BY THE ARUSHA NEWS REPORTER
Scientific research elsewhere in Africa is raising hopes that contraception and sterilisation could provide Tanzania with long-term measures for managing elephant populations in selected areas of growing human-beast conflict, although culling jumbos is currently out of the question.
Tanzania’s 2024/2025 National Wildlife Census recorded 66,714 elephants, up from 46,408 in 2014, reflecting a substantial recovery over the past decade following strengthened conservation and anti-poaching measures.
However, wildlife researchers cautioned against assuming that increasing elephant numbers alone were responsible for growing encounters between people and the animals.
Dr Julius Keyyu, Director of Research at the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI), said pressure on elephant habitats remains a major factor.
“Elephant numbers are still lower compared to historical levels and conflicts are largely due to increased human pressure on wildlife habitats,” Dr Keyyu said following the release of the latest census findings.
That distinction is important because Tanzania once had considerably more elephants. The country’s elephant population exceeded 134,000 in 2005 before being severely reduced by poaching and other pressures.
Research by TAWIRI has meanwhile found crop raiding to be the most common form of human-elephant conflict. In a study involving 2,312 respondents across 10 regions, about 85 per cent identified elephant crop raiding as the principal form of conflict.
The research found particularly high incidences in communities where settlements and agricultural activities had expanded within five kilometres of protected areas. It also found that people were most commonly killed or injured by elephants at night while guarding farms or moving between villages.
Against this background, scientists elsewhere in Africa have been examining whether controlling reproduction could help manage elephant populations in areas where space is increasingly limited.
One of the most extensively researched methods is immunocontraception, in which female elephants receive a vaccine known as porcine zona pellucida, or pZP, which prevents fertilisation.
More than two decades of research in South Africa found contraceptive effectiveness exceeding 95 per cent in larger treated populations, while studies reported no significant disruption to herd integrity, social associations or normal behaviour.
Reviewing the results of the long-running research, Hendrik Bertschinger of the University of Pretoria, Audrey Delsink of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, J.J. van Altena of Global Supplies in Gauteng and Jay Kirkpatrick of the Science and Conservation Centre in the United States concluded that “pZP could be considered as a reliable and humane method for elephant population control.”
Scientists have also experimented with vasectomy of selected male elephants, a procedure that prevents reproduction without removing the testes and therefore allows bulls to retain the hormones associated with normal behaviour.
A six-year study of vasectomised elephants at Pongola Game Reserve in South Africa found that treated bulls continued to display musth, maintained normal dominance hierarchies and continued associating with female groups.
Neither contraception nor vasectomy, however, would provide an immediate solution to Tanzania’s human-elephant conflict. Both are designed to slow population growth over years and would not prevent an elephant already living near farms or settlements from raiding crops or threatening people.
Tanzania has already ruled out elephant culling as a general response to human-wildlife conflict.
Addressing Parliament in April, Prime Minister, Dr Mwigulu Nchemba, said the government would continue pursuing non-lethal measures rather than proposals to reduce elephant numbers through killing.
“Tanzania is a signatory to international conventions that prohibit the killing of endangered species except under very strict conditions. Adopting culling would violate these commitments,” Dr Nchemba said.
The government has instead been expanding rapid-response capacity in areas affected by wildlife conflict, deploying drones to monitor elephant movements and increasing the presence of wildlife rangers in high-risk areas.
