Anytime that you hear about Elephants, one of the first things that you think of are all the efforts that are usually being taken to make sure that they don’t go extinct. You hear about how they are all endangered and their number as decreasing all over the world. People are killing them just for their tusks and stuff like that. Elephant poachers are looked down upon on worldwide. But in some places their are actually so many elephants that the government officials of that land have decided to take action and start killing them to keep the population down. Elephants are creatures of beauty andintelligence.
From a helicopter flying right above a heard of fleeing elephants, they shoot at them with elephant riffles, one shot to the brain will usually kill the beast in one shot. The killers usually go to the head male first. If they kill him first all the other elephants will stop and gather around him to protect him. Unfortunately for them this is just a trap. After they are all gathered up, all of the elephants in that herd will have been exterminated. Its terrible to think about but that’s just the way it has to be. Now the killers go and take the meat, tusks and skin. They will use all this and sell it to help their country. The killing of these animals is called culling, and from 1967 to 1995, 14,562 elephants were culled in just one South African park. Just one park. That’s a lot of elephants. In 1995 the culling stopped, and in the thirteen years since, the population has grown from 8,000 to over 13,000.
This is bad for the parks, because all of each of these huge beasts eat at least 400 pounds of food every day. Where ever the elephants go they leave a trail of destruction. Eating up all the good bushes and trees they cave a path, marking where they have been. These plants and trees were once home to many different species of birds and animals. Now they have nowhere to live and some of them aer leaving or going extinct. The elephants must be stopped or at least slowed down. Now the park officials are considering culling once again, giving the females expensive birth control, or shipping them off to other parts of Africa where the elephant populations are declining.