ELEPHANTS & IVORY

© IFAW/D. Willetts/Tsavo National Park, Kenya
policy in conservation. Again, this observation
applies to elephants, and the decisions made
by managers about how to mitigate human
interactions with them, their habitats, and the
environment. 68 A recent study found that most
managers responsible for elephants in protected
areas in South Africa based their decisions, for
example, on “experience-based information” rather
than on scientific principles or evidence. 69
Even when scientific information is actually
used to inform conservation decisions, it is done
so in a highly selective and arbitrary fashion. In
the case of elephants, much discussion focuses
on incomplete and imprecise data on population
numbers and trends, ignoring that elephants
exist not only as populations but as unique
individuals and as components within complex
communities and ecosystems. Important research
from other sciences, including modern taxonomy
and systematics, ethology, animal psychology and
neurobiology, as well as from other learned fields,
such as history and ethics, is essentially ignored.
Elephant conservation would look remarkably
different today if policy and management decisions
were informed and guided by knowledge from
all learned fields of study. But, before we discuss
that issue, let us outline a few aspects of elephant
conservation that are based on selective use of
available information and on prevailing myths that
bear little resemblance to the reality on the ground.
THERE ARE “TOO MANY ELEPHANTS”
In conservation today, we frequently hear that
there are too many animals, whether they be
cormorants, deer or wolves in North America,
kangaroos in Australia, seals in Canada and
Scotland, whales in the world’s oceans or, indeed,
elephants. 70 This phenomenon, which ironically
often involves threatened or endangered species 71
is frequently discussed, even by people calling
themselves scientists, as “overpopulation”,
“overabundance”, even “hyperabundance”. 72
From the outset, let’s be clear. The idea of
overabundance is not a scientific concept. It is
a value judgment. Science can never tell us how
many animals there should be in one place at one
time because no such number exists. We all know
people for whom a single mouse in the kitchen
pantry represents a local “overabundance” of
mice. One mouse in the house is one mouse too
many!
When people, including scientists, talk about
overabundance, they are actually referring to the
maximum number of individuals of a species that
they are willing to tolerate in one place at one
time, what academics sometimes call “cultural
carrying capacity”. Cultural carrying capacity
depends entirely on human attitudes towards a
species, not on biological principles.
Where there are more elephants locally than
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