Kruger National Park is 7,523 square miles of brush and home to 147 species of animals located in South Africa. You can explore these beautiful acres on your own vehicle or on a guided tour. While driving you are most likely to see a herd of impala, a bird of prey, a couple of giraffes, and elephants. Elephants appear to be fan favorites. You can find them in herds with a couple of females or also referred to as matriarchies along with the offspring or a single male off wondering on his own. You always hear tourist talking about elephants needing protection because of their ivory tusks, but after traveling, seeing, and learning about these amazing creatures first hand, I have learned that is not actually the case.
While traveling to different places inside Kruger National Park one that stood out the most was the elephant education center and museum at La Table. Before visiting this education center, I too thought that we needed to protect the elephants at all cost or else they, just like the rhinos, would become endangered. Why would we not believe that? It is all we hear being from the United States. Fortunately, I got the privilege of listening to a young woman who grew up in the park and alongside these magnificent mammals. Kruger National Park actually has a plethora of elephants. In fact, there are too many elephants inside the park and are working on a productive and humane way to keep the population under control. When the park first was built there was roughly 7,000 elephants inside the boundaries and to help keep the animals in fences were put up. This helped keep the animals inside, but it also made the elephant population explode. The population almost tripled. It was at that point the park decided something needed to be done. The first solution was culling. Culling is a reduction of a wildlife population by selective slaughter. As you can imagine this did not go over well with the public. Once that did not work out, they tried translocating. Translocating is moving the elephants out of the land to other locations. They often translocated them to private reserves, but still was not enough. Finally, they tried different contraception techniques. For example, they tried keeping the females in heat so they could not get pregnant and for males the tried vasectomies. The vasectomies were effective, but sadly to perform this procedure on one male elephant took a full day. They had to track down a male via helicopter, sedate him, then preform the vasectomy which took roughly four hours per testicle. Unfortunately, these took too much time for little reward.
Currently there still is not an effective and efficient way to keep the elephant population of Kruger National Park under control. They are trying to keep the population to under 20,000 elephants and the employees are welcome to any ideas on how to do so. Of course, they should be humane and reasonable. Elephants are amazing, but destructive creatures and deserve to stay that way.
