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Elephant Society Breaks Down After Mass Shootings
Today, wildlife managers in South Africa, where many elephants live, don’t usually cull herds, though the practice isn’t entirely off the books. When elephant numbers grow too high for one park to contain, managers now use other techniques to deal with the matter. But that wasn’t always the case. From the 1960s to the 1990s, culls were routine. In a cull, managers round up an elephant family group on a reserve and shoot the adults. The young, generally between four and ten, were then relocated.
Traumatic events affect elephants psychologically and socially.
But not elephants at the Pilanesberg reserve, which received many orphans. Here’s Virginia Morell, reporting for Science:
In contrast, the Pilanesberg elephants never seemed to know what to do. “The pattern there was no pattern at all; their reactions were completely random,” McComb says. In one extreme instance, a family left the area at once, traveling more than a kilometer before they came to a halt—but they did so in response to the call of an elephant they all knew. “Yet when they heard the call of the older, strange female, they did nothing at all; they just stayed completely relaxed,” Shannon says.Experts suspect this societal breakdown isn’t just limited to culls, but hunting and poaching of all types.
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