Deputy Forestry, Fisheries and Environment Minister Narend Singh has insisted that elephant culling in South Africa will remain a “last resort”.
But MPs and animal welfare groups warned that official delays, weak governance and failures to implement humane alternatives are creating the conditions that could later be used to justify it.
“Culling is one of the options but it is a last resort option,” Singh told parliament’s portfolio committee on forestry, fisheries and the environment last week. “Provinces will have to provide scientific evidence of why any of the other options are not applicable in their respective provinces.”
His remarks came amid mounting concern over elephant management crises in the Madikwe Game Reserve and parts of Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, where rising elephant numbers and drought pressure have intensified scrutiny of provincial authorities.
Committee chairperson Nqabisa Gantsho warned during the meeting that Madikwe’s elephants were effectively “a single drought away” from a far deeper ecological and welfare crisis, while key stakeholders remained excluded.
At the meeting, the department of forestry, fisheries and the environment outlined its forthcoming National Elephant Heritage Strategy (NEHS), expected to be gazetted by the end of June.
The strategy positions elephants as ecological, cultural and economic assets and proposes a framework for managing “living landscapes with elephants”.
But much of the hearing focused on whether failures by provincial authorities to implement available non-lethal interventions were narrowing management options unnecessarily.
Democratic Alliance MP Andrew de Blocq questioned why provincial authorities from North West and KwaZulu-Natal had not been called before parliament to account directly for escalating crises in Madikwe, Pilanesberg and other reserves.
Gantsho later emphasised that the committee would have a meeting with the provinces to hold them to account.
De Blocq cited failures by the provincial elephant task team, including withheld minutes, an overdue final report and indications it had not met at all this year “It is not tenable that the only statutory animal welfare organisation, the NSPCA, continues to be excluded,” he said.
While he conceded that culling might become necessary in some circumstances, including potentially in Madikwe, de Blocq argued that existing law and animal welfare principles required all non-lethal options to be exhausted first.
“Elephants are extraordinarily sentient and social animals and that does make it important for management and managers to take that into account,” he told the committee. “We can’t ethically do otherwise.”
The committee heard that Madikwe’s elephant population, estimated at about 1 600 animals in 2024, could approach 1 900 by the end of 2026 if interventions were delayed further.
The department acknowledged that elephant populations in fenced reserves posed increasingly complex management challenges.
Its chief director for biodiversity management and planning, Mukondi Matshusa, said South Africa has roughly 34 202 elephants in state-owned protected areas and another 5 904 in private reserves.
Matshusa said the strategy aimed to move away from rigid population targets toward more adaptive management combining ecological protection, conflict mitigation and community livelihoods. Proposed interventions included wildlife corridors, fencing, deterrents, compensation mechanisms and revised elephant management norms and standards.
Referring to culling, she said the NEHS recognised it as a reserve-level management tool that could be considered when “flexible ecological limits” were exceeded but stressed that any culling plan would still require ministerial approval.
“If culling has to happen, it has to be approved by the minister. It does not happen simply because there is overpopulation,” she told MPs.
She confirmed that no province had yet submitted a formal culling plan to the minister for approval.
Matshusa said the existing elephant norms and standards, originally developed during the contentious culling debates of 2008, had become “restrictive, inflexible, outdated and not aligned with modern science”.
The department wanted future management approaches to focus less on rigid carrying-capacity thresholds and more on adaptive ecological outcomes in fragmented landscapes where elephants could no longer disperse naturally, she said.
But de Blocq questioned why the drafting process appeared to be occurring largely within government structures without the same degree of participation from scientists, NGOs and other stakeholders involved in previous revisions. “Why not include stakeholders in the whole process?” he asked.
He also challenged the department’s assertion that the existing norms and standards prevented “sensible adaptive management tactics”.
De Blocq also criticised last year’s National Elephant Indaba, which helped shape the NEHS, saying MPs, NGOs and academics received invitations only days before the event in Hluhluwe, KwaZulu-Natal.
“As far as I’m aware, no members of this committee could attend,” he said, arguing parliament had been prevented from properly overseeing a process now influencing national policy.
He said the Indaba’s resolutions were never formally adopted by participants and warned against treating them as endorsed outcomes, arguing the process had “serious flaws” and did not constitute meaningful public participation.
Deputy director-general for biodiversity and conservation Flora Mokgohloa defended the consultation process, saying the Indaba formed only one component of a much broader engagement programme involving more than 1 500 stakeholders nationally.
Briefing MPs, Jeanetta Selier, a senior scientist for zoological support at the South African National Biodiversity Institute, challenged simplistic assumptions that reducing elephant numbers automatically reduced ecological damage.
Regarding scientific indicators, she cited a scientific paper that looked at roughly 70 years of data and more than 370 scientific papers. The paper could not find a direct link between numbers and the impact that elephants had, she said.
For example, a group of bulls repeatedly congregating around a waterhole could continue causing severe ecological damage regardless of broader population reductions elsewhere in the reserve. “Reducing the numbers would not necessarily stop those bulls from spending time in that area,” she said.
Instead, she argued, elephant management should focus on outcomes: identifying the actual ecological or social problem, selecting the most appropriate intervention and monitoring whether it worked over time.
Selier said modern elephant management increasingly aimed to mimic ecological processes disrupted by fenced and fragmented reserves, where elephants could no longer disperse naturally and mortality patterns had changed dramatically.
“There are hardly any mortalities at present, so management needs to mimic those natural processes,” she said.
She pointed to successful use of immuno-contraception in several fenced reserves to slow population growth and said South Africa’s meta-population management approach for lions had shown how adaptive management frameworks could evolve successfully over time.
Animal welfare organisations used the hearing to argue that South Africa already had humane, scientifically supported alternatives available but authorities had failed to implement them.
Douglas Wolhuter, wildlife protection unit manager at the National Council of SPCAs, told MPs that 75 elephants died of starvation in Madikwe during 2024 “due to drought and possibly mismanagement of the Madikwe Game Reserve”.
He said the crisis was now also about governance, transparency and preventable escalation, noting that Humane World for Animals had repeatedly offered to implement immunocontraception at no cost, but despite an existing memorandum with North West Parks, implementation had still not begun.
“There is no humane method of culling,” he said. He described how historical elephant culls involved helicopters and ground teams shooting matriarchs first before killing the rest of the herd, including calves. “No matter what is done, there will be a stress and welfare element.”
Dr Audrey Delsink, the senior director at Humane World for Animals, said Madikwe’s elephant population was currently growing at about 7.8% annually, while mortality stood at about 4%.
Delsink said consistent immunocontraception could stabilise Madikwe’s elephant population far earlier and reduce long-term ecological pressure. Humane World had remained operationally and financially ready since 2020 to begin contraception programmes in Madikwe and Pilanesberg, she said.
She confirmed that a memorandum of understanding with North West Parks remained valid and already covered Madikwe and Pilanesberg but implementation had stalled while provincial authorities waited for recommendations from the provincial elephant task team — recommendations that still had not been publicly released.
Delsink stressed that the debate should not be reduced to simplistic narratives about “too many elephants” but should instead focus on impacts, ecological resilience and rates of environmental change.
She pointed to KwaZulu-Natal’s Mawana elephant case as an example of successful non-lethal intervention, where elephants were ultimately relocated to the Loziba
Wilderness following collaboration between conservation groups and reserve managers.
Tony Gerrans, also from Humane World for Animals, said that if South Africa ultimately resorted to culling, serious legal, reputational and ethical questions would follow about why less harmful alternatives had not been implemented earlier.
Deputy environment minister insists culling will only be used with approval, but MPs and animal welfare groups say governance failures and delays in humane interventions are escalating risks in South Africa’s elephant reserves
