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Elephant Emergency in Africa Causes Controversy
South Africa is becoming so crowded with elephants that the government wants to start culling some of them. Culling is the selective killing of wild animals in order to reduce their population so that others may survive.
At one time, elephants were in danger of becoming extinct. But they were protected and their population has grown by 5 percent a year. There are now 20,000 elephants in South Africa. At this rate the population will double by 2020. And that's just too many!
The problem with so many elephants is that they can ruin the environment. A single elephant can eat a hundred pounds of leaves a day! This can be devastating to rare species of plants. Trees like the baobab can live to be over a thousand years old, but elephants can turn their forests into flat fields in a very short amount of time.
Environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund are asking South Africa to consider kinder ways of handling the problem. One way to control the number of elephants is to use sterilization to keep the elephants from having babies. Another is to move the elephants to other areas.
South Africa is not the only country with an elephant problem. Botswana and Zambia have herds that are too big. They also want to cull their elephants or else move them to Namibia.
I'm Michelle and that's what happened in the world this week!
Elephants are found in countries throughout Africa. Let's find some of them in this week's Pinpoint game!
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