JOHANNESBURG— Rangers in South Africa’s biggest wildlife park are killing about 350 hippos and buffalos in an attempt to relieve the impact of the region’s most severe drought in more than three decades.
The numbers of hippos and buffalos in Kruger National Park, about 7,500 and 47,000 respectively, are at their highest level ever, according to the national parks service.
Officials plan to distribute meat from the killed animals to poor communities on the park’s perimeter. The drought has left millions of people across several countries in need of food aid.
Many more animals are still expected to die because of the drought including hippos and buffalos because of they consume large volumes of vegetation. A drought in the early 1990s reduced Kruger park’s buffalo population by more than half to about 14,000, but the population rebounded.
Rangers are targeting hippos in “small natural pools where they have concentrated in unnatural high densities, defecate in the water, making it unusable to other animals,” said Ike Phaahla, a parks service spokesman.
Parks officials have described drought as a natural way of regulating wildlife populations. Earlier this year, they said they didn’t plan any major intervention to try to save wild species in Kruger park, but the drought’s impact intensified. Hippos are in particular trouble because they can’t feed as widely as other animals, returning to water by day after grazing by night.
South Africa’s parks service stopped killing elephants to reduce overpopulation in 1994, partly because of public opposition. Today, there are an estimated 20,000 elephants left. Poachers killed 36 elephants this year in the park, raising concerns that the Africa-wide slaughter of elephants for their ivory is finally affecting South Africa as poachers have already killed large numbers of rhinos in the park, which borders Zimbabwe and Mozambique and is almost the size of Israel.