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Monday, November 23, 2009

Photo: South Africa to Allow Elephant Killing


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February 25, 2008—South Africa will reverse a 1995 ban on killing African elephants—like those pictured in this photograph taken in Tanzania in 1975—to help control their booming population, the country's top environment official said Monday, drawing instant outrage from animal-rights activists.

The new regulation said that elephants' survival often depends on their operation as a family unit, and "an elephant may not be culled if it is part of a family, unless the matriarch and juvenile bulls are culled as well."

Photograph by Emory Kristof/National Geographic