Elephants in Saskatchewan? Scientist says it could work

Tom Spears
CanWest News Service
Thursday, August 18, 2005

OTTAWA --The best chance for saving Asia's and Africa's big mammals from extinction is by transplanting elephants, lions and cheetahs to vast, fenced-in preserves in the Prairies of Canada and the Great Plains of the United States, an influential ecologist says.

Places such as Saskatchewan, Neb-raska and West Texas -- with lots of grasslands and thin human populations -- would be just right for the big cats and elephants, says a team led by Josh Donlan of Cornell University.

Besides, he argues, American lions and elephant-like creatures such as mammoths did roam North America until about 13,000 years ago. If anything, they were even bigger than their modern cousins.

And if human hunters wiped them out, as some believe, then we owe a debt to modern big mammals.

Fine -- but elephants in Estevan?

Yes, Donlan and 11 colleagues write in today's edition of Nature, a major international science journal.

He's a PhD student studying biology, policy and law in endangered-species conservation at Cornell. The others come from seven universities and the U.S. Geological Survey.

They call the idea "rewilding"--or turning back the clock to a natural state. And while he notes the potential for conflict between the big African animals and humans is "high," he still wants go go ahead, establishing cheetah and camel populations in the next 25 years, Asian and African elephants in 40 to 50 years and lions within 60.

In any case, the human population in the Prairies and Plains States is declining, which opens up land for wild animals, they claim. And he says the ecotourism value would help ranchers and poor rural people.

"Will you settle for an American wilderness emptier than it was just 100 centuries ago? Will you risk the extinction of the world's megafauna [largest animals] should economic, political, and climate change prove catastrophic for those populations remaining in Asia and Africa?" they write.

"The obstacles are substantial and the risks are not trivial, but we can no longer accept a hands-off approach to wilderness preservation. Instead, we want to reinvigorate wild places, as widely and rapidly as is prudently possible."

This really would be restoring a natural balance, the group argues. For instance, they believe, the native pronghorn antelope evolved into a sprinter -- top speed at least 75 and perhaps 100 kilometres an hour -- at a time when North America had cheetahs.

"I don't think it's a pipe dream at all," said Richard Harington, a scientist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa who is an expert on the lions, camels and mammoths of North America's last ice age.

"Of course you have to have a good fence," he added.

He suggests very large tracts, at least 10 times larger than the safari farms we have today.

CREDIT: Associated Press
If a Cornell University scientist has his way, elephants, such as this one seen crossing a river in Kenya, could one day be roaming the Canadian Prairies.