Summary
Published hypotheses to account for habitat changes wrought by elephants begin from the assumption that elephant-forest systems possess a stable equilibrium point. The ‘elephant problem’ is conceived as a displacement of this equilibrium by man. Controversy centres around which human activities caused the dislocation of equilibrium and by which mechanisms these activities resulted in local high densities of the elephant Loxodonta africana. A study on elephant-forest relationships in the Luangwa Valley of Zambia casts doubt upon the basic assumption of these hypotheses and an alternative hypothesis is therefore offered. It begins from the opposite assumption–that there is no attainable natural equilibrium between elephants and forests in eastern and southern Africa. The relationship is viewed instead as a stable limit cycle in which elephants increase while thinning the forest and decline until reaching a low density that allows resurgence of the forest. This in turn triggers an increase of elephants and the cycle repeats. The period of the cycle, if the hypothesis is correct, is in the order of 200 years in the Luangwa Valley.

The activities of man can impose an artificial equilibrium on the system such that trees and elephants are trapped at the low density phase of the cycle. When interference is relaxed, as with the conversion of an area to a national park, the cyclic relationship reasserts.

The parameters of a system possessing a stable limit cycle need not differ in kind or interrelationship from those of a system with a stable equilibrium. Whether one or other outcome manifests may depend only on the numerical values of the parameters. If the elephant-forest system is characterized by a stable limit cycle the period and amplitude should change along a climatic gradient and may contract to a stable equilibrium in some climatic zones. A set of predictions is offered to facilitate rejection of the hypothesis.

Hunting Trips in Northern Rhodesia

The elephant problem–an alternative hypothesis

Most descriptions of social life in rural communities in Central Africa contain some references to hunters or hunting practices Despite the decimation of some wildlife species by rinderpest at the turn of the last century, wildlife continued plentiful in many regions and hunting and trapping were part of the subsistence routines of males in rural areas during the first three decades of this century During this period in Zambia, European administrators (Gouldsbury and Sheane 1911; Melland 1923; Hughes 1933), missionaries (Smith and Dale 1920), and itinerants (Lyell 1910; Letcher 1911) often interspersed their exploitative accounts of ‘sport hunting’ with descriptions of chants, rituals, magic and other hunting lore of their African associates These accounts of local traditions, often colored with the latent assumptions of the time, apparently intrigued and fascinated their European readership then mentally riding the crest of colonial expansion and technological superiority In subsequent decades, large wild mammals declined in numbers and in importance as a subsistence base in most rural areas Yet information on hunting customs, gleaned incidentally in the pursuit of the researchers' major interests, has been a continuous feature of ethnographies written subsequently by social scientists (Richards 1939; White 1956; Turner 1957; Scudder 1962; Stefaniszyn 1964; Reynolds 1968) suggesting a widespread enthusiasm for hunting even where wildlife is no longer of consequence These fortuitous bits of information on the subsistence hunter's world still leave many unresolved questions as to the function and frequency of these customs, the numbers and types of hunters in each community, and the nature of subsequent changes

Profile and Process: Subsistence Hunters in a Zambian Community

Insights into the taxonomy of tsessebe antelopes Damaliscus lunatus (Bovidae: Alcelaphini) with the description of a new evolutionary species in south-central Africa

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1159505

Hunting Trips in Northern Rhodesia

Citations

The elephant problem–an alternative hypothesis

Profile and Process: Subsistence Hunters in a Zambian Community

Insights into the taxonomy of tsessebe antelopes Damaliscus lunatus (Bovidae: Alcelaphini) with the description of a new evolutionary species in south-central Africa

Subsistence hunters in a zambian community

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