There was a revealing moment before Parliament this week when the increasingly controversial management of elephants in Madikwe and Pilanesberg moved beyond ecology.

SANParks large-mammal specialist Sam Ferreira was explaining the scientific modelling behind proposals for managing the elephant populations. Thirty-four scenarios had reportedly been examined, involving different combinations of contraception, translocation and lethal removal. Ferreira stressed that trophy hunting was not the starting point: managers should first establish what interventions were ecologically required.

Then came the important qualification:

âSome of those elephants that you need to remove may also provide opportunities to have other additional secondary economic outcomes,â he told the Portfolio Committee on Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment.

It is a carefully constructed distinction. First science determines that elephants must be removed. Only afterwards does economics enter the equation.

But it is precisely that distinction that deserves examination.

Because once the death of an elephant acquires economic value, the question is no longer simply whether a particular population can withstand the loss of that animal. It becomes a question about the increasingly dominant philosophy through which South Africa understands wildlife: animals as biological populations to be managed, but simultaneously as economic assets whose continued existence â and sometimes whose deaths â may be expected to generate returns.

Ferreiraâs statement did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum.

A particular vision of conservation

Ferreira is an influential conservation scientist and his contribution to South African large-mammal ecology should not be dismissed. Nor should his position be reduced to the crude claim that he simply wants elephants killed. Indeed, when the Madikwe controversy erupted last year, Ferreira was among those cautioning against precisely the simplistic ecological arguments being advanced in support of a cull.

He rejected the idea that Madikwe had crossed some easily identifiable numerical âcarrying capacityâ. Elephant numbers alone, he argued, were insufficient. Rainfall, vegetation, ecological processes and management objectives all mattered.

That nuance remains important. But there is another strand running through Ferreiraâs published work and public interventions that deserves considerably greater scrutiny: a willingness to accommodate consumptive use, hunting, wildlife sales and economic value within the architecture of conservation.

In March, Ferreira and South African National Biodiversity Institute scientist Jeanetta Selier publicly defended South Africaâs regulated hunting system for elephants, leopards and black rhinos. Their argument was essentially consequentialist: hunting and photographic tourism may arise from very different human motivations, but either can generate conservation benefits when the activity depends upon viable wildlife populations and functioning landscapes.

It is an argument heard increasingly frequently within South African conservation.

The test becomes sustainability. Can the population withstand the offtake? Is the quota scientifically defensible? Does the activity produce economic incentives for keeping wildlife on the land? If the answer is yes, killing becomes capable of being described as conservation.

But that deserves challenging because sustainability is not synonymous with ethical legitimacy.

The rhino precedent

Rhinos provide an illuminating example of how deeply economic reasoning has become embedded within this approach.

Ferreira has worked on rhino conservation for many years and has made important scientific contributions to understanding population decline and poaching. His recent work with Tim Kuiper, for example, highlights compelling evidence that dehorning can dramatically reduce poaching risk. There is nothing inherently lethal about his approach to wildlife management.

But economic calculation has long been present within the broader policy framework.

In 2014, Ferreira, Michèle Pfab and Mike Knight published an analysis of alternative strategies for combating rhino poaching explicitly using a cost-benefit approach. The purpose was to highlight that conservation resources are finite and governments need to understand which interventions provide the greatest conservation return.

A year later Ferreira was appointed to the South African governmentâs committee of inquiry examining the feasibility of proposing legal international trade in rhino horn. His membership of that committee should not be misrepresented as evidence that he personally supported legalising trade. The committee existed precisely to examine competing possibilities.

What matters is the broader intellectual architecture. Protection, trade, hunting, wildlife ownership, economic incentives and biological sustainability increasingly become components of the same conservation equation.

And once wildlife enters that equation primarily as a managed biological resource, something important risks disappearing from view. The individual animal.

From animal to asset

This is where the parliamentary exchange over Madikwe becomes particularly revealing. Ferreiraâs argument contains an apparently reassuring firewall: science first; economics second. Determine which elephants need to be removed according to ecological objectives and only then ask whether some economic return might arise from their removal.

But conservation does not operate in a laboratory.

Protected areas exist within institutions facing budgets, political priorities, tourism pressures and increasingly explicit demands that biodiversity should generate economic value. South Africaâs emerging biodiversity-economy policy makes precisely this connection between conservation, utilisation and economic development.

Against that background, the proposition that economic value enters only after an elephant has independently been identified for killing becomes considerably harder to accept without scrutiny. If contraception costs money while hunting generates money, those two interventions do not enter an institutional decision-making system as economically neutral alternatives. If keeping an elephant alive represents an ongoing management cost while killing it can generate trophy fees and other economic returns, a financial asymmetry has been created.

So, then, does economics determine the decision? It seems so. This makes rigorous separation between ecological necessity and economic opportunity essential.

The uncomfortable admission

This is why another statement before Parliament may ultimately prove even more important than Ferreiraâs.

MPs wanted to know why contraception had not been implemented years earlier. Immunocontraception was reportedly available without charge, and earlier intervention might have altered the population trajectory now being invoked to justify drastic management action.

Task team member John Powerâs answer was remarkable:

âIt certainly was a missed opportunity many years ago and I cannot answer why that wasnât done.â

Therein lies the real Madikwe problem.

Before calculating the economic opportunities generated by removing elephants, the government should explain how elephants came to require âremovalâ in the first place. If a non-lethal population-management intervention was available but not implemented, the present situation cannot simply be presented as an ecological problem produced by elephants.

It is also a governance problem produced by people.

And this exposes a particularly troubling possibility within utilisation-based conservation. Institutional failure can create a management problem; the resulting problem can justify lethal intervention; and lethal intervention can subsequently generate economic value.

That sequence should make Parliament extremely uncomfortable.

The economics of death

There is a deeper philosophical issue here.

South African conservation increasingly speaks the language of assets, beneficiation, harvesting, offtake, utilisation and wildlife economy.

These words are not neutral. They transform living beings into categories of economic usefulness. An elephant becomes a production unit. A rhino becomes a horn-producing asset. A hunted animal becomes a revenue generator. There may be economic arguments for each of these propositions. But economics should not be allowed to disguise itself as ecology. Nor should sustainable use be presented as though it were simply the conclusion reached when objective science has done its work.

It is a philosophy of conservation that assumes human utilisation of wild animals is legitimate. Government scientists wielding considerable influence over public wildlife policy should be particularly careful about distinguishing empirical findings from the values through which those findings are interpreted.

The question Madikwe now poses

The controversy at Madikwe is therefore no longer simply about whether there are too many elephants. Ferreira himself helped demonstrate why that question is ecologically inadequate.

The more important question is what happens after conservation science identifies an undesirable ecological effect. Does our first institutional instinct become finding ways for elephants and landscapes to coexist? Or do we increasingly move towards identifying a harvestable surplus â animals whose removal can simultaneously satisfy management objectives and produce economic returns?

There is an enormous difference between those approaches.

One begins with the continued existence of wild animals and asks how human institutions must adapt to accommodate them. The other asks how wildlife populations can be maintained while producing benefits for a select group of people. Both involve values. But only one is routinely presented as pragmatic, scientific and economically rational and that imbalance needs challenging.

Ferreiraâs comment before Parliament has inadvertently provided an opportunity to do precisely that. If an elephantâs death can become a âsecondary economic outcomeâ, Parliament should not merely ask how much money that death might produce. It should ask whether conservation has already travelled too far down a road where the economic usefulness of wild animals is becoming inseparable from decisions about whether they should continue to live. DM