(Posted 19th August 2024)
Courtesy of African Elephant News / Stenews and Mmangaliso Khumalo, Jacaranda FM
SANParks spokesperson Isaac Phaahla said the Kruger National Park has a healthy population of elephants but needs help from society to blow the whistle on poachers.
SANParks manages about 75% of the country’s elephants in five national parks.
These include the Kruger, Addo Elephant, Mapungubwe, Marakele and the Garden Route National Parks.
Phaahla said elephants are increasingly using human-inhabited landscapes, which makes planning and actions around human-elephant conflict critical.
“Elephants play a vital role in seed dispersal, bush thinning, influencing fire patterns, and felling trees which then become resources and habitat for other species.
We still have challenges in making sure that they are safe because there are still criminal syndicates that poach them for their ivory and for meat.
There’s quite a big and lucrative outside of the park of people selling bush meat and they can only get it from those poached animals.”
