What does the word “elephant” bring to mind?

Do you have a picture of a large, wise, friendly-looking creature? Maybe the words “cute” or “endangered” pop up.

You probably don’t think of the word “destruction.” A picture of a degraded habitat, a place that is hard for many animals to survive in, is almost certainly not what you see.

Go back to thinking about “big.” Remember that a large herbivore (an animal that eats only plants) needs to eat a lot. In fact, it needs to spend most of its life eating to get enough energy to survive. Elephants eat all sorts of plants: leaves from trees, vines that grow on trees, roots, leaves from bushes, and fruit. They live in herds, so quite a few elephants will live and eat in the same area at any given time.  (7-20, 30187)  To get the greenery that they like best they may simply knock down a tree, or two, or ten. (7-20, 30147) They make an enormous mess of the areas in which they live, especially if there are too many of them. A herd of elephants that has space to roam won’t cause more problems than the forest can fix. Other animals that need food, shade, or living quarters won’t find their lives made difficult due to elephant activity. However, herds of elephants that are confined to a single area, as is the case for most elephants today, can end up ripping the landscape apart to the point that it cannot easily revive. The vegetation, animals, and the elephants themselves, will then struggle to survive.

Why are elephants confined? (7-21, 30228) Game reserves, conservancies, and national parks exist as confined, generally fenced, areas. Animals can roam within those areas, but cannot generally pass from one to another. They may look enormous on a map, but a herd of large animals needs an area that is more than enormous! They need to move from place to place on a vast scale, eating, and then moving on. As young elephants leave their herd and form new herds, those groups need to be able to move away from places where other herds are eating. Some areas are getting land between protected areas that will allow animals to pass from one to another. This means adding large amounts of land, which is expensive and difficult. 

Meanwhile, elephants keep having babies.(7-20, 30196) Herds split, and everyone needs food. African elephants live as long as people do, 60-70 years, so the number of elephants can grow pretty quickly! A female elephant who has a baby once every 3 years or so will end up having added 6-7 young ones to the local elephant population before she gets too old to have babies.

So, how can people ensure the health and safety of the elephants that they have confined? Just allowing the populations to grow and grow will lead to a loss of plants and trees and animal species,  including the loss of elephants. We can try to create passages among protected areas, but that will take a long time and may not always end up being possible at all. We can “cull” elephants. That means we can allow certain elephants to be shot to reduce the number of animals, but few people see that as a great solution these days. We can allow them to destroy their own habitat, and endanger them and many other living things.

Creative, skilled, and knowledgeable people are coming up with new ideas that may help elephants survive in habitats that work. They may not be permanent solutions to the problems that elephants have in a world with shrinking wild spaces, but they may be able to give us a little more time to improve our management of land for these vegetarian giants.