Elephant destiny : biography of an endangered species in Africa by Meredith Martin

Author:Meredith, Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: African elephant, Afrikanischer Elefant
Publisher: New York : PublicAffairs
Published: 2003-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

Elephant Destiny

slaughter, they faced a new formidable threat: economic development. Elephant herds were accustomed to roaming freely in search of food and water. For centuries they had used seasonal migration routes, well-defined elephant 'roads', beaten hard underfoot, and skilfully aligned to take advantage of the contours of hilly terrain. Some were reported to stretch for hundreds of miles. One elephant route in Uganda, running from the Murchison Falls area eastwards through Lira and on into Acholi country, was at one time regarded as the best road in the whole country.

But gradually the old routes and the old familiar territories were cut by the spread of modern agriculture, by the farms and villages of an expanding African population, by plantations and estates, and by roads and railways, some of which followed paths first engineered by elephants. Forests were cleared; waterholes and riverbanks were taken over by herds of livestock. Elephants raiding crops such as maize, sugar cane and bananas came into deadly conflict with farmers, as they had done in Addo. Farmers demanded protection from the authorities.

In Uganda, where nearly three-quarters of the land was considered elephant country, the British governor in 1924 ordered the establishment of a special unit to combat animal harassment of the local population. Organised on military lines, it was given the name Elephant Control Department. The name was changed in 1925 to Game Department, but its main purpose continued to be to control elephant depredations.

'There is still plenty of room in Uganda for both the [human] population and the elephants,' Captain Charles Pitman, head of the Game Department, recorded in 1925, 'but a comparatively large number of elephants must be

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