The curious case of five dead elephants and a vanishing media statement Ed Stoddard, Daily Maverick October 22, 2024 See link <https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-10-22-mysterious-deaths-of-elephants-in-malawis-kasungu-park-place-ngos-credibility-in-question/> for photos. The International Fund for Animal Welfare’s donors should be very concerned about its bungling and questionable communications over a botched elephant translocation in Malawi that is extracting a mounting toll in both human and animal suffering. The curious case of five dead elephants in Malawi’s Kasungu National Park and a vanishing media statement are the latest twists in the saga of an ill-conceived elephant translocation spearheaded by NGOs the International Fund for Animal Welfare and African Parks in cooperation with the Malawi government. Last week Daily Maverick reported that the fund said that five elephants had been killed in recent months in Zambia in areas that border Malawi’s Kasungu National Park in retaliation for crop raiding. The park is completely in Malawi but borders Zambia along a frontier that is glaringly unfenced. As Daily Maverick has previously reported, rural communities in Zambia and Malawi have inhabited a landscape of fear and loathing since the translocation of 263 elephants to Kasungu in 2022. The International Fund for Animal Welfare published a statement on its website on 15 October 2024 — in response to Daily Maverick’s queries — after the Warm Heart NGO had alerted us to reports from its network of volunteers and informants that at least 11 Kasungu elephants had been shot or poisoned since the start of September in Zambia. “It is with great concern that the International Fund for Animal Welfare has learned that five elephants have been found dead in Kasungu National Park between May and September 2024,” Ifaw’s statement read. “Preliminary investigation by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Malawi suggests the elephants were shot in Zambia between May and September 2024 as retaliation for crop raiding, and fled back to Kasungu National Park injured, where they died slowly and painfully,” it said. Curiouser and Curiouser This, it turned out, was news to the department. “We have not done any preliminary investigation on the matter,” Brighton Kumchedwa, the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Malawi’s director, told Daily Maverick via WhatsApp. “About the five elephants dead between May and Sept I am aware; all that I am disputing is the narrative that they were shot in Zambia because there is no evidence and we have not investigated this yet. “I am the director of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Malawi, I fully distance the department from what the International Fund for Animal Welfare said unless they produce evidence to me,” he said. And rather oddly, the statement that the fund posted on its website about the matter suddenly vanished. Daily Maverick asked the International Fund for Animal Welfare about this perplexing sequence of events, and got the following response by email: “The International Fund for Animal Welfare will not be commenting on this matter for the time being. Should the position change, we will let you know.” Well, that hardly clarifies things and it raises serious questions about the fund’s credibility. Why would the fund claim that the Malawi wildlife authority had conducted a preliminary investigation into the deaths of the elephants when the department claims it did no such thing? The fund’s donors should be very concerned about the NGO’s bungling and questionable communications over this botched elephant translocation that is extracting a mounting toll in both human and animal suffering. The Department of National Parks and Wildlife Malawi is the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s main partner in this unfolding tragedy that has seen at least nine people killed by elephants and about $4-million (about R70-million) in crop and property damage inflicted on poor subsistence farmers, according to data compiled by the Warm Heart NGO, which has been monitoring the situation with a small group of dedicated volunteers. Two other people have been killed by wild animals — one by a hippo, the other by hyenas — in incidents that have been linked to the translocation. Both the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Malawi and the International Fund for Animal Welfare say that at least five Kasungu elephants died between May and September, but they are at odds over the circumstances. The department is effectively accusing the fund of lying about its own take on the matter, and the fund pulled its statement with no explanation. So, the fund now finds itself covered in elephant dung flung at it by the Malawi parks department. You simply cannot make this stuff up. Warm Heart, as we reported last week, says its sources on the ground maintain that at least 11 Kasungu elephants were killed in Zambia between 1 September and 6 October. According to Warm Heart, five of the dead pachyderms were shot, five were poisoned and one that was poisoned also had a bullet wound. The NGO also provided photos of the carcasses. Daily Maverick cannot confirm the veracity of these reports. But our on-the-ground reporting in the region in June corroborated Warm Heart’s allegations of terror and destruction being wreaked on poor, mostly subsistence farmers. The International Fund for Animal Welfare — an NGO with almost $114-million on its balance sheet as of the end of June 2023 — by contrast has a growing credibility problem around its handling of this fiasco. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-10-22-mysterious-deaths-of-elephants-in-malawis-kasungu-park-place-ngos-credibility-in-question/