Urgent need to rethink elephant management strategies and move from culling to coexistence

For decades, wildlife managers have clung to the notion of carrying capacity as if it were a law of nature — a neat number representing how many elephants a reserve can sustain. It is time we call this idea what it really is: an outdated relic of agricultural thinking, ill suited to the complexity of living ecosystems, and a dangerous crutch that has justified destructive and unethical management practices.

Outdated agricultural concept

Carrying capacity was never born of ecological science. It came from livestock management in the US in the early twentieth century, where calculating how many cattle a pasture could support before overgrazing was a matter of profit. The leap to elephants in the 1960s was — and remains — less about scientific insight and more about bureaucratic convenience: managers wanted a single figure to guide interventions. 

But elephants are not cattle. They are long-lived, wide-ranging architects of landscapes, whose movements and impacts are woven into centuries of ecological rhythms. Reducing them to a number is simply a category error. Elephant biologist Keith Lindsay maintains that “past management in the Kruger, for example, invoked the carrying capacity ‘rule’ but was never tested scientifically”. He also claims that “carrying capacity is not a very meaningful goal for wildlife management in semi-arid savannas” such as Madikwe.

The illusion of carrying capacity, however, is its promise of precision. Outdated forage-based models churn out figures suggesting how many elephants an area can “support”. But what counts as support? Sustaining elephants until they starve? Until woodlands collapse? Until every other species dependent on large trees is gone? These definitions are arbitrary, value-laden, and inevitably manipulated to justify management actions. In Kruger National Park, Hwange and Addo Elephant National Park, carrying-capacity targets led to mass culling campaigns in the 20th century. Thousands of elephants were killed in service of a number that was never more than a mathematical guess. 

Many other elephant researchers have clearly stated that “culling elephants over a large area is likely to have unanticipated consequences, as it eliminates their ecological role as architects of open habitat patches and are agents of seed dispersal”.  

Ecological processes

By treating ecosystems as static, carrying capacity ignores the very processes that make them resilient. Savannas shift between wooded and open states over decades; elephants accelerate these changes, but they do not dictate them alone. Rainfall patterns, fire regimes and human fences matter more than elephant density. 

Another study by South African elephant biologists Michelle Henley and Robin Cook has stated that since “elephants do not make use of the landscape uniformly, heterogeneity is promoted across areas of high and low elephant impact. Management initiatives based on outdated agricultural concepts, like carrying capacity, can no longer be implemented while a number of better long-term studies have been initiated.”

Pretending that a “safe” number of elephants exists then oversimplifies these dynamics and strips managers of responsibility to engage with the real drivers of change.

Worse, it provides cover for violent interventions: culls, translocations, and contraceptive programmes deployed in the name of “balance”. And balance for whom? Elephants are blamed for habitat degradation when, in reality, it is human mismanagement, politics, money and fragmentation that create the problem. 

Perhaps the most damning indictment is that carrying capacity undermines conservation itself. It frames elephants as a problem to be minimised rather than as keystone species to be understood. It reduces conservation to bean-counting — a herd to be trimmed back to fit a spreadsheet — instead of fostering adaptive management that respects ecological complexity.

At a time when elephants face relentless poaching and shrinking ranges, the idea that parks are “overstocked” is absurd. We should be dismantling fences and waterholes, restoring connectivity and allowing elephants to disperse naturally, not inventing pseudo-scientific ceilings to justify their removal.

Modern science

Science has moved on. Much of the modern research community, with the likes of globally recognised  biologists accept that ecosystem structure and function are not about elephant numbers but instead about elephant distribution across a landscape and in relation to plant communities. Meta-analyses show elephant impacts are context-dependent: rainfall, vegetation resilience, and landscape connectivity matter far more than density. Conservation biology now emphasises objectives, thresholds and adaptive monitoring, not rigid numbers. Holding onto carrying capacity is not just lazy; it is dangerous.

It is time to say it plainly: carrying capacity is a failed idea. It was never ecologically sound, it has fueled destructive policies, and it distracts us from the real work of conservation. If we care about elephants — and about the ecosystems they help shape — we must bury carrying capacity once and for all.

The way forward is not to calculate how many elephants “fit” into fenced parks, but to reimagine management around coexistence, space, and ecological processes. This means restoring migration corridors, prioritising landscape connectivity, and respecting elephants as agents of ecological change rather than as numbers to be controlled. Conservation should be about enabling systems to flourish in their complexity, not simplifying them into static quotas.

Oversimplification in a complex world

The myth of carrying capacity has lingered because it offers simplicity in a messy world. Managers, policymakers and even the public like the reassurance of a number — a threshold that seems objective and definitive. But numbers can deceive. They can mask values, obscure uncertainties, and justify harmful practices. True conservation is harder: it requires grappling with nuance, uncertainty and ethics. Yet it is also more honest and ultimately more effective.

To dismantle carrying capacity is to embrace a deeper vision of conservation — one that sees elephants not as overstocked cattle in a paddock, but as vital, dynamic players in ecosystems that are themselves fluid and resilient. It means rejecting the false comfort of numbers and facing the real challenge: creating enough space and connectivity for elephants and other species to thrive in the Anthropocene.

Clinging to carrying capacity is not just outdated; it is a betrayal of conservation’s core mission. Lindsay bluntly states that “the whole concept of a single fixed ‘correct’ number of elephants should be abandoned”. If we are serious about protecting elephants, we must bury this relic of agricultural thinking once and for all, and replace it with approaches that honor both science and ethics. 

Only then can we move from managing elephants as problems to celebrating them as the ecological architects they are. DM