Zimbabwe unveils plans to slaughter excess elephants for dried meat

Jan 4, 2008, 10:23 GMT

Harare/Johannesburg - Zimbabwe's parks and wildlife authority has announced plans to dry and sell elephant meat as a way of making use of the country's burgeoning elephant population, the official Herald newspaper reported Friday.

The state-run body will apply to get a quota of elephants it can slaughter to make the delicacy, which is known in southern Africa as biltong.

Abbatoirs will have to be specially constructed for the purpose, according to the report.

'It is in our plans. We plan to start this year,' said Morris Mtsambiwa, the director general of the authority.

'We tried it last year and we found that we did not have the proper infrastructure for the purpose,' he added.

Zimbabwe's elephant population is believed to number around 100,000.

The biltong project is unlikely to have any real impact on the elephant population, according to the report.

The country would need to slaughter 6,000 beasts per year for there to be any impact on the population.

Around 500 elephants are already slaughtered each year to provide communities in areas near game parks with meat, according to the Herald.

Elephant numbers in several southern African countries, once nearly decimated by poaching, have swelled since a 1989 Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) ban on international trade in ivory.

Zimbabwe and South Africa last year raised the spectre of return to the culling in a bid to curb their numbers of the mammoth creatures, as a measure of last resort.

CITES has partly relaxed the ivory trade ban for South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana.