THE DANGEROUS FICTION OF “SUSTAINABLE USE”: WHY SOUTH AFRICA MUST REJECT THE NORMALISATION OF ELEPHANT KILLING 

Written by Michele Pickover, Executive Director of the EMS Foundation

The latest article from the pro-trade, pro-culling Stellenbosch-based institute calling for the “normalisation of sustainable use” (Normalising the sustainable use of wildlife | African Wildlife Economy Institute) as a pragmatic and balanced contribution to the future of conservation is anything but. In reality, it represents something far more troubling. It is part of an increasingly coordinated and dangerous effort to shift South African conservation away from constitutional stewardship and towards the commercial utilisation of wildlife. It is the latest chapter in a decades-long effort to redefine South Africa’s relationship with wildlife from one based on stewardship, constitutional responsibility and ecological integrity to one based on extraction, commercialisation and the language of the marketplace.

This debate is not really about sustainable use. It is about whether South Africa will continue down a path that increasingly treats elephants, lions, leopards, rhinos and countless other wild animals as economic assets whose primary value lies in what can be extracted from them. The repeated invocation of “sustainable use” is central to this project. It sounds responsible. It sounds scientific.

It sounds environmentally benign. But language matters. The phrase has become a political and ideological device that sanitises practices which, stripped of their rhetoric, involve the commercial exploitation, trade and killing of sentient wild animals. 

What began in international environmental law as a narrow principle permitting carefully regulated ecological use has, in South Africa, become an increasingly expansive justification for trophy hunting, captive breeding, commercial wildlife trade, culling, live exports and the commodification of wild animals. 

This is not conservation. It is the commercialisation of biodiversity. And it is fundamentally inconsistent with the direction in which South African constitutional and environmental law is moving. The EMS Foundation rejects this paradigm. Not because we oppose conservation. Not because we oppose science. But because we reject the increasingly dangerous fiction that the commercial utilisation of wildlife should be the organising principle of biodiversity governance in a constitutional democracy.

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Michele Pickover is a prominent South African animal rights activist, social justice advocate, and the Executive Director of the EMS Foundation. She is widely recognized as a leading expert and opponent of elephant culling, captive wildlife industries, and commercial animal exploitation in Africa. 

As the founder and Executive Director, she directs the EMS Foundation’s mission to advance the rights and welfare of vulnerable groups, including children, the elderly, and wild animals.  

The EMS Foundation  is the founding  member organisation of the Pro Elephant Network, an international collective of elephant experts, scientists, and advocates who collaborate to end the exploitation and lethal management of elephants. 

Michele Pickover played a historic, key role in successfully lobbying for the suspension of elephant culling in Kruger National Park. When the South African government sought to lift the culling ban, she fiercely opposed it, arguing that lethal population control is ethically and ecologically flawed.  

Through the EMS Foundation, Michele Pickover argues that managing landscapes based on arbitrary elephant numbers or historical “carrying capacity” models is outdated and scientifically flawed.

She strongly criticizes state policies, such as the National Elephant Heritage Strategy, for viewing elephants as economic commodities or sustainable-use resources rather than sentient beings. 

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