Southern Africa’s elephant ‘problem’ is a human crisis in disguise

If you only read the headlines, you’d think southern Africa is groaning under a booming elephant problem with no silver bullet in sight.  

Tony Carnie’s detailed article from the recent “Elephant in the Room” conference in Harare paints exactly that picture: the region’s high elephant density, anxious managers and three big levers on the table – culling, contraception or translocation – plus a faintly embarrassed “do nothing” option in the corner.

It’s sober, careful journalism. But the overall framing still lands where many governments and some scientists are most comfortable: the core dilemma is “what to do about all these elephants”.

I’d argue that’s backwards.  

The real crisis in southern Africa is not an elephant overpopulation crisis. It’s a human land use, inequality and governance crisis that we keep disguising as a numbers game.

Not ‘too many elephants’ – too many walls

Carnie reminds us that elephants have lost roughly 85% of their historic range across Africa. Within what’s left, about 70% of the continent’s remaining 415,000 or so elephants are now in southern Africa, with Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa carrying a big share.  

Those aren’t the statistics of a continent with “too many” elephants. They’re the signature of a species squeezed into the last fragments that haven’t yet been ploughed, mined or developed.

What Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park shows, for example, is what happens when you compress a wide-ranging species into an increasingly human-dominated world. The park holds about 11,500 elephants in a relatively small area and they’re not dispersing into Mozambique as managers hoped, even after border fences came down. GPS collars show elephants avoiding high-human-density areas; trophy hunting just outside the park on the Zimbabwe side creates a “barrier of fear” where more than half the hunted animals are shot within a kilometre of the boundary. In Mozambique, a quarter of the country is nominally set aside for wildlife, but communities struggling with hunger are understandably wary of opening corridors when they see more risk than reward.

This is not an elephant revolt. It is an entirely predictable outcome of how we’ve drawn our lines, loaded our guns and structured rural poverty.

You don’t need to demonise elephants or glorify them to see the basic geometry. We have shrunk and weaponised their world, then labelled the fallout a “booming elephant problem”.

The three ‘solutions’ that keep circling back to us

The Harare conference turns on three tools: culling, contraception and translocation. Each tells you more about human politics than elephant biology.

1 Culling: fast, brutal – and very tempting

Professor David Cumming’s call to “take out” about 7,000 elephants from Gonarezhou to hit a preferred density sounds clinical, but the numbers reveal a powerful subtext.

Carnie notes that past Kruger culls cost about R6,600 per elephant (in 2005 rands) to kill and process, but that meat, hides and ivory could yield about double that in profit if ivory were legal to sell. Put bluntly: under the old “sustainable use” logic, you could make money killing elephants faster than you spend money managing them.

As CITES CoP20 in Samarkand approaches, Namibia and allies are already pushing proposals to reopen international trade in stockpiled ivory and “harmonise” conditions for trade from southern African populations.

When you set those politics next to Gonarezhou’s cost-benefit spreadsheet, culling stops looking like a neutral management tool and starts looking like a business model in search of moral cover.

And yet, lethal control does nothing to change: the hunting “wall of fear” at park edges; the lack of safe, accepted corridors into Mozambique; or the realities of climate volatility that will still bring drought-driven die-offs regardless of how many elephants we shoot today.

Culling addresses the symptom – high local density – while reinforcing the system that created it.

2 Contraception: helpful tool, not a master key

Immunocontraception, as Dr Audrey Delsink has shown across a number of South African reserves, is a humane, reversible way to slow future growth in largely fenced populations. It avoids the social trauma of culling; family groups remain intact; cows can resume breeding when treatments stop.

Used wisely, it’s an important part of the toolbox.

But contraception is being asked a political question it can’t answer: 
“How do we make elephant numbers match the human land-use decisions we’re unwilling to change?”

No matter how many cows you dart, it will not reopen closed migration routes, change hunting practices at boundaries, or put food on the table for communities who currently see only the costs of living with wildlife.

At best, it buys breathing space – time for humans to fix the map.

3 Translocation: moving the problem, or changing the system?

Josh Mostert was refreshingly candid at the meeting: yes, you can move hundreds of elephants; no, it’s not a silver bullet.

Translocation is expensive, stressful and often risky for animals. It can also be politically fraught for the communities at the destination. If the social contract isn’t there, you’re just exporting conflict.

The most telling line in his presentation is a question, not an answer: 
“We can uplift 1,000 elephants from Gonarezhou, but is it responsible? Are there suitable areas… Will they be safe? How will their presence affect neighbouring communities?”

Those are not ecological questions. They’re questions about human will, human institutions and human justice.

The missing option: change us

For all the nuance Carnie reports, the fourth option barely gets airtime: changing the human systems that made places like Gonarezhou such a pressure cooker in the first place.

Yet it’s hiding in plain sight in his own article.

During Covid, when tourism and hunting pressure eased, more elephants started moving into Mozambique. That’s a blazing red arrow pointing at how our economic choices shape movement. Trophy hunting clustered along the park boundary has created a psychological wall; elephants venture out mostly at night to avoid being shot. In Mozambique, Dr João Almeida was frank: if people have nothing to eat, they are not open to dialogue about elephant corridors. His team is piloting protected farming communities with solar fences precisely because food security is the precondition for coexistence, not an optional add-on.

None of that has anything to do with elephant “overpopulation”. It has everything to do with where we put guns and incentives; whether communities see elephants as a pathway to opportunity or a guarantor of hardship; and whether governments are willing to trade short-term revenue for long-term resilience.

This is where my own work on language really matters. For years I’ve been arguing that when we keep talking about “human-wildlife conflict” and “problem animals”, we smuggle in the idea that nature is misbehaving and humans are merely reacting. In reality, we engineered the conditions and then labelled the fallout a conflict with elephants. Our words do quiet political work: they shift blame onto elephants and away from the fences, policies and economic models that made those encounters inevitable.

Change that story, and different solutions suddenly become thinkable.

Heading into Samarkand with the wrong question

The Harare conference title – “Elephant in the Room” – was meant to be clever. It is also a bit too accurate.

The real elephant in the room isn’t whether we choose culling, contraception or translocation. It’s the uncomfortable fact that our political and economic systems are demanding that elephants fit into a human design that was never built with them in mind.

As CITES CoP20 looms in Samarkand, southern African delegates will arrive with talking points about “booming elephant populations” and the need for “flexibility” on ivory and live exports.

But we should ask a different set of questions: What would Gonarezhou look like if we replanned hunting zones, opened and protected genuine corridors and guaranteed communities on both sides of the border a fair share of the benefits from elephants? How many of today’s problems would evaporate if elephants had somewhere safe and socially accepted to go, instead of orbiting the same hard boundaries? And why are we so eager to reach for solutions that remove elephants rather than those that reform us?

There is indeed no silver bullet for managing elephants in southern Africa. But that’s because we’re aiming at the wrong target. The crisis in Gonarezhou, and elsewhere, is not an excess of elephants. It is an excess of human walls, human weapons and human denial. Until we admit that, every solution will keep circling back to the same uncomfortable truth: 

The problem was never the elephants. It was always us. DM

Dr Adam Cruise is an investigative environmental journalist, travel writer and academic. He has contributed to a number of international publications, including National Geographic and The Guardian, covering diverse topics from the plight of elephants, rhinos and lions in Africa to coral reef rejuvenation in Indonesia. Cruise is a doctor of philosophy, specialising in animal and environmental ethics, and is the editor of the online Journal of African Elephants.