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Elephants fed to cash crocs

March 11, 2007 Edition 3

Eleanor Momberg

Zimbabwe's national parks and wildlife management authority is killing elephants near Lake Kariba to feed to crocodiles at a parks-owned commercial crocodile farm.

Johnny Rodrigues, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force (ZCTF), says the guardians of Zimbabwe's national parks have entered the lucrative crocodile breeding business and have allocated 50 to 100 elephants a year to feed the crocodiles.

"They have shot three already. We are looking into allegations that other crocodile farms in the country are being supplied with elephant meat from culls in conservation areas," said Rodrigues.

Geoff Blyth, a Kariba resident, this week sent out an international e-mail appeal to help save the elephants of Lake Kariba, saying national parks had been given the go-ahead to build their own crocodile farm in the Kaburi wilderness area, on the shore opposite two popular tourist attractions.

Crocodile farming is a lucrative business, with owners of such ventures earning millions through the sale and export of skins for the manufacture of leather products such as handbags and shoes, as well as the sale of the reptiles' meat, a delicacy among local communities.

While Blyth saw nothing wrong with the planned development, he was concerned about the proposal that crocodiles were to be fed elephant meat.

He questioned the need to cull elephants in the area, saying they did not have enough to sustain the proposed quota of 50 to 100 pachyderms a year.

Also of concern was the fact that most elephants in Kariba were habituated to humans.

"If they shoot even 50, that will be the end of our Kariba elephant population," said Blyth's e-mail.

The placing of the crocodile breeding facility would see officials having "direct access to any elephant wandering past, and the remaining buffalo and whatever is left there to feed their crocs".

Blyth said an elephant caught in a snare had recently been shot so that officials could determine how many elephants a year would be required to keep their crocodiles fed.

"They are destroying everything," said Blyth. "We are researching the matter, because we believe there is a silent cull going on. More and more tourists are complaining they are not seeing any game.

"That is why we are doing an audit on all game ranches and conservancies on how many animals we have left.

"No animal counts have been done in the past five years and, if things continue, we will wake up one morning and there will be nothing left," Blyth said.

Rodrigues said his organisation would be pushing for a continued ban on the trade in elephant products by Zimbabwe at the next meeting of the parties to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in June.

"If you allow culling here, you will be opening the gates to hell. We are trying to get Cites to demand a satellite count of what is in our country. If we open the doors to sell ivory, then it will be an opportunity for people to make money out of the killing of elephants, because they will be able to sell the ivory."

Atrocious

Christina Pretorius, spokeswoman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said if claims that the Zimbabwean authorities were killing elephants to feed to crocodiles were true, the organisation found this "atrocious and inappropriate".

"We are going to investigate this," she said.

A Zimbabwe NSPCA official said they would be meeting parks and wildlife representatives this week about a plan to build a crocodile farm at Kariba.

"They are denying this is going to happen (feeding elephants to crocodiles), but we will know more after the meeting and will comment properly then," the official said.

A representative for the World Wide Fund for Nature's Harare programme office said they were also investigating.

"Nothing appears to have happened yet, but one must remember that elephants have been used in the past to meet supplies for crocodile farms," said the conservationist. He pointed out that rogue elephants were shot by conservation officials "every couple of months" to feed crocodiles at farms.

He claimed Zimbabwe had an overpopulation of elephants, so ways were being sought to properly manage them in a sustainable manner.