One of the most offered reasons for the horrific loss of elephant populations is many of the range countries are too poor to do anything effective to stop the slaughter. Mali, a very poor sub-saharan country is managing to protect the most northern elephant herd in Africa. Communities have done the job despite poverty, war, and environmental degradation. The
Mali Elephant Project (supported in part by the US Fish & Wildlife Service) began studying the migration of Mali's desert elephants, but that study evolved into a sometimes desperate effort to keep the herds of over 500 individuals alive. Increasing human populations equally desperate to raise food cleared increasing large areas for cultivation, cutting elephants off from critical water supplies and forage. Large herds of cattle were drinking seasonal lakes dry and compacting soils. Migrating elephants use all the passes through a range of hills between them and their wet season range in the 1970s. By 2003 they were using only a single pass without human habitation. Increasingly elephants relied on Lake Banzena for water. Humans and their animals were also increasing use of the lake. In 2009 Lake Banzena dried up. 96% of the cattle using the lake belong to urban elites who amass herds as a sign of prestige.
Local communities were contacted to determine their attitudes towards such large resource competitors
[photo above]. Surprisingly, locals responded favorably towards elephants since they realize their extinction would mean an unhealthy ecosystem for man too. They know that elephants are important as seed dispersers, helping to regenerate woodlands. Elephants knock down inaccessible fruits and seeds which are gathered by human foragers and eaten by their livestock. Even elephant dung is valued to combat conjunctivitis. Local people are in awe of elephants' obvious intelligence and emotions: they report elephants covering their dead with branches and soil. The diligent care of elephant offspring is legendary. Joy is vocalized when elephant clans meet after a long separation. To the local people elephants are
baraka, a blessing. Mali elephants benefited from local management committees, enforcement patrols
[photo left] as well as from large land areas set aside for their use.
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| photos courtesy Mail Elephant Project |
Then the war started. Elephants became the target of jihadists and bandits who sell elephant ivory for food, guns and ammunition. The Project paid young men only in kind to monitor elephant families, report suspicious activity, and elephant deaths. These men consider their work noble and did not join the fighting groups*. Only eight Mali elephants have been killed since January 2012. Over 20,000 elephants were killed in Africa that year. The way forward in Mali will not be easy as government instability and general poverty inhibit conservation measures. Education and local involvement with real benefits for local communities will help fill needs money from abroad cannot always meet.
*Mali like Indonesia is a Muslim country. Recently the Council of Ulema issued the first ever fatwa or religious edict against poaching in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim state.
