of the elephants in the eighteen countries, and compare the numbers of live (and dead) elephants counted to what we know about historic population sizes.
Mike uses the latest in GPS technology to track elephants as they migrate. In the summer of 2019, I joined him in an aerial recce mission to dart and collar a bull elephant in the Okavango Delta, as part of his ongoing research. It was a thrilling experience. Mike drove in his trusty old Toyota Land Cruiser through the bush and instructed me and his friend, the veterinary doctor Larry Patterson, to fly in a helicopter around an area near to Seronga.
Almost immediately after take-off, we spotted two adult bull elephants in their late twenties in a clearing; they were slowly walking and grazing together as we swept around to encircle them. Larry spoke to Mike on the radio, telling him where to drive. Once Mike had spotted the elephants from the ground, he drove as close as he could get safely and chose which one to target. Larry loaded his rifle with a dart filled with carfentanil tranquiliser drugs and we banked around to try to get a shot. The helicopter pilot, used to these sorts of missions, joked as we swung over to the right – the side door was fully open, and I was glad we were strapped in.
‘Closer, steady now,’ shouted Larry over the mic. We hovered at around fifty feet in the air as the older elephant stormed off into the treeline, while the younger one ran around in circles. That’s exactly what we wanted, to separate the pair.
‘He’s scared, but he’ll wait for his mate in the bush,’ said Larry. ‘If there’s danger, they will leave their mates behind for a bit, but they’ll be reunited soon.’ And then, as soon as Mike was in position, he gave the command to shoot.
Larry took aim from the wobbling chopper and fired a shot. ‘Got him,’ he smiled. The helicopter soared upwards and began to circle again from a safer height. We waited for the drug to work. ‘It usually takes fifteen minutes.’ So we circled around as the bull gradually slowed down, and after a while he came to a complete standstill.
‘He’s a tough bugger,’ said Larry, after twenty-five minutes. The elephant was still standing upright, although he was clearly in a trance. ‘We’ll need to give him another shot. Let’s land,’ he said. So the pilot came down, landing the helicopter fifty yards away in a clearing near to where Mike was parked, calmly watching.
‘Yeah, he’s a tough one, that’s for sure,’ said Mike, as we all walked over to the weird figure of a drugged elephant standing completely still. ‘Is it safe?’ I asked cautiously, as the beast towered above us. It felt very surreal to be in the shadow of this enormous creature that appeared to be suspended in time.
‘He’s out of it,’ said Larry, ‘but better safe than sorry.’ With that he walked up to the elephant and jabbed another dart in his backside to make sure we had a clear thirty-minute window to do the job. The elephant wobbled a bit, then crumpled under his own weight, luckily falling onto his side with a loud thud that shook the ground. If he had fallen forward onto his chest, we would have all needed to push the big male over so as to prevent the lungs being crushed, but fortunately that wasn’t necessary.
As soon as the elephant was still, we all set to work. Firstly, Larry pulled an ear over the elephant’s face to prevent the sun shining directly onto his face and flies from landing in the sleeping giant’s eyes. Then Larry began measuring the elephant’s dimensions – the tusk length and estimated weight, the skin condition and overall shape that he was in. He was remarkably fit and healthy, especially given the recent drought that Botswana had been undergoing. ‘That means he’s either been on the move a lot looking for new food. Or else he’s stayed in the delta where it’s green,’ said Mike.
As Larry did his thing, Mike and I set about putting on a collar, which involved lots of pulling and shoving until the weight was absolutely right. ‘This thing weighs four kilos,’ said Mike, holding the big lump of lead that acts as a counterweight to the tracking device, which sits on the back of the neck. I worked as fast as I could to screw the bolts in place, and using some shears, chopped off the excess rubber. I dreaded to think what would happen if the bull woke up prematurely. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Larry. ‘We’ve got another eight minutes. Loads of time.’ It didn’t reassure me!
But with the collar fitted, Larry injected a dose of the tranquiliser antidote to make sure the anaesthetic would wear off in good time, and we retreated to a safe distance as the animal rolled up and gradually got to his feet. No doubt with a beastly hangover, he shook his head and realised that he now had a new necklace, much to his displeasure. The bull started tugging on it and tried to pull it off.
‘They wonder what it is, but after a very short time they get used to it. It’ll stay on for three or four years, and then either drop off naturally, or we will come and remove it.’
As the bull ambled off to find his friend, I appreciated how much effort went in to gathering all this data. Mike and Larry had done this literally hundreds of times. But that was only the beginning. Then the scientists had to track and follow each elephant and find out exactly what they were up to.
His data, sadly, does not paint a pretty picture.
In the last thirty years, the elephant population has fallen again by another quarter, to reach its lowest known figure of around 415,000 elephants across the whole continent. Currently, populations are shrinking continent-wide at about 8 per cent per year, and this is still primarily due to poaching.
Here, we must insert a caveat: Africa is not monolithic. It is a hugely diverse continent comprising of fifty-four (currently recognised) individual countries, that each have their own geography, demography, and ecology. Each country has its own programmes, plans, and priorities for conservation and development, and we should not fall into the trap of talking about problems with elephants as though they are universal. The biology of elephants may be much the same across the continent, but the situation of each country – if not each administrative or ecological area within a country – is unique, and therefore the difficulties facing elephant populations vary greatly across their range.
That being said, there are patterns or trends in what has been happening that are common across several or numerous countries. Only bear in mind that what has happened in one population, country, or region may not represent the story for all elephants within the continent.
In west Africa, elephants are now extinct in Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Togo, and the only countries in the region to have populations that number more than a couple of hundred elephants are Benin (at nearly 3,000) and the contiguous population of Burkina Faso (6,850), and Ghana (at just under 1,000). The continent’s westernmost population of elephants – in Senegal – is estimated to be . . . one. It was seen in 2013.
In east Africa, populations in Kenya, Uganda and Malawi are showing fairly positive trends in recent years, but certain populations in Mozambique and Tanzania have experienced very large declines, with some of the greatest poaching rates in the continent between 2008 and 2016. In southern Africa, however, stable or increasing elephant populations were recorded in Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Some of these increases are due to migration, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, with elephants moving into these relatively safe areas from other locations that have been heavily hit by poaching, such as Angola.
Forest elephant numbers are almost impossible to ascertain, given the dense vegetation cover in the areas in which they live, making aerial surveys impossible, but between 2002 and 2011, elephants in the central forest block (from Gabon and Republic of Congo right across DRC) were counted on numerous walking surveys.
These surveys estimate that there are probably only 30,000 left and show that their population declined 62 per cent between 2002 and 2011, and 30 per cent of geographic range was lost in the same time period to agricultural development and land conversion. In less than fifty years, forest elephant numbers are thought to have fallen by more than 80 per cent. That is, less than one-fifth of the 1960s population of forest elephants now remains.
Forest elephants now inhabit less than 25 per cent of their potential range, and likely number only 10 per cent of their potential population size. Poaching, increasing human populations, rapidly expanding infrastructure, poor governance and law enforcement, all contribute to these problems. The scenario typically is that logging companies move into an area, building roads that open the dense forest to further encroachment and allowing easy access routes for poachers. These roads also permit illegal logging: it is not only animal parts that are trafficked – a huge illegal market also exists for African hardwood trees; and as the forest is chopped down, so are the last remaining habitats of the vanishing forest elephant.
I was once lucky enough to visit the DRC, travelling through some of the last volcanic upland forests left in Africa. It was an undoubtedly beautiful environment, and yet it was tragic to see so little left. Farming and ever-growing villages were encroaching all around the protected areas, and even inside the national parks, local people and gangs of poachers were relentlessly placing traps and hunting the last vestiges of wildlife, not to mention chopping down ancient trees and burning whole segments to make way for crops.
If you look at Virunga National Park on Google Maps, you’ll see how fragile an environment it really is. Straight lines show the scars of human invasion, and the ever-decreasing forest left for these little elephants in which to roam. All the surrounding countryside in DRC is cultivated, and everything on the other side of the border in Rwanda appears like a dirty patchwork quilt of maize and bean fields.
It’s almost impossible to know how many elephants are left there, as the rangers are few in number, inexperienced in elephant behaviour, and are constantly threatened by armed gangs and murderous militias, who try to kill them when they go out on patrol. In fact, hundreds of rangers have been killed in the last few years in the line of duty. An aerial census would prove fruitless, as the forest canopy is too thick and whatever elephants there are remain invisible.
I guessed there might be room for four or five herds in this forest, probably totalling no more than a couple of hundred, but it may have been much fewer. At least there they could range over the mountains into Uganda and Rwanda, and hide for a while in the jungle valleys away from the greed of humans, but ultimately they were hemmed in on all sides, and unless the forest is protected, it won’t be long before there are no forest elephants left to count.
Savannah elephants are much easier to spot. The Great Elephant Census (GEC) and Mike Chase’s subsequent analysis show that elephant numbers increased a little between 1995 and 2007, but they have been declining at a continental level ever since then, with especially rapid declines between 2010 and 2014. The majority of individual elephant range countries follow this same pattern, with the number of deaths far outstripping the potential number of births. The GEC also showed that most elephants now live inside parks or reserves – with 84 per cent of elephants counted being in protected areas. Only in Mali and Angola were more elephants counted outside protected areas than inside.
Given the high rates of poaching observed, the only conclusion is that many reserves are failing to protect their elephant populations adequately. In fact, if populations continue to decline at this rate, they will halve every nine years.
Perhaps what is even more astounding than all these figures, showing how quickly we have destroyed elephant populations, is the fact that data repeatedly shows that savannah elephant numbers can and do recover, given the right opportunities. We’ve seen it in Addo and Kruger; it has happened in Etosha, Namibia; and we have some reason to hope it is happening in other populations.
I briefly visited the Tarangire National Park, in north-east Tanzania, in the autumn of 2010 while driving down to Malawi. It’s a beautiful place filled with fat baobab trees scarred by centuries of wear by elephants, who enjoy coming to scratch off the bark with their tusks.
The region was affected by heavy poaching outside the national park boundaries in the 1970s and 1980s, especially on the main road that dissects the protected areas, and many elephants moved into the relative safety of the park itself, so the population increased from 440 in 1960 to about 2,300 in the year 2000. The poaching of older bulls meant this population had a particularly high number of young females.
Between 1993 and 2005, the elephant population was increasing in number at 7.1 per cent per year – the maximal rate of population increase for elephants. This high rate was achieved after intense poaching, because the females in the population had very short gaps between calves, they were young when they had their first calf, and death rates were also low. Females were literally pumping out calves as fast as they could, helped along by some years with very good rainfall, which meant lots of grass was readily available, giving them plenty of energy to reproduce.
When I was there, the Tarangire population was around 3,000 elephants, so this population has managed to continue increasing despite the recent poaching surge that has devastated other populations in the region.
But sadly, the Tarangire example is not universal. In Mikumi National Park, also in Tanzania, 75 per cent of the population was lost in heavy poaching in the years up to 1989. By 2004, a third of all adult females were still not reproducing and group sizes remained very small. It has been suggested that the key difference between Tarangire’s recovery and the lack thereof in Mikumi, is that by 1989, only 14 per cent of family groups in Mikumi had a matriarch that was over thirty years old (compared to nearly half with an older leader in Tarangire) showing how important the female leaders are to the species survival.
When you mess with family structure, it can have untold consequences, and it goes to show that numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Let’s imagine some anthropologists find a previously undiscovered island inhabited by a tribe of sixty-year-olds with their children and grandchildren.
We might assume, because there are old people on the island, that the young have had decent role models, that they are well informed, skilled in bushcraft, sociable and well adjusted. The anthropologists can see that the young don’t eat certain foods, because the elders have passed on some explicit knowledge about what is and is not good to eat, and they harvest other foods in certain ways or at certain times of the year for the same reasons. The anthropologists also see that they act in unusual ways that don’t seem to make sense.
Then after a few years of studying them, the anthropologists have noticed that the harvest is not very good, in fact it’s damaging, unhealthy and unsustainable, and that many potential food sources are ignored for no good reason. Not only that, but the social dynamics between the island inhabitants are a bit off; the children are rebellious, couples argue, the people are prone to disease and the birth rate is low.
Then the anthropologists discover that those sixty-year-olds grew up on that island without any elders themselves; perhaps they were shipwrecked as children or some disease tragically killed all but one or two of the adults in the population fifty-five years earlier. So, as a result, today’s adults did not acquire any social traditions or knowledge about what to eat, when and how, but instead made it all up themselves as they went along.
We would not be at all surprised if children who grew up without elders, without any acquired traditions or cultural knowledge, resulted in a dysfunctional, or at least sub-optimal society. Yet we almost constantly underestimate the effect this could be having on elephant populations across Africa. We have been altering elephant habitat, ecology, population genetics, demography, and thus their social structure, for hundreds of years. Not merely altering a little bit, but really screwing it up.
Many of the elephant populations we see today are oddly structured, inbred, or have recovered from very small population numbers, which means they grew up with no guidance and very little hereditary knowledge. The lists of numbers and declines that have appeared in this chapter can be a bit theoretical and too large to fully comprehend, and it is easy to lose sight of an important underlying point here.
So few elephant populations are untouched, we don’t have much idea what is normal any more – but more critically, perhaps, neither do the elephants that are left. We have forced so many of today’s elephants into a situation where they simply have to make it up as they go along, like the survivors on our pretend island, and we can’t yet quantify or understand the implications that this could have.
Rates of killing elephants peaked during the 1970s and 1980s, but the twentieth- and twenty-first-century killing has caused much greater population reductions, because the elephants were being taken from an already smaller population to begin with, made even worse by the fact that the populations that do remain are potentially scarred socially and emotionally beyond repair.
The figures show clearly that the colonial period and the slaughter in the early twentieth century was responsible for a steady and substantial decline in elephant numbers across the African continent, but the decimation has been even faster since the present century began. It’s now time to look at the main reasons for this decline, starting with the one that has historically been the main reason that humans have killed elephants for millennia: our insatiable desire for their teeth.
** Interestingly, another situation that has seen growth rates exceed 7 per cent is the introduction of elephants to game reserves where new populations are being established (a common management approach in South Africa, for example). Rapid growth in these populations is facilitated by abundant resources and a young age structure, which leads to lower ages of sexual maturity and short inter-calving intervals.