talking of cullings makes me remember of Ron Thomson opinion on fending of culling of elephants :

Ron Thomson Publications
March 19, 2013 ·
NSPCA.KNP.ELEPHANTS.
ELEPHANT CULLING IN KRUGER NATIONAL PARK
How many people in South Africa supported the viewpoint that elephant culling in Kruger National Park should be stopped? How many of these same people know what has happened since the decision to stop elephant culling was made?
With the help of “academic sponsorships” by IFAW – the biggest and most influential animal rights organisation in the world – and upon the recommendation of senior academic scientists in this country – a management system of “natural’ population control of elephants in Kruger National Park has been set in place. What does that mean?
The idea is to allow the elephants of Kruger to increase in number without interference by man (no culling), until they have eaten out all the edible plants within daily elephant-walking-distance of the ‘natural’ river pools (15 – 25 kms). This will happen during the six-months long dry season every year.
The whole elephant population will, during every dry season, be subjected to a reduction in nutrition. It is planned that the drop in nutrition will then ““naturally” reduce the fecundity (rate of increase) of the elephant population; and the elephant population numbers will stabilise.
Sounds a good idea! No more “cruel” culling by blood-thirsty game rangers and the elephants will sort out their population explosion all by themselves – without the need to cull!
Right?
Wrong!
What it means is that the elephant population of Kruger has been set on a road that will become a serious starvation regime (and every other animal in the park will be subjected to that same starvation regime, too). The first animals to feel the crunch will be lactating mother elephants. It takes a lot of very good nutrition to enable a cow elephant to continue producing milk when it has a calf at foot; and elephant calves are dependent on their mother’s milk for nearly three years.
So as each dry season advances the mother elephants will slowly stop producing milk; and the babies will starve. And by that stage of the starvation management regime, the elephants will be walking up to 25 kms every day from the water to their food source – and 25 kms every day back from the food to the water. 50 kms a day! And the babies, not getting the nutrition (from their mother’s milk) that they need to keep up with their mothers, will abandon their mothers. They will leave their mothers simply because they cannot keep up with them on the long daily hike between water and food and back to the water. The mother HAS to do this long trek or SHE will die.
These abandoned baby elephants will then wander about the game reserve on their own – until they die of a combination of heat fatigue, dehydration and starvation. And they will die terrible SLOW deaths – covering many days - all on their own. If they are “lucky” the lions and hyenas will find them and rip them to pieces. Death will then be accomplished - hopefully - in less than an hour; but during that hour they will be half-eaten alive.
And THIS IS A CALCULATED PLAN OF ACTION.
The plan is based on the fact that in any animal population the rate of population increase is dependent on the number of baby animals that successfully enter the population from birth. More directly, population increase is determined by the number of babies that survive their first twelve months of life. So the starvation regime that is being imposed on Kruger’s elephant population (on purpose) is designed to reduce the number of baby elephants that survive the first twelve months of their lives. The plan also, coincidentally (but purposefully), includes the intention to have lots of baby elephants dying of heat fatigue, starvation and thirst every year.
And this is going to happen to all the other species of animals that share the Kruger environment with the elephants.
In effect, what these scientists have contrived is to eliminate the humane culling of elephants (because the animal rightists object) and they have replaced it with the extremely cruel and protracted deaths of hundreds of baby elephants (which nobody in South Africa knows about). One way or the other, elephants are dying; or they are going to die (in their hundreds). During the culling era, they died quickly and humanely with a bullet through the brain; now they are/will be dying terrible and protracted deaths brought about by PLANNED starvation.
The NSPCA jumped at the chance to nail “Elephants of Eden” in Knysna – not knowing the full facts - when they got an apparent tip-off about the baby elephants in transit. Now I have given NSPCA a full report about the planned starvation management regime to which the elephants of Kruger are being subjected – which includes details of baby elephants being starved to death - by design. Now I want to know what the NSPCA is going to do about it! It should be interesting because it is being perpetrated by their erstwhile academic chummies!
Ron Thomson