By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick Behind claims of escalating human-elephant conflict lies a tangle of weak data, mismanagement and a R460-million fund that seems to need a crisis more than it proves one. Are elephants becoming increasingly dangerous to humans? Deputy...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick South Africa’s provincial nature reserves, the quiet custodians of our country’s natural heritage, are in freefall. Once envisioned as sanctuaries of biodiversity and engines of rural development, they are now symbols of systemic...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick A quiet but highly significant policy rift is opening among southern African states as the world turns its attention to CITES CoP20, scheduled for 24 November 2025 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. For decades, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and...
By Mike Cadman - Financial Mail Madikwe’s pachyderms are at the centre of a debate on how to manage the wildlife reserve.\ The Madikwe Game Reserve in North West has become the focal point of an extraordinary wrestling match over how the reserve, and particularly its...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Carrying capacity came from livestock management in the US in the early twentieth century, where calculating how many cattle a pasture could support before overgrazing was a matter of profit. But elephants are not cattle. They are...
By Don Ross and Ross Harvey - Business Day The overpopulation myth seems to be a useful pretext on which to justify the hunting and culling tender. The human brain is a remarkable organ (and remarkably metabolically expensive, so its evolution confirms our intuition...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick North West Parks seems hell-bent on hunting and culling elephants and seems prepared to thumb its nose at parliamentarians trying to find solutions. In a blistering parliamentary session last week (18 September), members of the...
By Christiaan Bakkes - Daily Maverick Somehow, Addo Elephant National Park has achieved a fine balance between effective conservation and expansion while earning the goodwill of its neighbours. If ever an elephant reserve could serve as a template for effective...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Claims of ‘overpopulation’ sound less like science and more like a cover for old practices dressed in ecological rhetoric. Elephants in fenced reserves, like Madikwe in North West, have become a lightning rod in South Africa....
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Culling, hunting and quick-fix solutions dominate policy talk, but without reliable national figures on human-elephant conflict, South Africa risks sacrificing both elephants and communities to politics and profit. South Africa has just...