“We can confirm that we plan to cull about 200 elephants across the country. We are working on a method to do this,” said Tinashe Farawo, a spokesperson for Zimbabwe’s National Parks and Wildlife Authority.
It will be the first mass shooting of Zimbabwean elephants since 1988, and the local authorities were inspired by neighboring Namibia with this solution to the starvation of citizens. She approved the shooting of 83 elephants last month. In Zimbabwe, shelling will take place in the districts of Hwange, Mbire, Tsholotsho, and Chiredzi, reports The Guardian.
Overcrowding of parks
It is estimated that over 200 thousand elephants live across Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Angola and Namibia. According to Farawo, the shooting of elephants is also necessary to solve the overcrowding in Zimbabwe’s parks, where there are 84,000 of them, but they are able to support only 55,000 of them.
“It’s an effort to free up parks due to droughts. It’s just a drop in the ocean, because we’re talking about 200 elephants, but we have 84,000 of them here, which is a lot,” he said.
Last year they killed 50 people
Devastating droughts also often lead to an escalation of conflicts between humans and animals, as they make their sources of livelihood more scarce. Last year alone, elephants killed fifty people in Zimbabwe.
Although Zimbabwe is praised internationally for the protection of the elephant population, it is already starting to cause problems. Therefore, the country is now lobbying the UN Office for Trade in Endangered Species to once again allow trade in both live individuals and ivory. Zimbabwe has a stock of that, which would bring it approximately 600 thousand dollars (13.5 million crowns), but it is not allowed to sell it.
