Elephants are important and sentient animals. This makes any discussion about their management difficult and thus the debate about elephant numbers in the Kruger National Park should be based on the best data available, not heated discussions.

There is no doubt that present African elephant populations and distributions are a fraction of what they were a few hundred years ago. Therefore, given this decline, any suggestions that elephant populations are too high in areas where they are still extant, such as the Kruger National Park (KNP), need to be carefully and scientifically argued.

In an article in Daily Maverick, the journalist Don Pinnock has now presented a perspective suggesting that it is a myth that there are too many elephants in the Kruger National Park. In its place he has promoted the Goldilocks myth... elephant numbers are just right. He avoided any references to the large amount of research showing that high elephant densities reduce trees and biodiversity. Pinnock should have at least presented the data for both sides of the argument.

He declared that we will never know what historical elephant numbers were and that science is unable to specify elephant carrying capacities. But there are chances to reconstruct...