(Posted 17th October 2024)
Courtesy of African Elephant News and Ed Stoddard, Daily Maverick
The International Fund for Animal Welfare has confirmed that five elephants have been killed in recent months on the Zambian side of Malawi’s Kasungu National Park in retaliation for crop raiding. But an NGO says the toll is higher, adding to the misery unleashed since more than 260 elephants were translocated to the park in 2022.
Abrief statement from the international fund (Ifaw) on the matter was pointedly sent on Tuesday after Daily Maverick had submitted queries to the animal welfare NGO upon being alerted to reports that at least 11 elephants had been killed on the Zambian side of the park since 1 September.
Kasungu is in Malawi but borders Zambia, and more than 260 elephants were translocated to the park more than two years ago in an operation spearheaded by Ifaw and African Parks, despite the glaring fact that there is no fence on the international frontier and much of the Malawian side.
“It is with great concern that Ifaw has learned that five elephants have been found dead in Kasungu National Park between May and September 2024,” Ifaw’s statement read. It was also posted on Ifaw’s site but not prominently.
“Preliminary investigation by DNPW Malawi suggests the elephants were shot in Zambia between May and September 2024 as retaliation for crop raiding and fled back to Kasungu National Park injured, where they died slowly and painfully,” it said.
The five carcasses uncovered were three adult males, one adult female and a calf. Ifaw also noted that the carcasses were scattered around the park with their tusks, an indication that ivory poaching was not the cause.
As Daily Maverick has previously reported from on-the-ground fieldwork in the region, rural communities in Zambia and Malawi have inhabited a landscape of fear and loathing since the translocation.
At least nine people have been killed by elephants since the translocation on both sides of the border. Another has reportedly been killed by a hippo displaced by the pachyderms while a man was hunted and slain by hyenas in August against the backdrop of local perceptions that the predators have been trailing the elephants out of the park.
The NGO Warm Heart, which has been compiling data and reports from its network of volunteers and informants about the damage wreaked, estimates that subsistence farmers reeling from the El Niño drought last summer have suffered close to $4-million in damage to crops and homes smashed by elephants seeking stored maize.
Ifaw’s terse statement speaks of the elephants dying “slowly and painfully”, but makes no mention of the people who have lost their lives or livelihoods, which would explain their “retaliation”.
Another way to view it is desperate defence against a terror that none of the people in the region had been subjected to before the translocation, which is widely regarded as ill-conceived and has also drawn critical reporting from the Financial Times and The Guardian, among others.
None of the people this journalist interviewed in late June in the region had laid eyes on an elephant before and so had no experience to draw on to deal with the animals.
Daily Maverick’s queries to Ifaw were prompted after Warm Heart alerted us to reports from its on-the-ground network that 11 elephants had been killed on the Zambian side of the park between 1 September and 6 October.
This is at odds with Ifaw’s recording of five elephants killed from May to September and it is entirely possible that the toll is even higher than that cited by either organisation.
“We have recorded 11 elephant deaths from 1 September to 6 October,” Mike Labuschagne, Warm Heart’s founder, told Daily Maverick.
According to Warm Heart, which has shared its report on the matter with Daily Maverick, five of the pachyderms were shot, five were poisoned and one that was poisoned also had a bullet wound. The NGO has also provided photos of the carcasses.
Daily Maverick cannot verify the veracity of either the latest Warm Heart claims or Ifaw’s statement. But our reporting in June in the field certainly corroborated many of the assertions that Warm Heart has been making.
And the carnage, according to Warm Heart, continues, with a further 29 households suffering crop or house damage from elephants between 1 September and 6 October.
“These are new households and not part of the 1,551 we had collected (data from) by 31 August 2024,” Warm Heart’s latest report says.
One thing is clear: in the warm heart of Africa, blood is being spilled, and both humans and elephants are paying the price of a wildlife translocation conceived thousands of miles away.
