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Europeans care more about elephants than people, says Botswana president
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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The last time elephants naturally lived in Europe was thousands of years ago. The climate was very different and there wasn't the same level of human occupation. Yes the vegetation and landscape would need to change, and I'm not sure why on earth you think the elephants would do it?? There aren't a lot of elephant ecologists as far as I'm aware. Plus the effects of releasing elephants would go beyond the effects on the elephants themselves, there would need to be management of other species that may be impacted by moving elephants in to avoid other damage to the ecosystem.
Elephants, like beavers, are ecosystem engineers. They can change the vegetation community, as well as make the terrain elephant-navigable by removing obstacles.
And these problems would not arise in Botswana?
Yes, but that doesn't mean they would be able to entirely make a new habitat habitable for them. You can't dump a beaver in the Sahara and expect it to survive. Even if they did, like I said the impact on the preexisting ecosystem also needs to be managed or you just trade one problem for another.
You don't have to do this in Botswana because the elephants are already in Botswana...
Of course not. But beavers had also gone extinct in most of Europe (though not for as long), and have since been reintroduced to most of the continent. From an ecological perspective, the same can definitely be done for other species. And yet, there is a strange silence whenever the question is raised.
There are a couple of problems. First, Botswana is a very dry country. About three-fourths of the land is desert, and the rest depends on a single river system. And global warming will make this worse. Second, the country is transitioning from a mining and tourism based economy to one based on agriculture and animal herding.
The combined effect is that there is going to be a water crisis. Guess what elephants do when their usual water sources dry up? Oh, and did I mention that Botswana has over 50,000 elephants? Either other countries have to take up some of them, or the elephants will have to be culled. This is the problem.