The Elephant Management Dilemma Wildlife managers have adopted a policy that goes about culling elephants. They have decided on this because there they wanted to limit the population of elephants to around 7,000, which is why they began the culling process. Personally I believe that culling should not be happening. Culling is essentially the act of killing someone or something. Culling is actually their only long-term alternative to this problem. I believe that this is wrong because elephants are their own species, just as us human species are. Elephants have their own place in this world, as do humans and any other species of animals. If the population of elephants is growing, then that’s great, there should be no need to kill them. Why does the population of elephants have to be altered once it has reached a certain number? Human population is constantly growing every single day yet we aren’t doing anything to humans to keep the population at a certain number. We just let it keep growing and growing. We are always hearing news stories about endangered species and what we can do to keep them from going extinct. What if in a couple of years these elephants that are suffering from culling become known as endangered species? The first thing people will begin to say is “Remember when we were culling these elephants to keep their population at a certain number?” The long-term views should be taken into effect when culling animals, not just short term. Culling them may seem like a good option at first but elephants are beneficial to many other species that live around them. Elephants may just be elephants to us but they are also considered a “keystone species”. This means that other species are dependent on elephants for their own survival. There are a couple reasons as to why elephants may be looked at this way for other species. One of these reasons is that since elephants are big in size they are able to open up areas that have thick woodland which is good for species that like to live in habitats that have an open space that normally wouldn’t be able to create their own habitat this way. Another great reason why some species need elephants to survive is because elephants excavate holes in the sandy riverbeds so that they can gain access to water below for drinking. This is extremely helpful to species that would never be able to survive because they couldn’t make these holes themselves for water for them to drink. So not only are these park managers killing off these elephants they are ultimately hurting the long-term life of other species that need elephants to survive. Fixing this elephant problem has been tried in other ways but it hasn’t really worked. Some of these other options were translocation and contraception. Translocation would essentially be the better option because it would get groups or families of elephants to be moved to other places. This way population in the parks wouldn’t exceed the desired number but the elephants also wouldn’t be getting killed. The other one is contraception. The problem that park managers had with this one was that it wasn’t reducing the elephant’s population; it was only keeping them at a steady rate. These options would seem better to some people because it means you aren’t killing off elephants but they are also more expensive for park managers, where as contraception and translocation are more expensive. People may have their own thoughts and objections to my opinion on this topic. Some may say that killing these elephants should be okay because they aren’t affecting the way that we are living so they should go ahead and keep killing them. The term egalitarianism can be used here in saying that all species are equal. If they are going to decide to kill elephants why not kill other species in these same parks. Why not kill off humans who account for over 7 billion human species in the world. Thousands of elephants should not be a problem in the world if they are