The adult African elephant (Loxodonta africana) eats between 150 and 170 kilograms of food and drinks as much as 200 liters of water every day. Now imagine keeping 7,000 of those animals fed.
That's the task of the staff at Kruger National Park, a 2-million hectare reserve that stretches 350 kilometers along South Africa's border with Mozambique. The elephant's appetite has an enormous impact on the surrounding environment. With this in mind, Kruger's scientists calculated in the 1960s that the number of elephants the park could host without harming wider biodiversity was roughly 7,000. To keep the population at that level, they initiated an annual cull. Over the next 27 years, approximately 14,500 animals were killed.
In 1995, facing widespread condemnation, Kruger stopped culling elephants. Since then elephant numbers in the park have continued rising. By last year, they had become so numerous that officials from South African National Parks ...
