East Africa: The Great Elephant Hunt

A light plane buzzed through the clear morning air above Kenya’s Tsavo National Park. In the rolling bushland below grazed herds of zebra, kudu, oryx and hartebeest, swishing away flies with their tails. Suddenly, from the middle of a patch of thorn trees, flashed the white flick of an egret, constant companion of the African elephant. It was what the pilot had been looking for. He radioed the position to the ground, and within minutes a helicopter arrived. Two white hunters climbed out and disappeared into the tangle of thorn trees. There was a burst of high-powered rifle shots, a flutter of startled egrets. The hunters reappeared. Behind them lay a family of ten elephants, from a yearling calf to its great-tusked grandfather, all dead.

Uprooted Forests. Similar forays are taking place throughout the game parks of East Africa. Protected by the rigid enforcement of poaching laws and strict limits on trophy hunters, the population of big game has exploded beyond all bounds. There are now 20,000 elephants in Tsavo alone, and another 20,000 have been counted in the Zambezi River Valley between Zambia and Rhodesia. In Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park, the pachyderms are packed in at a density of between five and 40 elephants per square mile.

The proliferating herds of hippo, buffalo and giraffe add to the problem, and as a result, African game parks are badly overgrazed and their enormous herds are faced with famine. Tsavo’s hungry elephants have uprooted entire forests of thorn trees, turned giant baobab trees into twisted wreckage in their search for edible shrubbery. Parts of the Zambezi Valley, according to one conservationist, “look as though an atom bomb had exploded in the area.”

Birth Control. For reasons that ecologists are unable to explain, the elephants themselves seem to be aware of the danger—and have begun to practice birth control of sorts. At Tsavo, where the elephant population has entered a “cycle of despair,” the mating age of young cows has been mysteriously delayed by three years, and the interval between their offspring has nearly doubled from four years to seven. Such natural controls are not enough, however. Game experts agree that the only solution is the final solution—a bullet.

Before it is over, Africa will have gone through the biggest big game hunt in its history. Already Uganda has “cropped” 4,000 hippo and nearly 2,000 elephants. Zambia and Rhodesia have hired white hunters to kill as many as 10,000 buffalo and hippo. In Kenya, where authorities at first feared that mass elephant slaughters might frighten the rest of the game out of the reserves, a month-long pilot hunt proved so successful that the government is now taking bids for the killing of thousands of elephants. Its primary stipulation: that the hunters destroy entire family units, leaving no orphans to disturb the survivors. As in the rest of East Africa, they must also make some provision for disposing of all carcasses.

The great hunt has inspired the free-enterprising instincts of Africa’s entrepreneurs. A Rhodesian meat packer has set up shop at Wankie to haul away dead elephants and turn them into minced pet food. Elephant steaks (which taste like prime beef), buffalo burgers (something like venison) and hippo stew (very fishy) are flooding meat markets in Zambia. In Kenya, three major consortiums are negotiating for the privilege of establishing a multimillion-dollar “Jumbo-burger” plant across the downwind boundary of the Tsavo reserve—along with rights to kill and can between 1,000 and 3,000 elephants a year. The location of the plant is important. If the government’s initial scheme is followed, the dead elephants will be tied to giant balloons and floated from the reserve to the cannery.