By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick KwaZulu-Natal’s elephant ‘overpopulation crisis’ is being presented as scientific inevitability. But official replies reveal contradictions, missing evidence and a regulatory process that has yet to catch up with the rhetoric. The claim...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick A willingness to kill elephants as a management tool in North West’s Madikwe Nature Reserve suggests a shift in South Africa’s conservation approach. What was once a last resort may be becoming standard practice. t’s been a bad few...
By Stephanie Klarmann - Mongabay The latest statistics on South Africa’s professional (“trophy”) hunting industry reveal a large increase in animals hunted, with numbers set to rise in coming years, under the logic that the revenue generated is necessary for managing...
By David Akana - Mongabay Dzanga Bai is an exceptional forest clearing where hundreds of elusive forest elephants gather, offering scientists and visitors opportunities to observe their behavior, social interactions and family dynamics in the open. Mineral-rich soil...
By Bool Smuts - Daily Maverick Use of biodiversity does involve trade-offs. But complexity does not justify analytical shortcuts. Trade-offs do not justify false equivalence. And regulatory structure and adaptive management without transparent rules does not...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Scientists have a vital role to play. But they cannot arbitrate values, nor legitimise them by implication. When they attempt to do so, they risk overstepping their authority and end up narrowing, rather than enriching, the debate....
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Four years ago, Parliament endorsed a shift in wildlife governance that would recognise animal wellbeing as part of conservation policy. Today the forum created to implement that reform has been snubbed – and Parliament may need to ask...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick For as long as elephants have shared landscapes with people, they’ve also carried the weight of controversy. In southern Africa in particular, images of toppled trees and stripped bark often spark alarmist claims: too many...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Aucamp’s first major conservation intervention signals comfort with a worldview in which wildlife remains a consumable asset, governed primarily through quotas and markets, expected to justify its existence through commodification and...
By Dave Balfour and Sam Ferreira - Daily Maverick The ‘elephant problem’ debate tracks this logic: dead or damaged trees with signs of elephants being involved equals evidence of too many elephants which requires their numbers to be reduced. This intuitive response...