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International News
Thursday 29 May 1997 Issue 734
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Free love in the park is too exciting for elephants
By Aisling Irwin, Science Correspondent
ELEPHANT society, used to the order of family values,
has fallen apart in South Africa after the introduction
of contraception.
Male elephants have proved unable to deal sensibly with
their new lifestyle of free love without paternity. The
result has been a social disaster, with males in a
constant state of sexual excitement and females too
harassed to look after their young.
The experiment began six months ago in Kruger National
Park, where elephant numbers have caused overcrowding,
leading to the slaughter of 600 a year.
Scientists inserted implants modelled on human
contraceptives into the young females and, since then,
none has conceived. Unfortunately, the contraceptive
causes the cow elephants to appear permanently on heat.
In conventional elephant society, females are available
for sex for only two days in every four months.
Conservationists have watched helpless from the air as
females have been harassed by up to eight bull elephants
at a time and are unable to shake off lines of admirers
walking behind them.
Sometimes the males have separated them from their
young. Baby elephants born before the experiment have
disappeared as a result of the mothers' distraction.
Kruger National Park has called a halt to the
experiment, New Scientist magazine reports today. The
authorities said that any future hormone trials would be
tested rigorously before they were allowed in the field.
Opponents of the scheme had maintained that it was
expensive and sentimental. The elephant population
should be allowed to grow, with the surplus being killed
and eaten by local people, they said.
Dr Thomas Hildebrand, from the Institute for Zoo Biology
and Wildlife Research in Berlin, one of the scientists
involved in the experiment, said it might work better
with a different combination of hormones.
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| Did you notice any parallels in the previous article with
our own society's birth control "experiment"?
Incidentally, a related article published in the New Scientist
(there's a link from the ET article page to that one)
also mentions this procedure has caused tumors in zoo animals.
Someday the truth will come out. Ironically, it may take elephants
to get through the stopped-up ears that the Catholic Church
has been unable to reach.
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