The human brain is a remarkable organ (and remarkably metabolically expensive, so its evolution confirms our intuition that it’s hugely important to our success as a species). But the specific way it works comes with a major downside. The result of having very tightly packed frontal cortical neurons is that the line between fantasy and reality is blurry for us.
One thing that separates humans from other mammals is that we possess special capacity for imagination. Thinking about what things might be like in future can inform the decisions we make today. Historically, the collective result of this unruly imagination is that the short-term pursuit of technological innovation undermined the very basis of our long-run survival — some among our ancestors bet the house (our ecological systems) at our expense.
We seem to have lost our collective ability to understand that there is no economy without intact ecological systems, and indeed little life worth living if we do not protect what little of the house is left.
National and provincial parks are now the lungs of the planet. Closer to home, they are both lungs and revenue earners. For instance, the Kruger National Park is rightly a source of national pride. Put aside for now that it was demarcated as a north-south park instead of a more intuitive east-west park. The latter would have allowed for natural elephant migration, a generally good idea for reasons we shall shortly explain.
Outside Kruger, we have wonderful provincial parks that constitute part of the country’s conservation heritage. We should be working hard to protect these. Madikwe Game Reserve in North West is one among them, a serious conservation success story and a useful site of analysis for understanding the current deluded and myopic policy decision-making prevalent in SA.
At the heart of this story is corruption, of two kinds. The first is of a mind that can see value only in terms of money, with rationalisations couched in profound abuse of the important concept of “sustainable use” and therefore uses corrupted heuristics to inform policy decisions. The second is more literal. One has to wonder exactly who benefits from the current options on the table at Madikwe. Elites? Yes. Animals and citizens? No.
If the drama is new to you, the backstory is elucidating. In June this year members of the parliamentary committee on forestry, fisheries & the environment accused North West officials of gross mismanagement for the “ongoing elephant crisis in the Madikwe Game Reserve”. Madikwe has more than 1,600 elephants now, more than six times what the reserve (75,000ha) had originally envisaged.
The original figures were a working estimate of 250-300. That number has since been weaponised — anything beyond it is said to exceed “carrying capacity”, a scientifically outdated concept. In static landscapes the idea was that to attain “balance” (which essentially meant a utopian aesthetic that pleases tourists), elephant numbers needed to be managed to prevent ecological deterioration.
In closed, fenced reserves there is perhaps an argument that elephant numbers should be watched, not because of a fictional “carrying capacity” but because natural adaptation mechanisms are curtailed by fences (habitat fragmentation). Nonetheless, Madikwe decided not to manage the numbers, which resulted in death by starvation for 75 elephants — extremely unpleasant but also a natural response to the recent drought.
Madikwe could have employed immuno-contraception or translocation to prevent this, as it’s hardly a problem that developed overnight. Immuno-contraception is a safe, scientifically tested, non-lethal means of artificially slowing reproduction rates (often necessary in fenced reserves that lack Kruger’s scale of more than 2-million hectares). The ultimate solution is to build migratory corridors, but land ownership rigidities often scupper efforts in that direction. Migratory corridors allow for movement to other water sources when drought hits and enable growth rates to respond to natural conditions.
Meanwhile, the North West Parks & Tourism Board, instead of moving to a workable solution with park management, issued a tender in May 2025: a “request for proposals from prospective buyers (hunters [for 25 elephants] and outfitters and professional culling [500 elephants] teams for game reduction/removal programmes) for the 2025/2026 financial year”. Clearly, the tender was rushed and lacked transparency.
For those looking to make a quick buck from the situation, the “overpopulation” narrative is useful fiction; the mask behind which nefarious motives hide. To hell with reputational risk and sustainable tourism — no tourism partners in the reserve were consulted about the tender. Hunting and culling would earn rents for an elite few under the banner of “sustainable use”.
Of course, it turns out that claims of “ecological degradation” and elephant “overpopulation” are wildly exaggerated, and the North West department of economic development, environment, conservation & tourism has never responded to requests for scientific management plans. This suggests that it doesn’t have any, but the plan to hunt and cull was tabled anyway.
One lodge owner reported (under condition of anonymity) that Madikwe’s 33 safari lodges generate about R1bn in annual revenue and create hundreds of jobs for communities: “By contrast, trophy hunting would bring in approximately R5m-R7m per year while simultaneously dealing a devastating blow to the photographic tourism sector.”
In July, after considerable media attention, Khorommbi Matibe and Jonathan Denga (chair and acting CEO of the North West Parks & Tourism Board, respectively), wrote a response to the furore. Unsurprisingly, it headlined with: “Sustainable solutions for Madikwe’s elephant overpopulation crisis”, a classic case of “stacking the decks” from the first line — how humans choose to tell stories tells us a lot about underlying motive and rationale.
Matibe and Denga essentially argued that none of the “rhetoric” (a sly insult to experts like Don Pinnock and Adam Cruise) came from affected communities or people within the reserve. Perhaps they hadn’t read the article referenced above. They also repeated the now-expected line: “It will be of no surprise to anyone that Madikwe has too many elephants, and we are not afraid to say that. Those who say otherwise are blindly ignoring the significant change of the ecological infrastructure.”
On the basis of this purported overpopulation, Matibe and Denga opine that contraception and lethal reduction are the only real options now left to Madikwe management. On contraception, they fail to account for why they didn’t harness the memorandum of understanding they have with Humane World for Animals, which has extensive experience and expertise with immuno-contraception. It could easily have been implemented at Madikwe. On lethal reduction, it does not follow — just because one opines so — that this is a preferable option to letting nature take its course.
With Trump-like grandiosity, Matibe and Denga assert: “We are at the doorstep of doing something incredible at Madikwe.” Those opposed to the abuse of “sustainable use” as a cover for rent-seeking — or even those who merely question whether hunting and culling will really produce the benefit its proponents fantasise it will — are vilified as being “emotional” and somehow opposed to development: “We will not be driven by emotions or agendas that seek to keep SA and our province in the economic doldrums.”
Matibe and Denga primed their readers to believe a false premise that Madikwe is “overpopulated” with elephants, and then employed the reductionist, and untrue, conclusion that lethal removal is the only viable option to earn conservation revenue and restore the ecosystem. The first problem is that Dr Sam Ferreira — the chief mammal expert for SanParks — does not believe Madikwe is carrying too many elephants. Second, the notion that culling and hunting can coexist with eco-tourism like photographic safaris is increasingly untenable, nor will they restore the ecosystem (largely because the ecosystem is just fine as it is).
Elephants are animals that, like us, have rich and distinctive emotional lives as individuals and families. They communicate in sophisticated ways with each other, operate societies based on special friendship networks (just like people), and are irreplaceable ecosystem engineers. Almost all conservation science is now pointing towards the positive impact elephants have on ecological regeneration. We’ve seen the culling movie before — one only has to look at Pilanesberg in the late 1990s to see what happened as a result of Kruger culling (which also conferred significant trauma on the human executioners).
To present culling as a “humane” option, as opposed to letting nature take its course, is disingenuous. Even if a concept of “overpopulation” applied here, as it does not, it still wouldn’t warrant elephant culling. Now that the overpopulation myth has been shattered though, it seems clear that it was merely a useful pretext on which to justify the tender.
The gears are officially engaged to destroy hundreds of morally important lives so a small set of people can pocket a few rand at society’s expense. If this is not stopped by widespread national outrage, our country will commit an atrocity for which deep shame will be the primary legacy for all who let it happen. Civic action on a broad front is urgently in order.
• Ross, a professor at the University of Cape Town School of Economics, is author of ‘The Gambling Animal’, written with Glenn Harrison. Dr Harvey is MD of research consultancy Harvey Economics.
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