And then they begin to snore. Loudly. Coetsee, a 24-year veteran of Zimbabwe’s National Parks and Wildlife Management Department, has shot the elephants with darts containing narcotics and tranquilizers; the next hour or so the beasts slumber while 10 workers them up and winch them onto the trucks. Only a year ago these pachyderms would have joined the thousands slaughtered over the years as part of Zimbabwe’s controversial policy of culling its surplus elephant population. But under an innovative program funded by both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Care for the Wild, a British-based conservation group, these animals will head instead for South Africa and other parts of Zimbabwe.
The implications for Loxodonta africana’s future are profound. While hardly an endangered species–the continent’s elephants are now estimated to number 600,000–the elephants are poorly distributed. Poachers have depleted herds in nearly every sub-Saharan country except Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. In those countries, officials complain there are too many animals for their parks to support.
Now Coetsee has devised a technique that permits entire families to be moved hundreds of miles safely and without any apparent damage to the pachyderm’s social structure. It had long been assumed that no adult elephant could be safely tranquilized for more than a couple of hours. Coetsee has proven that even middle-aged elephants can be safely sedated up to 48 hours using haloperidol and trilafon, two tranquilizers. In the field, the immobilized animals are first loaded onto trucks; later, as many as eight animals at a time are placed–conscious but sedated–into a shipping container on a tractor-trailer. Since the program began in August, more than 600 elephants have been relocated from Gona-re-zhou (“Place of the Elephants” in the Shangaan language), including about 200 sent to the Madikwe Game Reserve in the South African homeland of Bophuthatswana, a 650-mile overland trek. Only 15 animals have died.
The effort has produced an unlikely alliance. Coetsee, the driving force behind the program, is no sentimentalist: the 54-year-old grandfather has shot thousands of elephants in his lifetime. “You’ve got to manage the population,” he says. “But if we can find homes for them and move them live, what a pleasure.” His partner is Henry Hallward, 31, an entrepreneur and a project director for Care for the Wild. “We shouldn’t be moving them [because] that’s interfering with the elephant population,” says Hallward. “But we’re not going to allow them to be culled.”
Wildlife officials in other African countries have voiced interest in the project and its implications for their herds. Coetsee believes there are no limits to the distances that sedated elephants can travel, given sufficient water and food. There are, however, other obstacles that must be overcome before a largescale transfer of southern elephants to areas north of Zimbabwe can be considered. Ensuring that the relocated elephants are humanely treated in their new home is one. Care for the Wild has slapped a 25-year hunting ban on any animal captured with its sponsorship, but Hallward admits that it may be hard to enforce.
The transfer program is the best news for elephants since Dumbo learned to fly. If expanded, it could guarantee a better future for the African herds. In Cameroon’s Kaele farming region, for instance, crop-raiding animals could be moved into national parks. Most of the elephants from Gona-rezhou have been shipped to 16 former cattle ranches in Zimbabwe; if the pachyderms draw large numbers of tourists, that might encourage other farmers to become game wardens. It’s not a bad life: dodging peanuts instead of bullets.
