(LONDON) -- Zimbabwe has announced that dozens of its elephants will be killed to control the population size and the meat from the carcasses will be distributed to people.
The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, also known as ZimParks, said it has issued permits to Save Valley Conservancy, a large private game reserve in the southeast, "for an elephant management exercise."
"The management quota is meant to address the growing elephant population in the region and will initially target 50 elephants," the agency said in a statement Tuesday. "According to the 2024 aerial survey, there are 2,550 elephants against an ecological carrying capacity of 800 elephants in Save Valley Conservancy."
The reserve has translocated 200 elephants to other areas in the southern African nation over the past five years "to manage the elephant population and protect the wildlife habitat," according to ZimParks.
"Elephant meat from the management exercise will be distributed to local communities while ivory will be State property that will be handed over to the ZimParks for safekeeping," the agency added.
A global ban on ivory trade bars Zimbabwe from selling its stockpile of elephant tusks.
ZimParks spokesman Tinashe Farawo told ABC News on Wednesday that the "management exercise" is "not culling," as the latter "involves wiping [out] the whole herd in huge numbers." He did not respond to a question about how many elephants in total will be killed in this instance and over what period of time.
A spokesman for Save Valley Conservancy told ABC News on Wednesday that the first phase, happening this year, "will be to understand the ecological, logistical and financial constraints involved in carrying out elephant management exercises, which may have to be an ongoing feature in the future."
"Our first choice is (of course) to try and find alternative homes for the elephants, however there now seems to be no areas of suitable habitat that are empty of elephants and within a feasible distance," the Save Valley Conservancy spokesman wrote in an email. "Obviously safety and habitat management are top areas of consideration and we are therefore constraining our initial exercise to small numbers (approximately 50), the exact number of which will depend upon what size herds we find within the selected management area and how well the logistical enterprise of dealing with the carcasses in a respectful (not wasteful) manner."
Zimbabwe is home to the second-largest population of elephants in the world, after neighboring Botswana.
ABC News' Liezl Thom contributed to this report.
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