UP TO 10,000 elephants are facing slaughter as South Africa prepares to end its ten-year ban on culling the beasts.

The Government is expecting a global outcry from animal welfare groups, so there will be an 18-month “consultation period” before the cull — which would involve rounding up and shooting entire family groups — begins.

But officials said that action was vital to reduce the elephant population in the Kruger national park to protect trees — some of them 4,000 years old — vegetation and water supplies on which other, rarer, species depend. An adult elephant consumes about 170kg (375lb) of vegetation a day.

Marthinus van Schalkwyk, the Environment Minister, said that between 7,000 and 10,000 animals would be killed. “Elephant culling is something I would rather not have to do,” he said. “If there was any way of avoiding it we would have done that. But the do-nothing approach is no longer an option. We have to act on culling as a management option.”

The elephant population in the Kruger Park, an area about the size of Wales, has doubled to 14,000 since the last cull in 1994. Scientists have said that the park cannot sustain a population of more than 7,000 without risking the destruction of habitats of rare antelopes, eagles and other threatened creatures.

Scenes of a previous cull shown on television provoked such an outcry at home and abroad that the South African National Parks (SANParks) board agreed to halt the annual cull to see what happened. But now the elephant population is increasing by 1,000 a year, and Kruger’s managers and scientists are so worried by the destruction that they have put forward plans to resume the killing in 2007.

“It is our legal duty to protect the biodiversity of the Kruger and other parks,” said Hector Magome, SANParks director of conservation. “We are strongly leaning towards culling and we want the public to digest this hard fact. There is a consensus that we have to reduce the population now.”

In a cull, elephant families of about 20 mothers, aunts and babies are corralled into a small area by a helicopter, from which a game ranger immobilises the adults with tranquilliser darts. On the ground, other rangers kill the fallen elephants with a bullet to their heads. The babies are taken to an enclosure and moved to other parks.

Dr Ian Whyte, Kruger Park’s senior elephant scientist, said: “Elephants have big appetites. You can utilise an area to maintain biodiversity, or else you have a purely elephant sanctuary. You can’t have both.”

The inevitable outcry about the cull disguises South Africa’s remarkable achievements in bringing the Kruger elephants back from the brink of being wiped out. At the beginning of the 20th century there were only 50 or so wild elephants in the whole of South Africa.

Major James Stevenson-Hamilton, a short, stocky Scot, Laird of Fairholm in Lanarkshire, started the recovery when he created the Kruger Park in 1902 at the end of the Boer War. There are now 17,000 elephants in 31 separate South African reserves.

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