Like all promoters of significant social causes, the animal rights movement presents a broad spectrum of doctrines as well as an evolutionary trend: the newer groups tend to espouse a more activist agenda than the older groups. If the Royal and American Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals represent the conservative roots of the movement, groups such the Animal Liberation Front in the United States and Hunt Saboteurs in Britain are the more (depending on perspective) radical or progressive, advocating direct confrontation and even the destruction of private property to save individual animals. The animal rights cause is both more established and more influential in the United States and Europe than in Africa, but it is growing robustly on the African continent, particularly in Kenya and South Africa.
As in Europe and the United States, the melding of animal rights with conservation is a hallmark of these newer African environmental groups. Earthlife Africa, based in Johannesburg, is a typical example. It casts a very large net, supporting campaigns for animal rights, biodiversity, the reduction of toxics, carbon mitigation, the treatment of acid mine drainage, and the production of sustainable energy.
The most influential groups are more focused but still hew to a doctrine that equates animal liberation with conservation. The International Fund for Animal Welfare and Born Free are certainly the best known of these organizations, but despite the complaints of their critics, they are hardly the most aggressive. That claim would properly go to Animal Rights Africa, a South African group founded in 2008. Animal Rights Africa uses a logo of a lion’s paw print superimposed on a clenched fist and espouses a “total liberation” philosophy for animals that, while familiar to activists in the developed world, is new in Africa—and distinctly disturbing to the continent’s old-school conservationists.
The keynote speaker to the Animal Rights Africa inaugural event was Steven Best, an associate professor of humanities and philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso and a leader in the animal rights movement. Best combines animal liberation, environmentalism, and social progress into a syncretic philosophy that essentially demands equal rights for all living creatures. In his keynote speech, Best declaimed,
The interests of one species (Homo sapiens) are represented as millions go unrecognized except as resources to be preserved for human use. But in the last three decades a new social movement has emerged—animal liberation. Its power and potential has yet to be recognized, but it deserves equal representation in the politics of the twenty-first century. . . . Every year alone humans butcher seventy billion land and marine animals for food; millions more die in experimental laboratories, fur farms, hunting preserves, and countless other killing zones. . . . On a strategic level, the animal liberation movement is essential for the human and earth liberation movements. In numerous key ways, the domination of humans over animals underlies the domination of human over human and propels the environmental crisis. Moreover, the animal liberation movement is the most dynamic and fastest growing social movement of the day, and other liberation movements ignore, mock, or trivialize it at their peril.
In the coda to his speech, Best urges animal liberationists to link up with—and dominate—other progressive movements and intimates that Africa is ripe for such engagement: “The kind of alliance politics one finds in South Africa remains weak and abstract so long as animal liberation and vegan interests are excluded. . . . The animal liberation movement can no longer afford to be single-issue and isolationist but must link to other social justice and environmental movements. Each movement has much to learn from the other, and no movement can achieve its goals apart from the other. It is truly one struggle, one fight.”
But is it, in fact, truly one fight? From the perspective of traditional conservationists, vertebrate biologists, and habitat ecologists, clearly it is not: to these people, wildlife preservation and animal liberation are two distinct, even inimically opposed, issues. And there is also the matter of simple pragmatism: the disparity between what is “right” and what can work can be profound, particularly in Africa. For example, should the rights of elephants trump the rights of other wildlife species? This is a pressing question wherever elephants are found in Africa but particularly in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, a reserve that has been profoundly influenced by the continent’s nascent animal rights movement.
At more than seventy-three hundred square miles, Kruger is one of the largest game reserves in the world. It has more mammalian species than any other protected area in Africa, including the so-called Big Five: elephant, rhino (both species), lion, leopard, and Cape buffalo. But as vast as it is, Kruger is still limited in terms of its wildlife carrying capacity, especially in regard to elephants. If there are too many elephants—in Kruger or anywhere else—the land takes a beating. First, the trees are damaged from excessive browsing, and finally they disappear. The habitat literally changes, from forest to parkland and then to grassy savanna. The topsoil erodes. All the species that relied on these transitional habitats—from birds and forest antelopes to arboreal primates—disappear. An excessive number of elephants will eat everything, including themselves, out of a home.
As with most other African parks, Kruger is an island; the migration routes that had supported the region’s megafauna since the late Pleistocene are severed now, and the park is largely fenced. Progressively managed hunting preserves and tribal properties along Kruger’s borders have resulted in the removal of the wire in some areas, expanding available habitat to a degree. More significantly, a transfrontier pact has allowed fence removal between Kruger and Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park, essentially doubling the size of the protected habitat. Still, in general terms, Kruger’s elephants aren’t going anywhere. They have to stay in the Kruger-Limpopo biome; they have been denied those corridors that once allowed them to roam the continent as hunger, thirst, and will dictated. These strictures imply enforced limits on elephant numbers. The general consensus among biologists and game managers is that no more than eight thousand elephants should inhabit Kruger proper, and much of the park’s budget and management efforts over the past two decades have been devoted to trying to keep the herd to this figure.
In the past, the solution was easy: cull to the desired population. As previously discussed, experienced sharpshooters, mostly professional hunters and the game scouts they had personally trained, would identify family groups appropriate for removal and take them out in a minute or two of concentrated gunfire. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it even hunting; it was killing, and it sometimes emotionally damaged the men who had to do it. But culling was a long-established tradition in South Africa, and it worked. Eliminating entire family units rather than targeting individual animals from different groups kept the essential social structure of Kruger’s elephants intact, because it minimized stress on the population as a whole. Elephant herds are matriarchies. Each herd is controlled by a dominant cow, and each member has a place within the group. Killing individual animals (particularly the dominant matriarch) within a group invariably traumatizes the group as a whole, commonly resulting in the phenomenon of pachyderm “juvenile delinquents”: young males that act aggressively toward other elephants and are often inclined to attack humans or livestock.
But Kruger severely restricted culling beginning in 1989 as a result of international pressure—more from people enamored of elephants as a charismatic species than from scientists or mainline conservationists. In other words, animal rights advocates drove the change in policy. By 1995, culling was no longer actively pursued.
(As an aside, it should be noted that Kruger’s history of unexpected consequences in wildlife management is not dissimilar to other reserves on other continents where ambitious tinkering with the native fauna has been attempted. Gray wolves were mostly eliminated from Yellowstone National Park in the United States by the 1900s. As a result, the region’s elk population exploded, ultimately destroying much of the riparian vegetation and harming many species associated with Rocky Mountain riverine environments. But the elk population dropped after wolves were reintroduced to the park in the late twentieth century. Riparian