Loaded for Bear: How would you like it if someone dumped 263 elephants in your backyard?

26 Mar 2025

Homo sapiens as a species — in other words, us humans — for perfectly understandable reasons, don’t like sharing space with dangerous megafauna. That's kind of obvious, isn’t it?

Daily Maverick reported today that the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw) faces a group action lawsuit spearheaded by UK law firm Leigh Day that seeks to have the NGO pay compensation to small-scale Zambian and Malawian farmers who have lost loved ones and suffered crop and property damage because of an ill-conceived translocation of 263 elephants to Malawi’s Kasungu National Park in 2022.

Read more: NGO Ifaw faces group action suit seeking redress for victims of botched Malawi elephant relocation

Ifaw has said it “... rejects any allegation of wrongdoing against it in this regard”, and that: “Best practice and international standards have been followed in regards to the translocation and management of human-wildlife conflict.”

The affected communities would beg to differ.

“My farmland has been destroyed five times. I was growing maize, sugarcane, rice and beans. Everything was destroyed. We have been told that once elephants find food they keep coming back for more. I am scared they will keep coming back to my village,” says one of Leigh Day’s clients, a 73-year-old farmer who lives on the Malawian side of the park.

As I reported from the Zambian side of Kasungu last year, the landscape in the region has been transformed into one of fear and loathing for some of the poorest people on the planet.

Read more: How a botched elephant translocation in Malawi unleashed a landscape of fear and loathing

Kasungu lies completely in Malawi, but it has a long western border with Zambia. This jumbo relocation was undertaken without a proper fence being erected first on the park’s international boundary with Zambia, and much of the eastern side of Kasungu running alongside Malawian villages is also unfenced.

This was a chronicle of a disaster foretold — with at least 10 people killed by elephants to date, more than 50 children orphaned, and estimates of millions of dollars in crop and property damage — and the lack of compassion displayed for the poor rural farmers in the area is simply unconscionable.

This correspondent remains shocked to the core by what was directly observed when reporting this story from on the ground in June last year.

But this is the problem with wildlife initiatives in Africa that are viewed through the prism of “animal welfare” from affluent countries up north.

Such an initiative would be unthinkable in Europe or North America, where the public would simply not tolerate the dumping of large and threatening animals in close proximity to people.

Think about it this way: How would you like to have 263 elephants dumped in your backyard?

Grotesquely distorted image

But many folks up north — who would be aghast at such a suggestion — have a misconception that humans and elephants in Africa somehow coexist in peace and harmony, as if that was the natural order of things.

This is a grotesquely distorted image completely at odds with the historical record on the continent and on the wider global stage; it is one impaled on the piercing spear of prehistory.

Homo sapiens as a species — in other words, us humans — for perfectly understandable reasons, don't like sharing space with dangerous megafauna.

I mean, that’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?

If that was not the case then we would be the dumbest animals on the planet and our evolutionary journey in and out of Africa would have been cut short tens of thousands of years ago.

The worldwide Pleistocene extinctions outside of Africa of many large, mammalian species between roughly 130,000 and 10,000 years ago as Homo sapiens spread across the planet from our African cradle was a consequence — in the view of many scientists — of overkill at the hands of prehistoric human hunters.

If that is the case, it marks the start of the current “Sixth Extinction” that is unfolding across the planet, and our prehistoric ancestors didn’t do it for the hell of it. They did it — a point I have raised before — plausibly to eliminate a menacing threat to their kith and kin.

Read more: Africa’s beastly burden: The case for shrinking the faunal poverty line

From a human perspective, a landscape inhabited by mammoths, mastodons, woolly rhinos, cave lions, sabre-toothed cats and other hulking beasts was one of fear. And fear can provoke flight — or fight.

Big critters also don’t like sharing space with us because we are actually the most dangerous species on the planet — for tens of thousands of years, we have been the alpha predator — in full fight mode to tame our landscape of fear.

If species such as elephants did not mind spending time in our company, they would be literal dumbos, but they are far from dumb.

This is the prism — the longue duree — through which to view the Kasungu relocation: humans and elephants, two highly intelligent and dangerous animal species with an ancient, bloody and understandable history of conflict, were suddenly thrust into each other’s space.

The result for both is a landscape of fear — an emerging and insightful concept in ecology and conservation science that can be applied in spades to this misguided “conservation” and “animal welfare” project but with an added human and social dimension.

The bewildered elephants sought food and water beyond the park’s boundaries, and found it in the fields of subsistence farmers and the rudimentary irrigation systems they have built by hand to tap shallow underground wells.

This has forced the pachyderms to share space with the humans they would prefer to avoid — but hunger and thirst can see caution cast to the wind.

Slanting the angle of my question above, one could also ask: Would elephants want to be dumped in the collective backyard of a bunch of humans?

Human lab rats

For the humans caught like lab rats in the cage of this translocation experiment, the relatively benign landscape they long farmed and moved around freely at day and night has been transformed into one of utter fear and loathing.

None of the people I interviewed during the week I spent there had ever laid eyes on an elephant before the 263 were moved there. The park at the time was already home to about 100 elephants — I have seen different estimates — and the ecosystem seemed capable of supporting that number as the animals seldom strayed outside of the reserve.

The social fabric of the poor rural communities around the park has been completely torn asunder. People are afraid to walk after dark and many have been reduced to the indignity of urinating in buckets in their homes at night.

The elephants have also suffered. Warm Heart, an energetic NGO spawned in response to the crisis, estimates that as many as 80 have been shot or poisoned or fallen to hunger and thirst.

No human or animal wants their landscape to be marked by the terrifying scent of fear.

But this what this elephant translocation has achieved: it has unleashed the prehistoric demon of human/wildlife conflict on to an impoverished human population engaged in pre-industrial modes of agriculture — a state of affairs that has pushed them below what I call the “faunal poverty line”, a terrifying and economically precarious existence defined by the constant threat of big animal attack.

Only the poorest of the poor find themselves on the wrong side of the faunal poverty line.

The elephants and their intricate social life and patterns have also been frayed. Human/wildlife conflict is not always a zero-sum game. In many instances, both sides are ultimately losers.

A massive human and animal welfare crisis is unfolding across this landscape of fear. This calls for justice to be served and a massive rethink in wildlife translocation projects. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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Africa

Grotesquely distorted image

Human lab rats