When conservation science puts a price on an elephant’s death

The renewed Madikwe elephant controversy raises a question extending far beyond culling. When a senior SANParks scientist speaks of economic opportunities arising from elephants selected for killing, we need to examine the philosophy of conservation behind the statement.

Dr Adam Cruise is an investigative environmental journalist, travel writer and academic. He has contributed to a number of international publications, including National Geographic and The Guardian, covering diverse topics from the plight of elephants, rhinos and lions in Africa to coral reef rejuvenation in Indonesia. Cruise is a doctor of philosophy, specialising in animal and environmental ethics, and is the editor of the online Journal of African Elephants. He is a Research Fellow at the Unit of Environmental Ethics, Philosophy Department, Stellenbosch University.

There was a revealing moment before Parliament this week when the increasingly controversial management of elephants in Madikwe and Pilanesberg moved beyond ecology.

SANParks large-mammal specialist Sam Ferreira was explaining the scientific modelling behind proposals for managing the elephant populations. Thirty-four scenarios had reportedly been examined, involving different combinations of contraception, translocation and lethal removal. Ferreira stressed that trophy hunting was not the starting point: managers should first establish what interventions were ecologically required.

“Some of those elephants that you need to remove may also provide opportunities to have other additional secondary economic outcomes,” he told the Portfolio Committee on Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment.

It is a carefully constructed distinction. First science determines that elephants must be removed. Only afterwards does economics enter the equation.

Because once the death of an elephant acquires economic value, the question is no longer simply whether a particular population can withstand the loss of that animal. It becomes a question about the increasingly dominant philosophy through which South Africa understands wildlife: animals as biological populations to be managed, but simultaneously as economic assets whose continued existence – and sometimes whose deaths – may be expected to generate returns.

Ferreira is an influential conservation scientist and his contribution to South African large-mammal ecology should not be dismissed. Nor should his position be reduced to the crude claim that he simply wants elephants killed. Indeed, when the Madikwe controversy erupted last year, Ferreira was among those cautioning against precisely the simplistic ecological arguments being advanced in support of a cull.

He rejected the idea that Madikwe had crossed some easily identifiable numerical “carrying capacity”. Elephant numbers alone, he argued, were insufficient. Rainfall, vegetation, ecological processes and management objectives all mattered.

That nuance remains important.