South Africa lifts 13-year ban, OK's elephant killing
DAKAR, Senegal - South Africa lifted a 13-year ban on killing elephants yesterday, a move conservationists warn could encourage poachers to slaughter the animals for ivory and threaten dwindling populations elsewhere on the continent.
Elephants - once on the verge of extinction in some parts of South Africa - are flourishing, with the population there growing more than 5 percent annually in recent years as a result of a well-managed national parks industry.
South African authorities want to keep a lid on their burgeoning numbers and protect the elephants' viability. Killing elephants, which have no predators and can turn woodlands to grass and stubs in a matter of years, is the best way to control the population, South African officials say.
However, the huge mammals have not done as well elsewhere, and some conservationists say the end of South Africa's moratorium on killing elephants will have repercussions far beyond its borders.
In war-ravaged Congo's Virunga National Park, for example, 14 elephants have been killed since mid-April by soldiers, militias, and villagers - an upsurge in poaching that is "part of a widespread slaughter across the Congo Basin" of Central Africa, according to Dr. Emmanuel de Merode, director of the conservation group WildlifeDirect.
The increase in elephant poaching is "being driven by developments on the international scene: the liberalization of the ivory trade, being pushed by South Africa, and the increased presence of Chinese operators on the ground, who feed a massive domestic demand for ivory in their home country," de Merode said.
A four-year war ended in Congo in 2002, but huge swathes of the east remain gripped by violence involving militias and rebels, who since last year have occupied a southern part of Virunga park that is home to one of the last mountain gorilla populations on earth.
Virunga, a forested region straddling eastern Congo's borders with Rwanda and Uganda, is home to about 350 elephants, one-tenth the number found there in 1959. The 14 elephants were killed in the Mabenga district.
