Elephant culling debate is about governance, not activism

Public outrage and media campaigns shouldn’t dictate wildlife management. Ezemvelo’s transparency shows why conservation authority and legal responsibility must remain inseparable.

Piet Nel is the owner of Regenerative Conservation Solutions, specialising in habitat regeneration. He is the senior trainer in the Southern African Wildlife College’s Nature-Based Economy Department. Dr Wiseman Ndlovu is deputy director at the African Wildlife Economy Institute and an extraordinary lecturer at the Department of Conservation and Entomology at Stellenbosch University.

Few words in conservation evoke stronger emotions than culling. The reaction intensifies further when the term “hunting trophy” is added. The very mention of it is enough to ignite public outrage, mobilise advocacy campaigns and generate headlines that frame conservation managers as executioners rather than custodians.

It is therefore unsurprising that Don Pinnock’s Op-Ed on 6 July 2026, “Let’s talk ‘lethal control’ – Ezemvelo wants to cull 1,220 elephants”, and Adam Cruise’s 8 July Op-Ed , “The 951 dead elephants in the Kruger Park and a question everyone should be asking”, have become another flashpoint in South Africa’s increasingly polarised conservation debate.

Yet beneath the emotionally charged language lies a more important question, one that extends far beyond elephants.

Who is entrusted to manage conservation areas? The answer should be straightforward: The management authority. Not the loudest advocacy group. Not the most persuasive opinion writer. Not whichever organisation is most successful at shaping public sentiment through media campaigns.

And how should it be managed? By balancing ecological, economic and social needs. It is not by surrendering to whoever feels most strongly in the conservation conflict trifecta. A management authority exists because someone must ultimately accept responsibility for the ecological condition of protected areas. That responsibility is neither symbolic nor optional. It carries legal obligations, financial accountability and ecological consequences that extend decades beyond the lifespan of a news cycle.

For that reason alone, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife deserves recognition for something that is becoming increasingly uncommon: institutional transparency.

Rather than quietly implementing a controversial decision or allowing speculation to fill an information vacuum, Ezemvelo placed an extraordinarily difficult management issue into the public domain. It acknowledged the scale of its elephant management challenges, explained that alternatives such as translocation are still pursued where feasible, and openly accepted the inevitable scrutiny that accompanies any discussion of lethal control.

Transparency should be the foundation upon which constructive debate is built. Instead, transparency is increasingly treated as an invitation for prosecution.

Rather than approaching the issue as one of competing ecological realities requiring difficult judgement, sometimes the narrative that journalism leans towards is casting doubt on the legitimacy of the management authority itself.