Elephants
Mugabe is the official mascot of “Life in the 21st Century.” A dozen years ago, Mugabe was a young bull elephant in Tsavo, Kenya. He’d hang around one of the park’s camps and what does a ten-thousand pound bull elephant do in your camp? Anything he wants, thus Mugabe. I always wonder if Mugabe is still around, survival for elephants in Africa is hard these days.
This morning reading about rampaging, booze drinking brown bears in Romania, “He drank all my whisky” (home-wrecking, booze drinking brown bears always give me great hope for the future), I came across an article I previously missed about the growing population pressures on the elephants in Kenya.
“Incidences of “crop raiding”, where elephants damage or trample cultivated land, more than doubled from 156 in 2020 to 363 last year. ‘It’s skyrocketing . . . because the space is shrinking,’ Samuel Tokore, a senior official at Kenya Wildlife Service, said of the human-wildlife conflicts.”
Kenya, the size of Texas, has population somewhere around 50 million people. Texas is way behind with 30 million people. Nonetheless, the resource and energy use of Texans dwarfs that of Kenyans. As far as conserving wildlife populations, Kenya does a much better job than Texas, but then that’s not saying a lot.
In the end, if Africa follows America’s development path, the wildlife of Africa face a very bleak future. Africans need to come up with a different development model and it’s certainly not going to come from established industrialism.
There’s a fine fellow I met, James Isiche, who has spent many years fighting for space for elephants in Kenya. You can help him.