Carrie’s jumbo conservation confusion
Kenyans criticise plan to ‘rewild’ captive elephants
PLANS by Carrie Johnson’s charity to spend £1million flying elephants to Kenya sparked an international row yesterday.
The Aspinall Foundation, which employs the Prime Minister’s wife as its director of communications, wants to take 13 captive-born elephants from Howletts Wild Animal Park in Kent for ‘rewilding’ in their ancestral home.
Damian Aspinall, the millionaire socialite who chairs the charity, said he hoped to encourage other zoos to return captive elephants to their homeland.
But yesterday Kenya’s ministry of tourism and wildlife said neither it nor the country’s wildlife chiefs had been consulted. In a statement it expressed ‘concern’ over the project, adding: ‘Relocation and rehabilitation of an animal from a zoo is not easy and is an expensive affair.’
A spokesman for the Aspinall Foundation insisted it had been in contact with the Kenya Wildlife Service at a high level about the plan since last November.
Some conservation experts have questioned the value of the idea, given that the elephant population in Kenya has more than doubled to 34,000 since 1989.
This has led to conflicts with the expanding human population as elephants destroy crops and water pumps. Keith Somerville, a professor of conservation and ecology at Kent University, said the transported elephants were likely to die in the wild. ‘Kenya doesn’t need the introduction of captive-bred elephants with no experience of the climate, water and vegetation, and no institutional memory of foraging in the wild and migration routes,’ he added.
While Mr Aspinall and Mrs Johnson have described the herd’s life in eight acres of Kent grassland as ‘idyllic’, the Daily Mail can reveal that inspectors have historically expressed grave concerns about their indoor accommodation.
Announcing the plan to transfer the herd, Mr Aspinall conceded there were risks but described it as ‘a genuine world-first’.
Conservationist Adam Hart, who presents science programmes on BBC Radio 4, rubbished the project as ‘ego conservation’ and a ‘waste of resources’.