Establishing Welfare Parameters on Small Fenced Game Reserves. In order to complement our work on rewilding captive elephants, we have embarked on a project endeavoring to understand how to better assess elephant welfare on fenced reserves. Our project on understanding the effects of various management activities on elephant welfare has seen us visiting several reserves spread across South Africa over the last year and a half. As the first official research project we have embarked on, we are excited to be wrapping up the first part and collating all this data at last. It has been so encouraging to see the interest with which these reserves have embraced involvement in this project while also making reserve resources available to help us maximise data collection opportunities. This work would not be possible without this buy in from reserves as they so kindly accommodated our field researchers for at least 6 weeks of the year allowing for the collection of this valuable data. With elephants being such complex animals, everything from reserve size, to tourist density to herd and social dynamics can play very influential roles on their wellbeing. It is our objective to turn our findings into constructive feedback for each of these reserves as we continue to grow our understanding of what it takes to best manage elephants on fenced reserves in South Africa. |
