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All 12 elephants found dead last weekend near Zimbabwe’s largest nature reserve were victims of a bacterial infection, authorities said Tuesday.
The bodies were discovered on Friday and Saturday in the Pandanasuwe forest (west), between the Huange Nature Park, near the border with Botswana, and the city of Victoria Falls, west of the falls of the same name.
The rangers initially admitted that the young elephants, aged between two and six, had been poisoned by hunters, but the elephants had their prey intact and no other animals, including vultures, had been affected.
“I have a report that says it is a bacteriological infection,” said the spokesman for the Zimbabwean authority in charge of nature parks, Tinashe Farawo.
The animals were too small to reach the leaves of the trees, so they must have ingested the bacteria by eating poisonous plants, he explained.
Zimbabwe has more than 84,000 elephants, for an estimated ecological capacity of 45,000 to 50,000.
Elephants “are so overcrowded that the vegetation they prefer has disappeared and they end up eating anything, including poisonous plants,” the spokesman said.
In the Huange reserve, which has 45,000 to 53,000 elephants in an area of about 14,600 km2, many of these animals have died of hunger and thirst in recent years.
In 2013, at least 300 elephants also died from poisoning at water points in the reserve.
In neighboring Botswana, where there are around 130,000 elephants in the wild, the world’s largest population, the deaths of 300 elephants this year have been attributed to natural toxins.
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