By the end of next year, the private conservancy plans to have slaughtered 600 of its resident elephants, in southern Africa’s biggest mass cull for three decades.
A three-ton bull elephant lies dead on the ground in a remote corner of Africa. His life has been snuffed out by a marksman’s bullet fired into his brain. In a few seconds it was all over.
He will have known nothing. Within minutes of his death ten days ago, a wildlife vet was running to the elephant to check he was shot cleanly and had felt no pain.
An hour later, I was able to stand by him, marvelling at the dark eyes perfectly circled by bristly lashes and his four jumbo feet, each bigger than a dinner plate, which will never tramp the bush again.
The 22-year-old bull might have survived another four decades, roaming wild with 950 other elephants on the giant Sango Conservancy stretching over 231 square miles – a third of the size of Greater London – in south-east Zimbabwe, near the border with Mozambique.
He was killed because here there are far too many elephants. At least 100,000 (17,000 more than a decade ago) trudge the country, annihilating the land where they live.
The bull was among 54 elephants killed in a purge at Sango to control numbers. By the end of next year, the private conservancy plans to have slaughtered 600, almost two-thirds of its resident elephants, in southern Africa’s biggest mass cull for three and a half decades.
‘It is a horrible job, which we don’t like doing,’ says the owner, Willy Pabst. ‘There is an elephant overpopulation, which means they imperil their own survival. The biggest danger to the elephant is the elephant itself.’
We are sitting together at his imposing conservancy, which teems with every kind of African wildlife from lions, hippos, zebras and leopards to baboons and hyenas.
Members of the Zimbabwe National Parks and veterinarians examine the bull elephant, capturing data on the size and weight of the animal
By the end of next year, the private conservancy plans to have slaughtered 600, almost two-thirds of its resident elephants, in southern Africa’s biggest mass cull for three and a half decades
Marksmen poised to cull a family of elephants herded by helicopter into an enclosure at Sango Conservancy, Zimbabwe
‘We were at the end of our tether about what to do,’ he continues.
‘Thousands of our trees, much of our forest, have been destroyed by elephants.
‘We are trying to save the elephants and the conservancy.’
Before we watched the cull, Kim Wolhuter, Sango’s wildlife filmmaker, drove us miles to see the devastation wreaked by elephants in their relentless quest for food.
‘They are eating themselves out of house and home,’ he said. ‘There are too many for the land and their numbers keep going up.’
Sango experts stress that southern Africa is not a Disneyland full of gentle jumbos as portrayed in Western children’s films.
Neither, in many parts of Africa, are elephants an endangered species, despite the claims of animal rights charities and their wealthy Western donors.
The experts add: ‘Elephants are not fluffy toys. A lion is not a vegan. These are wild animals that, to survive, will consume or kill everything in their path just like they always have.’
Today, the hideous consequences of Sango’s elephant overpopulation are clear. Some of the conservancy resembles a desert.
Nearly 80 per cent of the grass has disappeared because ever-hungry elephants use their powerful trunks to rip up stems and roots together – which means it can never regrow.
A third of Sango’s forest of mopane trees, native to southern Africa, are now dead or stunted because the elephants like to gorge on them.
Hundreds of huge 1,000-year-old baobab trees have toppled over after being assaulted by beasts that need to eat 300 pounds of vegetation a day and drink enough water to fill a bathtub.
The animals tear off the baobab bark up to 19 ft, the height their trunk tips can reach.
Then they suck the sap inside to slake their thirst. Under this attack, the ancient tree is hollowed out. Finally, it collapses, leaving a pile of what resembles sawdust.
The result is a single baobab can die in a few weeks. Known in Africa as the ‘upside down’ tree (because its branches resemble roots), the baobab has thrived at Sango since the Middle Ages – until now.
Rifle shells are gathered afterwards so an accurate record of how many shots were fired during the culling
Pictured: A bull elephant rushes into the enclosure alone as professional hunters and members of the Zimbabwe National Parks wait for the rest of the group to enter the enclosure
As a rule of thumb, ecologists say an adult elephant needs almost a square mile of the southern African bush to thrive (without destroying its own habitat). But even in vast Sango there are five living in this space ‘far more than we can feed’, said Pabst.
David Goosen, a Sango director and wildlife expert, added: ‘We had to figure out a way to save our 950 elephants from themselves.
‘We may have to cull over and over again into the future to keep down numbers. They are destroying their own habitat and that of other wildlife too.’
The controversial action at Sango follows last year’s decision by the Zimbabwean government to kill elephants to control numbers.
It ended a 35-year hiatus on culls, which wildlife activists worldwide dubiously, but successfully, argued were ‘cruel and unnecessary’.
In desperation, ignoring the critics, Zimbabwe slaughtered 200 elephants to feed its citizens left hungry by the worst drought in decades.
Nearly half the country’s people faced ‘acute food shortages’, said the United Nations.
The environment minister said enormous elephant numbers – more than in any country apart from Botswana – were endangering human life.
Marauding animals had marched into villages and grown fearless of people. Some 31 people in Zimbabwe died from elephant attacks last year.
A few were farmers collecting their livestock in the evening or tending their crops.
Children and old people walking near their round thatched homes, known as ‘rondavels’, were killed or injured when the animals confronted them.
In the middle of last year’s state-ordered cull, I visited villages deep in the bush where desperately hungry Zimbabweans were being handed elephant meat by government officials.
The people said they hated and feared elephants and wanted them dead. ‘They have become so dangerous and there are so many of them,’ said one.
‘We cannot go out at night without hiding from an elephant. These animals, which we never used to see in our villages, take everything we have.’
So it was on a Wednesday morning that I watched the first shootings at Sango. They were run like a military operation after months of planning.
Since the early hours, a helicopter pilot with a vet had begun searching Sango’s rivers where elephants gather to drink.
When a herd with up to 100 animals was spotted, their position was radioed to a team below, which set up an enclosure, or ‘boma’ in Swahili, made of black plastic sheeting to capture some of them.
The boma site was chosen near a road so that trucks carrying skinners and butchers could transport the carcasses.
The meat was taken away to a cold store to await distribution to local communities or sale on the commercial market (with villagers sharing in the proceeds).
At 9.34am that morning, a suitable herd of elephants had been spotted from the air.
Four shooters were ready, hidden from sight on a platform at the top end of the boma and overlooking what the Sango team call, with brutal honesty, the shoot box.
The helicopter began gently driving the herd, the wind behind them so they could not smell the plastic sheeting or shooters, from the bush towards the 100-yard-wide entrance of the boma.
A family group of elephant who were driven into the enclosure with the help of a helicopter
As they moved along, with the helicopter sounding an occasional siren to chivvy them, the animals split naturally into family groups. One consisted of seven animals selected from the air.
This group (two females, four calves and the 22-year-old bull) was then pushed towards, and into, the boma, which narrowed as it led towards the shoot box.
As the elephants trundled on, a series of curtains – again made of black plastic – were pulled shut behind them. Once past the first curtain, there was no going back. The animals were destined to die in just a few minutes’ time.
The Sango team expected the matriarch, the leader and most experienced female of any elephant family group, to lead the way and be shot first.
But the bull was ahead and he entered the shooting area on his own. A marksman instantly stood up and fired a bullet into the animal’s brain in front of the left ear.
Once he was killed, the shooters abandoned the platform, jumping down and walking towards the remaining six elephants, killing them from the ground.
‘We had no choice. They were already far into the boma but would not have gone into the box with the dead bull ahead of them,’ explained one. It was a clean sweep, over in the blink of an eye.
Some elephants escaped the cull. One family group, led by a wily matriarch, refused to enter the boma. It hid under a patch of trees to avoid the helicopter.
‘We let them go. They deserved their freedom,’ the shooters told me.
There are few alternatives to culling. Firing contraceptive-laden darts from the air has been tried – but it failed.
The mass translocation of herds to new habitats often leads to unhappy and unsettled elephants, provoking more conflict with humans.
A few years ago, Sango sent 101 elephants hundreds of miles by road to another conservancy. Vets put monitoring collars on the 14 matriarchs to track them.
Eight of these females, crucial to each family group, have unexpectedly died from what Sango’s wildlife experts believe is stress.
Later, as we talked, sitting on a rock among the carcasses, one of the Sango wildlife vets said: ‘This is the first time in the world that our boma method has been used to cull elephants. It is humane, there is no screaming by them, no panicking, no stress.’
Of the group of seven shot that day, he made this suggestion: ‘We think the lone bull had joined this family group because a female was on heat.’
The vet team, Sango ecologists and researchers, watched by Zimbabwe wildlife monitors, examined the animals immediately after they fell to the ground.
They counted the bullet wounds, taking the precise measurements of teeth, ears, tusks and limbs in order to learn more about the herds roaming the conservancy.
Soon enough, the enormous bodies were carried by crane or lorry to the butchery area set up in a bush clearing.
Over the next few hours, on a mercifully cool, cloudy day, they were skinned and de-boned, with the flesh sliced from every inch possible so nothing was wasted in a country dogged by poverty.
Overhead, vultures from Sango’s 85 nesting sites arrived on the bloody scene. They circled over the carcasses, hoping to swoop down for the remaining scraps and shreds of flesh.
That morning at 11.50am, another eight elephants were culled, bringing the tally to 15.
It was late afternoon before the grisly task of dealing with the bodies was over.
To one side of the site, where the ground was stained red, a village chef called Livingstone, 49, was cooking scraps to make kebabs.
He handed me a stick of the meat to eat, as I tried in vain to forget that it came from a wild animal living free in the African bush until that morning.
Village chef Livingstone cooks kebabs from elephant meat near the culling site
Estanaty, 60, stands in front of her home with a gifted handful of the elephant meat
In what had become a celebratory atmosphere, Livingstone handed kebab sticks to villagers of all ages who gathered in droves.
‘The children aren’t frightened of eating elephant,’ he said. ‘They are happy that they are dead.’
The Sango cull was not a pretty business. Some of the dead female elephants were pregnant. One was carrying a male calf three weeks from being born.
This was removed respectfully from her body by the butchers, watched over by the vets, and laid gently on the ground.
The trunks of the adult beasts were given to the village chiefs as a gift. They are a delicacy, which is often cooked for two days in milk and onions to make a stew.
Just after the first 15 were culled, I visited the village of Muvava, near where hundreds of elephants live, to see the first of the meat distributed by Sango’s community liaison manager Tsumbei Nemabwe.
The children clapped with joy and a group of ten year olds at the primary school told me, sweetly: ‘We love eating the elephant’s meat. It is our favourite.’
Winfilda Nedombkie, the 49-year-old chief councillor and mother of two daughters, said: ‘The elephants eat our crops, they damage and trample on everything if they get into the village or our fields.’
She said that an electric fence had been put up between Sango Conservancy and Muvava village to try to halt a constant stream of marauding, hungry, elephants coming in.
A few years back, an old lady from the area was killed by one of the beasts as she walked in a dried-up river bed.
As we sat in the village square, Winfilda said: ‘The meat from this cull will give the children nutrition, some protein. We normally have a diet of vegetables, beans and maize mash. That does not help our young ones grow strong bones or get tall.’
As we drove away, the children ran after our vehicle shouting goodbye. Suddenly, the driver brought us to a sharp halt alongside a settlement of small rondavels on the village outskirts.
In one was a 60-year-old called Estanaty who was presented with a large slab of elephant. Because of her frailty, she was awarded the meat early (the rest of the village were made to wait a few more days until the official distribution).
Estanaty’s response was to give an enormous toothless grin. ‘Thank you. I am very pleased today,’ she said, holding the meat aloft.
To this hungry Zimbabwean, living hand-to-mouth as so many do near Sango, the meat she received that day was as precious as a bar of gold.
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