Culling With Kindness?

It has been reported that the South African government has felt it necessary to respond to the increasing numbers of African elephant in national parks and private reserves by ordering a cull (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/26/environment). Apparently, the numbers of these animals has increased from around 8,000 to nearly 20,000 in the last 10 years and the culling of 'excess animals' will only be allowed once other options (e.g. translocation and contraception) have been ruled out. This point has only been reached after "nearly 3 years of widespread consultation and acrimonious debate". Support for the cull comes from a group of Ecologists working at the Kruger National Park that apparently has 5000 more elephants than the location can sustain. They feel that, left unchecked, the 12,500 animals threaten the park's biodiversity by their huge appetites, tendency to uproot trees and trampling. Other conservationists claim that the environmental impact of elephant have been over-stated and animal 'rights' campaigners claim that these intelligent animals with their close-knit social structures should be immune from culls. This latter position, to some degree, fails to consider the 'rights' of other species, the fact that elephant must have been subject to occasional losses even before human intervention (the WWF, who welcome the cull, point out that there is currently an absence of natural predators of mature elephant) and that the parks etc have distinct boundaries precluding migration as a response to local over-population. Some groups are urging a tourist boycott if the culling goes ahead and there is little doubt that ivory poaching is still an issue in some locations. Having said all this, there is no way that humans can fail to impact on these animals: perhaps the mistake is to believe that they are really 'wild' animals in the original sense.