Management the key in SA’s parks

It will be traumatic to think of the gemsboks, warthogs, springboks, waterbucks, kudus, plains zebras and fallow deer which will be shot.

The prospect is all the more unpalatable because these species are often seen as innocuous and can survive in tough conditions. They are also not associated with the sort of immense damage which can be caused by large animals, like elephant.

The animals are being culled in national reserves in what SANParks refers to as those in the “arid region” of South Africa – Karoo National Park, Tankwa Karoo National Park, Camdeboo, Addo Elephant Park, Mokala National Park and Namakwa National Park.

These parks fall mainly in the Eastern and Northern Cape, the areas which have been battered hardest by years of drought. These national parks – even those in which species are hardy and adapted to semi-desert environments – have been badly affected and many have had to use supplementary feeding schemes to keep their animals alive.

The ecologists and veterinarians in SANParks would have used their huge stores of knowledge, built up over decades, to assess whether the “carrying capacity” – the amount of animals a given space can accommodate – would have been exceeded. When the population pressures become too great, the only option is to cull.

None of this would be necessary if it was not for the “interference” of humans. Our farms and towns cut off migration routes and our parks become small isolated islands. That has to be managed. The only alternative is a massive “population crash”, in which many more animals die than would have been culled.

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