Remember, this is KZN taking a step forward. SANParks couldn't give a damn at this stage for any new idea's regarding conservation if there is no immediate financial reward.
Elephant Hunting/Culling/Contraception
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Sprocky
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Re: SA planning elephant birth control
This exercise is new technology. The animals do not have to be darted and the have the contraceptive administered. It is all done with one shot from a helicopter. Much cheaper and according to those in the know, more effective than the old method.
Remember, this is KZN taking a step forward. SANParks couldn't give a damn at this stage for any new idea's regarding conservation if there is no immediate financial reward.
Remember, this is KZN taking a step forward. SANParks couldn't give a damn at this stage for any new idea's regarding conservation if there is no immediate financial reward.
Sometimes it’s not until you don’t see what you want to see, that you truly open your eyes.
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Richprins
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Zim Weighs Cost of too many Elephants
2012-10-23 07:50
Hwange - A herd of elephants hobbles past a cluster of acacia trees to a water-hole deep in Zimbabwe's vast Hwange game reserve, attracted by the drone of generators pumping water round the clock into the pool.
With the elephant population ballooning, wildlife authorities have resorted to using 45 generators, each consuming 200 litres of diesel a week from June to November, to ensure the animals can get water.
The strategy appears to be working. So far this year around 17 elephants have died in the area due to the extreme heat and lack of water, compared to 77 last year.
"The elephants drink close to 90% of all the water [pumped] here," said Edwin Makuwe, an ecologist with the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Authority,
"I think elephants now know that when they hear an engine running, chances are that there is water close by."
But the water, while life-preserving, may be running against the flow of nature.
The 14 600-square-kilometre reserve is home to between 35 000 to 40 000 elephants, twice its capacity.
The increase in the elephant population has led to higher demand for water at the park, home to over 100 different species of animals including the "Big Five": elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo and the endangered rhinoceros.
Makuwe said the rise in the elephant population at the game reserve, established in 1949, had also led to the destruction of the environment.
Negative effect
"There is so much activity by the elephants that the vegetation has been affected negatively, the trees are no longer growing as fast as they should."
"[The trees] are no longer producing as many seeds as they should. In the long term this will have a negative effect on the entire habitat of Hwange."
He said the quality of the forage had gone down, with elephants stripping tree barks and digging roots for food.
"The African savannah is supposed to be a mosaic of trees and grasses. The moment you start to have more grasslands than trees it is not functioning as African savannah."
Makuwe fears small animals and insects who live in the trees risk extinction.
"If you lose the trees and you are left with the grasslands, then definitely some of the species will be lost," he said.
The authorities are yet to find a solution.
"Some people advocate to let nature take its course ... [but] we are yet to find a method which can convince all the people to accept and bring down the [elephant] population," Makuwe added.
With tourists, who have shunned the country over the years, slowly returning, there is little incentive to cull the main attraction.
In the meantime, Tom Milliken, of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), said elephants in Hwange were suffering greatly due to the water shortages.
"This is the worst time of the year for elephants and we still have a month before the rains come," he told AFP. "Elephants have most stress this time of the year when there is no water."
- AFP
Further discussion can follow HERE: viewtopic.php?f=60&t=107&p=52527#p52527
Hwange - A herd of elephants hobbles past a cluster of acacia trees to a water-hole deep in Zimbabwe's vast Hwange game reserve, attracted by the drone of generators pumping water round the clock into the pool.
With the elephant population ballooning, wildlife authorities have resorted to using 45 generators, each consuming 200 litres of diesel a week from June to November, to ensure the animals can get water.
The strategy appears to be working. So far this year around 17 elephants have died in the area due to the extreme heat and lack of water, compared to 77 last year.
"The elephants drink close to 90% of all the water [pumped] here," said Edwin Makuwe, an ecologist with the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Authority,
"I think elephants now know that when they hear an engine running, chances are that there is water close by."
But the water, while life-preserving, may be running against the flow of nature.
The 14 600-square-kilometre reserve is home to between 35 000 to 40 000 elephants, twice its capacity.
The increase in the elephant population has led to higher demand for water at the park, home to over 100 different species of animals including the "Big Five": elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo and the endangered rhinoceros.
Makuwe said the rise in the elephant population at the game reserve, established in 1949, had also led to the destruction of the environment.
Negative effect
"There is so much activity by the elephants that the vegetation has been affected negatively, the trees are no longer growing as fast as they should."
"[The trees] are no longer producing as many seeds as they should. In the long term this will have a negative effect on the entire habitat of Hwange."
He said the quality of the forage had gone down, with elephants stripping tree barks and digging roots for food.
"The African savannah is supposed to be a mosaic of trees and grasses. The moment you start to have more grasslands than trees it is not functioning as African savannah."
Makuwe fears small animals and insects who live in the trees risk extinction.
"If you lose the trees and you are left with the grasslands, then definitely some of the species will be lost," he said.
The authorities are yet to find a solution.
"Some people advocate to let nature take its course ... [but] we are yet to find a method which can convince all the people to accept and bring down the [elephant] population," Makuwe added.
With tourists, who have shunned the country over the years, slowly returning, there is little incentive to cull the main attraction.
In the meantime, Tom Milliken, of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), said elephants in Hwange were suffering greatly due to the water shortages.
"This is the worst time of the year for elephants and we still have a month before the rains come," he told AFP. "Elephants have most stress this time of the year when there is no water."
- AFP
Further discussion can follow HERE: viewtopic.php?f=60&t=107&p=52527#p52527
Please check Needs Attention pre-booking: https://africawild-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=322&t=596
Elephant Contraception
BBC News Africa
31 October 2012 Last updated at 01:09 GMT
Will elephant contraception work in South Africa?
By Martin Plaut
BBC World Service Africa editor
Birth control for elephants in South Africa is being hailed as a success, after the introduction of a contraception vaccine being trialled by researchers.
Wildlife conservationists believe it is likely to become the way to control South Africa's ever-expanding elephant population.
But the plans have provoked considerable controversy.
Some of the country's most eminent elephant experts are completely opposed to the contraception programme.
Elephants eat an estimated 270kg (600lbs) of food a day and can be extremely destructive while feeding, pushing over trees or breaking off branches.
Unlike in many African countries, where poaching has recently been having a devastating effect on elephant numbers, in South Africa the population is estimated at about 20,000.
For the last five years, wildlife experts in the Tembe Elephant Park, which borders Mozambique, have been firing the contraceptives into the female elephants from the air.
The 300 sq km (115 sq mile) park in KwaZulu Natal province has 200 elephants in its herd - some of southern Africa's largest giant animals with magnificent tusks.
The biggest of them all is Isilo, who is about 50 years old, weighs seven tonnes, and stands 3.2m (10.5ft) tall.
His tusks are about 2.5m long and weigh more than 60kg.
It is a testimony to their successful conservation, but elephants can run out of vegetation and at this point they starve to death or rampage through neighbouring farms.
Pink dye
Catherine Hanekom, the district ecologist, says the new vaccine is the least disruptive way of limiting the fertility of these wild animals.
"The really nice thing about it is that it is a remote application," says Ms Hanekom, who works for Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, a government organisation that is responsible for overseeing conservation areas and more than 57 parks in KwaZulu-Natal.
"So we will fly with the helicopter, we dart the animals from the air, the dart will fall out and that's the entire impact we have on the herd," she told the BBC.
The elephants are then marked with a pink dye to indicate they have been vaccinated, although this sometimes becomes obscured by dust.
Annual boosters are required to maintain contraception.
The results have been encouraging as the number of calves being born has more than halved, Ms Hanekom says.
This has meant that the distressing process of hunting down and culling elephant herds has been avoided.
Tembe Elephant Park was the first public park to start using the birth control method and is one of 13 reserves in the country now using it.
The Conservation Ecology Research Unit (Ceru) at the University of Pretoria says the average female elephant gives birth when 12 years old and produces 12 calves over her lifetime of about 60 years.
The South African government halted the killing of elephants in 1995 but by 2008 then numbers had more than doubled and culling was reintroduced.
Known as immunocontraception, the vaccine is a non-hormonal form of birth control.
Its production and testing is being partly funded by a US non-governmental organisation, Humane Society International, and in South Africa is being supervised by the University of Pretoria's reproduction section in the department of production animal studies.
According to HSI, the porcine zona pellucida (PZP) vaccine is 90% effective and has been tested successfully on horses and deer in the US.
It works by stimulating a female elephant's immune system to produce antibodies which prevent the sperm from fertilising her egg during ovulation.
The organisation argues that this form of population control is cost effective, with each vaccination in the first year, including the use of a helicopter, amounting to about 1,200 rand ($142; £89) per elephant cow.
It is also quick.
Jaco Mattheus, from the Phinda Private Game Reserve in KwaZulu Natal which began testing the vaccine in 2004, said it was initially done at ground level, a time-consuming process.
"We then explored the opportunity to implement aerial vaccinations when the elephant congregated in more accessible areas of the reserve, as it happens at the beginning of the wet season," he told HSI in its 2012 report Free-ranging African Elephant - Immunocontraception, a new paradigm for elephant management.
"Darting from the helicopter significantly reduced the time needed to vaccinate the required animals, as well as the perceived stress on the animals. It literally only takes an hour or two now."
'Unfeasible'
But contraception is not universally supported, with some elephant experts questioning whether it is the right approach.
Some scientists suggest the programme is not even feasible in large-scale parks like the Kruger National Park.
"Even if individual treatments were 100% effective, the costs would be likely to exceed the total management budget of the South African national parks," argued Stuart Pimm of Colombia University and Rudi J van Aarde of Ceru at the University of Pretoria.
Prof van Aarde says that the elephant numbers problem is an artificial one.
Digging water-holes that allow elephants to remain in one location even during dry seasons leads to the decimation of the vegetation and an explosion in elephant numbers.
He takes Namibia's Etosha National Park as an example - there were only 50 elephants in the park before it was fenced and 58 wells were put in place.
"Today it is home to 2,000 elephants, most of them living there throughout the year," he told the BBC.
Where there is no artificially provided water the periodic droughts provide a natural brake on elephant populations, since many calves do not survive their first four years.
The case of the Kruger National Park is also illustrative.
"In Kruger, the 30 years of elephant culling went hand in hand with the increasing placement of boreholes and dams," Prof van Aarde says.
"By the time the culling came to an end in 1994/5, there were some 280 artificial water-holes outside rest camps."
No elephant had to travel for more than 5km for water, he says.
Now the process has been reversed and over the past 10 years about half the Kruger's artificial water points have been closed.
At the same time the fences on the east of the park have been removed, allowing elephants to roam into Mozambique, and culling has ended.
Elephants responded to these changes and numbers have stabilised, says Prof van Aarde.
"As a matter of fact numbers have not changed significantly over the past five years," he says.
Clearly, there are strong opinions on the question of elephant contraception.
And what works in a small, enclosed reserve like Tembe may not necessarily be applicable for much larger nature parks like the Kruger.
31 October 2012 Last updated at 01:09 GMT
Will elephant contraception work in South Africa?
By Martin Plaut
BBC World Service Africa editor
Birth control for elephants in South Africa is being hailed as a success, after the introduction of a contraception vaccine being trialled by researchers.
Wildlife conservationists believe it is likely to become the way to control South Africa's ever-expanding elephant population.
But the plans have provoked considerable controversy.
Some of the country's most eminent elephant experts are completely opposed to the contraception programme.
Elephants eat an estimated 270kg (600lbs) of food a day and can be extremely destructive while feeding, pushing over trees or breaking off branches.
Unlike in many African countries, where poaching has recently been having a devastating effect on elephant numbers, in South Africa the population is estimated at about 20,000.
For the last five years, wildlife experts in the Tembe Elephant Park, which borders Mozambique, have been firing the contraceptives into the female elephants from the air.
The 300 sq km (115 sq mile) park in KwaZulu Natal province has 200 elephants in its herd - some of southern Africa's largest giant animals with magnificent tusks.
The biggest of them all is Isilo, who is about 50 years old, weighs seven tonnes, and stands 3.2m (10.5ft) tall.
His tusks are about 2.5m long and weigh more than 60kg.
It is a testimony to their successful conservation, but elephants can run out of vegetation and at this point they starve to death or rampage through neighbouring farms.
Pink dye
Catherine Hanekom, the district ecologist, says the new vaccine is the least disruptive way of limiting the fertility of these wild animals.
"The really nice thing about it is that it is a remote application," says Ms Hanekom, who works for Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, a government organisation that is responsible for overseeing conservation areas and more than 57 parks in KwaZulu-Natal.
"So we will fly with the helicopter, we dart the animals from the air, the dart will fall out and that's the entire impact we have on the herd," she told the BBC.
The elephants are then marked with a pink dye to indicate they have been vaccinated, although this sometimes becomes obscured by dust.
Annual boosters are required to maintain contraception.
The results have been encouraging as the number of calves being born has more than halved, Ms Hanekom says.
This has meant that the distressing process of hunting down and culling elephant herds has been avoided.
Tembe Elephant Park was the first public park to start using the birth control method and is one of 13 reserves in the country now using it.
The Conservation Ecology Research Unit (Ceru) at the University of Pretoria says the average female elephant gives birth when 12 years old and produces 12 calves over her lifetime of about 60 years.
The South African government halted the killing of elephants in 1995 but by 2008 then numbers had more than doubled and culling was reintroduced.
Known as immunocontraception, the vaccine is a non-hormonal form of birth control.
Its production and testing is being partly funded by a US non-governmental organisation, Humane Society International, and in South Africa is being supervised by the University of Pretoria's reproduction section in the department of production animal studies.
According to HSI, the porcine zona pellucida (PZP) vaccine is 90% effective and has been tested successfully on horses and deer in the US.
It works by stimulating a female elephant's immune system to produce antibodies which prevent the sperm from fertilising her egg during ovulation.
The organisation argues that this form of population control is cost effective, with each vaccination in the first year, including the use of a helicopter, amounting to about 1,200 rand ($142; £89) per elephant cow.
It is also quick.
Jaco Mattheus, from the Phinda Private Game Reserve in KwaZulu Natal which began testing the vaccine in 2004, said it was initially done at ground level, a time-consuming process.
"We then explored the opportunity to implement aerial vaccinations when the elephant congregated in more accessible areas of the reserve, as it happens at the beginning of the wet season," he told HSI in its 2012 report Free-ranging African Elephant - Immunocontraception, a new paradigm for elephant management.
"Darting from the helicopter significantly reduced the time needed to vaccinate the required animals, as well as the perceived stress on the animals. It literally only takes an hour or two now."
'Unfeasible'
But contraception is not universally supported, with some elephant experts questioning whether it is the right approach.
Some scientists suggest the programme is not even feasible in large-scale parks like the Kruger National Park.
"Even if individual treatments were 100% effective, the costs would be likely to exceed the total management budget of the South African national parks," argued Stuart Pimm of Colombia University and Rudi J van Aarde of Ceru at the University of Pretoria.
Prof van Aarde says that the elephant numbers problem is an artificial one.
Digging water-holes that allow elephants to remain in one location even during dry seasons leads to the decimation of the vegetation and an explosion in elephant numbers.
He takes Namibia's Etosha National Park as an example - there were only 50 elephants in the park before it was fenced and 58 wells were put in place.
"Today it is home to 2,000 elephants, most of them living there throughout the year," he told the BBC.
Where there is no artificially provided water the periodic droughts provide a natural brake on elephant populations, since many calves do not survive their first four years.
The case of the Kruger National Park is also illustrative.
"In Kruger, the 30 years of elephant culling went hand in hand with the increasing placement of boreholes and dams," Prof van Aarde says.
"By the time the culling came to an end in 1994/5, there were some 280 artificial water-holes outside rest camps."
No elephant had to travel for more than 5km for water, he says.
Now the process has been reversed and over the past 10 years about half the Kruger's artificial water points have been closed.
At the same time the fences on the east of the park have been removed, allowing elephants to roam into Mozambique, and culling has ended.
Elephants responded to these changes and numbers have stabilised, says Prof van Aarde.
"As a matter of fact numbers have not changed significantly over the past five years," he says.
Clearly, there are strong opinions on the question of elephant contraception.
And what works in a small, enclosed reserve like Tembe may not necessarily be applicable for much larger nature parks like the Kruger.
Elephants & Trees
Science News
Airborne Technology Helps Manage Elephants
ScienceDaily (Aug. 6, 2012)
For years, scientists have debated how big a role elephants play in toppling trees in South African savannas. Tree loss is a natural process, but it is increasing in some regions, with cascading effects on the habitat for many other species. Using high resolution 3-D mapping, Carnegie scientists have for the first time quantitatively determined tree losses across savannas of Kruger National Park. They found that elephants are the primary agents -- their browsing habits knock trees over at a rate averaging 6 times higher than in areas inaccessible to them.
The research also found that elephants prefer toppling trees in the 16-to-30 foot (5-8 m) range, with annual losses of up to 20% in these height classes. The findings, published in Ecology Letters, bolster our understanding of elephant conservation needs and their impacts, and the results could help to improve savanna management practices.
"Previous field studies gave us important clues that elephants are a key driver of tree losses, but our airborne 3-D mapping approach was the only way to fully understand the impacts of elephants across a wide range of environmental conditions found in savannas," commented lead author Greg Asner of Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology. "Our maps show that elephants clearly toppled medium-sized trees, creating an "elephant trap" for the vegetation. These elephant-driven tree losses have a ripple effect across the ecosystem, including how much carbon is sequestered from the atmosphere."
The technology used for monitoring trees is Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), mounted on the fixed-wing Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO). It provides detailed 3-D images of the vegetation canopy at tree-level resolution using laser pulses that sweep across the African savanna. The CAO's lasers can detect even small changes in each tree's height, and its vast coverage is far superior to previous field-based and aerial photographic evaluations. The scientists considered an array of environmental variables spread over four study landscapes within Kruger and in very large areas fenced off to prevent herbivore entry. For years, four of these exclosures have kept out all herbivores larger than a rabbit. Two other partial enclosures have permitted entry of herbivores other than elephants.
The scientists identified and monitored 58,000 individual trees from the air, inside and outside of these exclosures and across the landscape in 2008 and again in 2010. They found that nearly 9% of the trees decreased in height in two years, and that the mapped changes in treefall were linked to different climate and terrain conditions. Most tree losses occurred in lowland areas with more moisture and on soils high in nutrients that harbor trees preferred by elephants for browsing. Critically, the partial exclosures definitively identified elephants, as opposed to other herbivores and fire, as the major agent of tree losses over the two-year period.
"These spatially explicit patterns of treefall highlight the challenges faced by conservation area managers in Africa, who must know where and how their decisions impact ecosystem health and biodiversity. They should rely on rigorous science to evaluate alternative scenarios and management options, and the CAO helps provide the necessary quantification," commented co-author Shaun Levick.
Danie Pienaar, head of scientific services of the South African National Parks remarked, "This collaboration between external scientists and conservation managers has led to exciting and ground-breaking new insights to long-standing questions and challenges. Knowing where increasing elephant impacts occur in sensitive landscapes allows park managers to take appropriate and focused action. These questions have been difficult to assess with conventional ground-based field approaches over large scales such as those in Kruger National Park."
Here is the link to download the study: Ecology Letters, (2012) 15: 1211–1217 Landscape-scale effects of herbivores on treefall in African savannas
Airborne Technology Helps Manage Elephants
ScienceDaily (Aug. 6, 2012)
For years, scientists have debated how big a role elephants play in toppling trees in South African savannas. Tree loss is a natural process, but it is increasing in some regions, with cascading effects on the habitat for many other species. Using high resolution 3-D mapping, Carnegie scientists have for the first time quantitatively determined tree losses across savannas of Kruger National Park. They found that elephants are the primary agents -- their browsing habits knock trees over at a rate averaging 6 times higher than in areas inaccessible to them.
The research also found that elephants prefer toppling trees in the 16-to-30 foot (5-8 m) range, with annual losses of up to 20% in these height classes. The findings, published in Ecology Letters, bolster our understanding of elephant conservation needs and their impacts, and the results could help to improve savanna management practices.
"Previous field studies gave us important clues that elephants are a key driver of tree losses, but our airborne 3-D mapping approach was the only way to fully understand the impacts of elephants across a wide range of environmental conditions found in savannas," commented lead author Greg Asner of Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology. "Our maps show that elephants clearly toppled medium-sized trees, creating an "elephant trap" for the vegetation. These elephant-driven tree losses have a ripple effect across the ecosystem, including how much carbon is sequestered from the atmosphere."
The technology used for monitoring trees is Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), mounted on the fixed-wing Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO). It provides detailed 3-D images of the vegetation canopy at tree-level resolution using laser pulses that sweep across the African savanna. The CAO's lasers can detect even small changes in each tree's height, and its vast coverage is far superior to previous field-based and aerial photographic evaluations. The scientists considered an array of environmental variables spread over four study landscapes within Kruger and in very large areas fenced off to prevent herbivore entry. For years, four of these exclosures have kept out all herbivores larger than a rabbit. Two other partial enclosures have permitted entry of herbivores other than elephants.
The scientists identified and monitored 58,000 individual trees from the air, inside and outside of these exclosures and across the landscape in 2008 and again in 2010. They found that nearly 9% of the trees decreased in height in two years, and that the mapped changes in treefall were linked to different climate and terrain conditions. Most tree losses occurred in lowland areas with more moisture and on soils high in nutrients that harbor trees preferred by elephants for browsing. Critically, the partial exclosures definitively identified elephants, as opposed to other herbivores and fire, as the major agent of tree losses over the two-year period.
"These spatially explicit patterns of treefall highlight the challenges faced by conservation area managers in Africa, who must know where and how their decisions impact ecosystem health and biodiversity. They should rely on rigorous science to evaluate alternative scenarios and management options, and the CAO helps provide the necessary quantification," commented co-author Shaun Levick.
Danie Pienaar, head of scientific services of the South African National Parks remarked, "This collaboration between external scientists and conservation managers has led to exciting and ground-breaking new insights to long-standing questions and challenges. Knowing where increasing elephant impacts occur in sensitive landscapes allows park managers to take appropriate and focused action. These questions have been difficult to assess with conventional ground-based field approaches over large scales such as those in Kruger National Park."
Here is the link to download the study: Ecology Letters, (2012) 15: 1211–1217 Landscape-scale effects of herbivores on treefall in African savannas
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Richprins
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Re: Elephant Hunting/Culling/Contraception
Thanks, Toko!
The South African government halted the killing of elephants in 1995 but by 2008 then numbers had more than doubled and culling was reintroduced.
The South African government halted the killing of elephants in 1995 but by 2008 then numbers had more than doubled and culling was reintroduced.
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Re: Elephant Hunting/Culling/Contraception
I do know that the abbatoir at Skukuza had been upgraded and that there was talk that culling was to be re-introduced but to my knowledge this was not in fact implemented. What I do find interesting in this entire thread is that its very clear that the mechanism whereby the census is now worked out on a formula as opposed to the actual aerial census appears to be somewhat topical right now. We have long been calling for an accurate census of rhino and if doubt was cast that the American based formula is not accurate then one wonders just how many elephant AND rhino there really are in Kruger National Park.
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Richprins
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Re: Elephant Hunting/Culling/Contraception
The standard excuse is it doesn't matter, or they have stabilised, or they have moved to Mozambique.
All wrong!
Anyway...taking R1200 as the going rate for the first "innoculation"...(no mention made of the annual repeats per elephant)...
And the "purist" warnings that 6000 need to be culled in Kruger once off, and 2000 per year after that for a decade to try and get them down to a manageable figure:
Aerially spaying just 850 of the possible 7000 females of breeding age will cost a minimum of R1 000 000.
To find them the next year will be very difficult indeed in an area as large as Kruger, no matter what dye is used...
Ain't gonna happen!
All wrong!
Anyway...taking R1200 as the going rate for the first "innoculation"...(no mention made of the annual repeats per elephant)...
And the "purist" warnings that 6000 need to be culled in Kruger once off, and 2000 per year after that for a decade to try and get them down to a manageable figure:
Aerially spaying just 850 of the possible 7000 females of breeding age will cost a minimum of R1 000 000.
To find them the next year will be very difficult indeed in an area as large as Kruger, no matter what dye is used...
Ain't gonna happen!
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Re: Elephant Hunting/Culling/Contraception
Yes, culling is a legal option and SANParks can start culling again.Richprins wrote:Thanks, Toko!
The South African government halted the killing of elephants in 1995 but by 2008 then numbers had more than doubled and culling was reintroduced.
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Richprins
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Re: Elephant Hunting/Culling/Contraception
I know, but Kruger says they haven't/didn't! 
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