Kenya mounts a game plan to cut elephant counts

This thickly forested park in the hills near Kenya's coastline has a problem that would have been welcome in the 1970s and '80s, when game poaching ran rampant in Africa. Shimba Hills has too many elephants.

About 600 jumbos tromp through the park's 74 square miles, each one munching through hundreds of pounds of foliage daily. "It has overshot its carrying capacity," says Moses Litoroh, the park's research scientist. "The destruction of the habitat has been devastating."

Elephant numbers in many parts of Africa are growing, thanks in large part to a global ban on the ivory trade. But in areas like Shimba Hills, they are increasingly coming into conflict with the rapidly growing human population. With people and elephants both looking for a fertile land, wildlife experts are trying to find alternatives to killing elephants because it is destructive to their social systems, experts say.

Here in Shimba Hills, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) is planning to try cutting-edge method: elephant birth control.

In a pilot project due to start in the coming months, about 30 female elephants will receive an injection of a contraceptive vaccine. It works by causing the elephant's immune system to produce antibodies that surround its eggs, preventing fertilization. The vaccine was developed by Bonnie Dunbar of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and has been used on about 80 different species of animals.

In the journal Nature last September, a team from the University of Georgia published research that shows the vaccine reduced elephant pregnancies by 70 percent in South Africa's Kruger National Park, where the population has been increasing by 500 elephants a year.

KWS would like to use the method on as many as 200 female elephants in Shimba Hills and extend it to other places where humans and elephants come into conflict, if the pilot project proves successful, says Patrick Omondi, head of the organization's elephant program.

Until recently, Kenya's method of choice to control elephant populations was simply to shoot the ones that were causing problems. "It is easier to kill elephants instead of trying to scare them out of the farms," explains Mr. Omondi.

In 1996, game wardens killed 107 elephants. But that year, KWS - which is mandated by the government to manage the country's wildlife and national parks - decided to try other solutions.

Wardens now kill elephants only as a last resort - if human life is endangered. By 1999, the number of problem elephants killed was down to 17.

The agency's policy is to use population

control strategies "that we feel are humane, that will not disrupt the social structure of the elephants," Omondi says, adding that contraception may fit those criteria.

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