Zimbabwe: 1000 Elephants Will be Sacrifice to Reduce the Hunger

Elephants from Zimbabwe, Sept 2024 Photo: CGTN

September 13, 2024 Hour: 2:42 pm

Zimbabwe will launch a slaughter programme later this month of nearly 1,000 elephants to reduce pressure on natural resources and provide meat for local communities suffering from the devastating drought caused by the US weather Child, The Zimbabwean government reported this Friday.

“Zimbabwe has more elephants than we need and we have more elephants than our forests can house. We are talking to ZimParks (National Parks and Wildlife of Zimbabwe) and some local communities about the issue,” Minister for Environment, Climate and Wildlife, Sithembiso Nyoni, told.

“We will do what Namibia has done before, which is to slaughter the elephants and mobilize our local women to collect the meat and dry it for the benefit of communities as protein food,” added Nyoni.

According to the minister, the slaughter will be carried out in a legal manner and will help decongest the country’s landscapes, which has a total population of about 100,000 elephants, as well as reduce conflicts between people and wild animals.

Zimbabwe’s wildlife authority said on Friday the country will cull 200 elephants as it faces an unprecedented drought that has led to food shortages while also tackling a ballooning population of the animals. pic.twitter.com/SNnRIyOYap
— CGTN Africa (@cgtnafrica) September 13, 2024

This is the second such exercise in Zimbabwe since independence from the UK in 1980, while the first was in 1988. Including that exercise and others conducted since 1965, about 50,000 pachyderms were slaughtered in the country.

With this news, Zimbabwe followed in the footsteps of Namibia, which announced at the end of last August that it will slaughter 723 animals, including elephants, zebras, hippos and buffaloes, among others, to also alleviate drought-related hunger.