The British vet making a giant step to save Africa's most endangered elephants

Decades of bloodshed and poaching in the Democratic Republic of Congo have dwindled the number of majestic savannah giants to fewer than 200. Now, one determined team has hatched a plan to save them before it's too late

- By Richard Ashmore

IN THE wild heart of Africa there is a dwindling group of savannah elephants so traumatised by decades of war, poaching and conflict with humans, that when they see a helicopter, they don’t run away... they charge.

While the choppers are a means of providing vital conservation measures, such as collaring programmes to monitor under-threat animals for their own protection, these majestic animals have learned to defend themselves in an area so wracked with human conflict it’s been dubbed the “Triangle of Death”.

Combine the dangerous reality of several tons of angry pachyderm with the threat of armed militias, and almost impenetrable terrain, and you have potentially life-threatening conditions for man and mammal.

Yet these are the conditions faced by a determined team, including a British vet, who have just successfully carried out the first ever collaring programme on the last population of a species in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Only around 200 savannah elephants now roam in pockets in Katanga Province in the south of the war-torn nation, having once numbered in the thousands across the whole country. The herds are the subject of an urgent conservation project to save them from extinction led by Upemba National Park and backed by the UK-founded Forgotten Parks Foundation, the European Union and the Elephant Crisis Fund.

Upemba covers a vast area close to the Zambian border and contains a diverse habitat of a plateau, mountainous terrain, grasslands, swamps, forests and lakes.

British freelance wildlife vet Dr Richard Harvey was part of the operation last month to dart and collar what could be some of the most endangered elephants in Africa.

Richard says the amount of sedative that is loaded into the CO2 dart guns fired from the helicopter to put an elephant to sleep is “about 1,000 times stronger than morphine — what we use would be a fatal dose for around 30 to 35 people”.