Jumbos Killing Elicit Sharp Rebuke From Wardens

The East African Standard (Nairobi)
August 24, 2004
Nixon Ng'ang'a
Nairobi

Like with the rest of the country, Limuru residents may be under the grip of biting hunger and starvation but that hardly mitigates their savagery and plain greed subjected to three rogue elephants last Sunday.

The human hounds decided not to wait for the carcass. By the time the elephants breathed their last, little of their bodies had any flesh on them.

Besides the villagers' act, the treatment of the elephants that had strayed from the Aberdares is being blamed on police officers who killed them.

"They did not have the right guns for the job. What they used were a low calibre automatic guns lacking the requisite firepower to kill elephants with minimum pain," says a senior warden with the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).

Rapacious villagers had cruelly parceled out chunks of meat into polythene bags from whatever quarter their knives and pangas could cut from creatures still resisting death from a hail of police bullets.

A man shouldered away the giant tail he had hacked off from a still-breathing elephant; a middle-aged woman, resolutely unmoved by the painful whimpers and pitiable movements of an elephant's eyes, filled her bag with a bloody steak. It was a macabre feast that would send the average animal rights crusader into prolonged mourning.

There is no gainsaying the dangers and the damage rogue elephants can visit on a community. This notwithstanding, there must surely be a civilised, humane and dignified way of dealing with their menace unlike what villagers of Kinyogoori, Ngarariga and Gitogothi did.

According to the KWS officer, the Wildlife Management Act clearly stipulates the range of guns for hunting/killing wildlife.

He says: "Cap 376 is explicit. You can only use long rifles and other heavy calibre guns such as .303, .306 and .458. The intention is to have a powerful gun that can kill with a single shot. You don't use G-3 and other automatic guns."

He blames Sunday's scenes where officers kept pumping bullets into elephants that apparently "refused" to die on "weak" bullets adding it was disagreeably cruel and should have never been allowed.

He sees the ill-executed killing as further evidence of the lean financial times at KWS. He adds, however, that there is actually no legislation criminalising consumption of game that dies from causes other than poaching.