Let Elephants Roam — a conservationist’s last will and testament to icons of the African savanna

Apart from its size, there’s something utterly fascinating about an elephant. It projects a compelling wisdom we can sense and exhibits a charming and playful relationship to its family we resonate with. To be gazed at by an elephant is to feel understood.

The more we learn about them, the more extraordinary they become. They call each other by name, which means, of course, that they’re individually named. They communicate over huge distances through infrasound directed through their feet.

When rivers run dry, they become water diviners, they mourn their dead – even when they’re reduced to bones – and they have a spatial knowledge of landscape surpassing Google Earth.

As a creature worthy of study, elephants very often turn scientific researchers into activists for their conservation – think Joyce Poole, Cynthia Moss, Ian Douglas-Hamilton, Paula Kahumbu and the Sheldrakes.

Then there’s the late Rudi van Aarde, a conservation ecologist. Through his life, his strict adherence to empirical science in the study of elephants spilled over into compassion and then, as his latest and sadly his final book shows (he died as it was in its final production), into love.

Let Elephants Roam is a legacy project. Rudi has taken good science, simplified it without reducing its impact and packaged it in a coffee-table-sized book that weaves together scientific findings, personal anecdotes and beautiful images.

The book is structured around key challenges in elephant conservation, moving from a critique of past practices to a vision for a more sustainable future. The images, captured over decades of research, offer an intimate glimpse into his relationship with these iconic animals.

Let Elephants Roam contains important insights, the result of nearly half a century of research conducted through the University of Pretoria’s Conservation Ecology Research Unit (Ceru) which Rudi founded and led. More than 70 PhD and MSc students completed their studies under his supervision, many now at the forefront of conservation work.

Van Aarde’s vision produced Room to Roam, a partnership between Ceru and the International Fund for Animal Welfare with the goal of ensuring space and corridors for elephants to thrive across southern Africa and beyond. This concept has been extensively implemented in the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area and the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area.

Culling

Culling, he says, isn’t a solution. Studies going back 60 years show that, despite tens of thousands of elephants shot in Kruger Park, Hwange and Gonarezhou, numbers continued to rise. A far more effective solution is to reduce supplied water and take down fences to allow trans-park and trans-border migration.

Historically, wildlife management did the opposite: provided water to ensure sightings for tourists, fenced parks to stop movement and then culled when densities were deemed too high.

Unfortunately, taking down fences has not always been a solution. When part of the fence between Kruger Park and Mozambique was removed, elephants moved east for a time, but poaching drove most of them back into Kruger. When the Sengwe corridor was opened between Kruger and Gonarezhou in Zimbabwe, farmers populated it and severely limited elephant movement.

Elephant herds generally do not live more than 10km from water. In Kruger Park, providing water halted seasonal migrations. Plants and trees around the water points were destroyed and starvation followed. In this way, says Rudi, supplying water during droughts promotes calf death because of depleted food around fixed waterholes.

With reduced food sources around waterholes and fenced parks, elephant numbers then became an issue, he writes. Managers talked of “balance of nature” and “carrying capacity” and imposed arbitrary, unscientific quotas. On this basis, from the 1960s until culling was finally halted around 1997, 60,000 elephants were shot in Zimbabwe, 2,000 in Uganda,1,600 in Zambia, 800 in Namibia and 17,000 in South Africa – 81,400 in all.

Rudi found that during culling in Kruger Park, more food became available, causing elephant growth rates to almost double. After the park was fully fenced, densities increased even more. “It makes more sense,” he writes, “to manage movement instead of culling to cut back numbers.” This is also official SANParks policy. 

Finally, sense prevailed. In Kruger Park over the past 15 years, more than half of the artificial water points have been closed and some fences to the east and west of the park were removed. Elephants are responding and their growth rate is slower than during the years of culling.

Numbers

How many elephants should there be? “The answer is we don’t know. Many places carried many more elephants without apparent impact. We also know that areas with high elephant numbers in winter usually have lower numbers in summer, suggesting that factors other than elephant numbers cause vegetation degradation.”

There are today around 250,000 elephants across southern Africa. Botswana alone once supported that many. There are far fewer elephants than there used to be 100 years ago. 

Generally, among elephant populations only around 25% of newborns survive to breeding age. “This low survival rate keeps growth through breeding and survival rates below 5.4% a year.”

Trees

Another elephant issue is the perception that elephants are destroying big trees to the detriment of biodiversity. They do, of course, and birds lose some nesting sites. However, arecent study found that the major cause of nest loss is wind. Downed trees are important for smaller browsers, making their leaves more accessible.

The real issue, writes Rudi, is not so much the loss of big trees but the fact that they’re not being replaced because fire and small herbivores are taking out the seedlings in the understory. So reduced tree cover can, in fact, be laid at the hooves of the large herds of antelope, like impala. But there’s an upside. Without elephants, savannas would become woodlands or covered in bush and unsuitable for many species.

Spaces

A recurring theme in the book is that conservation of elephants (and much else) is not simply about parks, but the spaces between them. It’s about dispersal through connectivity. Fenced-off islands result in reduced biodiversity, he says, and for this reason our focus must be conservation without borders.

Researchers at Ceru studied populations across 73 large protected areas to model optimal carrying capacity and, controversially, that they could easily carry 800,000 elephants, substantially more than the 370,000 they presently do. They acknowledged that isolated populations in fenced areas will deplete their food base with adverse results, but that generally speaking, overpopulation is not a core concern.

Rudi’s dream – and he always dreamed big – was to create megaparks for megapopulations. “We need to abandon the agricultural mindset that has dominated elephant management in southern Africa since the 1960s. Country boundaries, fences around protected areas and large-scale land transformation have fragmented the once-contiguous savanna elephant population into scattered and isolated sub-populations.” 

Megaparks with surrounding buffer zones linked through corridors would allow dispersal and strengthen gene pools. This is not just a good idea, but vital. Recent assessments show that population numbers for at least 60% of large herbivores and carnivores in Africa’s protected areas are declining. Rhino, lion, giraffe and cheetah populations have crashed. Extinctions are now possible.

“We know where elephants would like to live,” he writes. They prefer savannas with summer rains, they prefer areas along rivers, they don’t like fences and they tend to avoid rural people where they can. Our knowledge of these facts is also our duty to make this possible if we are to have elephants into the future.

It is, however, necessary to sound a note of caution as the window of opportunity to realise Rudi’s dream is fast closing. Already the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area is fragmented, with almost no movement between Kruger and Gonarezhou. There is very little eastward movement between Kruger and Mozambique’s Zinave and Banhine because of trophy hunting and population pressure.

In Let Elephants Roam, Rudi leaves us with a powerful reminder that the fate of Africa’s elephants is intertwined with our own. His book is a testament to the power of science, compassion and a lifelong commitment to protecting these iconic creatures for generations to come.

The book is essentially his last will and testament to a continent and a creature he loved. He died on 21 July 2023 at the age of 71, leaving an indelible mark on conservation ecology and wildlife management. DM

Original source: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-03-10-let-elephants-roam-a-conservationists-last-will-and-testament-to-icons-of-the-african-savanna/