Just want to say hello and let you know that I am reading along. I agree with you (both) and have nothing to add but you may have the impression that you are alone in the forum which would be wrong
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Trophy Hunting How hunters use jargon to conceal cruelty
You raise a very important issue in conservation, whether to cull or to let nature take its course. Yes, I well remember the Tsavo controversy, and the photos of those dead and dying eles still haunt me. Particularly the one taken from the air, showing an arena of disturbed sand all around the dead ele, who must have kicked and struggled for days to dig out such a basin around him.
I put myself in the position of the ele - would I want a quick bullet to the brain, or a long drawn out death from thirst and starvation. I would choose the bullet, myself. But I suppose that I am really talking about euthanasia rather than culling.
Yes, putting down the fences to increase the available habitat is clearly necessary, but in SA that would be corrupted to hunting. The fences on the west of Kruger came down - and now the Kruger Park eles, rhino, lion etc are hunted in the private nature reserves where they can now roam. This is a huge subject: there is plenty land on the Mocambique side but the eles stay away from Coutada 16 etc because they are poached and hunted there. Michele Pickover covers this well in her book Animal Rights in SA.
Even when darted and relocated there, the eles come fleeing back in to Kruger. SA, Zim and Moz governments have insufficient political will to deal effectively with poaching.
It is not a happy situation.
Oh and thanks Simba for your note.
I know the thinking in the "old days" was let Nature take its own course for all incidents. However, today I personally think it depends on each situation. I've seen elephants the Maasai have speared as retribution for some stupid thing the government did or didn't do. When we have today the capability of immobilizing the animal, removing the spear and giving a dose of an antibiotic to save his life, we should interfere. When a young orphaned endangered animal is found it is up to we humans (who most likely were the cause of the baby being orphaned) again we should try to rescue if at all possible. Drought is a different situation I will admit. You can't possibly attempt to feed thousands of animals. However, with the young bull I told about in an earlier post, had he been rescued, given milk, eucerne, grass in another area, he could well have survived. As you state, it is often a hard decision.
Better than pulling down the fences is making all the people who have moved in to the area since Kruger was established (and all African parks) to move out of it. I know, I dream, but there really needs to be a wide buffer zone between parks/reserves/ranches ensuring some type of corridors for wildlife. None of the African governments have dealt with this yet. We can only keep our fingers crossed that they will see the wisdom of it soon.