Zimbabwe's Ballooning Jumbo Herds A Growing Threat To Humans

Hwange, Zimbabwe, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 26th May, 2022 ) :Seventy-five-year-old Hanganani Gideon Dube has walked with a slight limp and his speech been laboured since he miraculously survived being trampled by an elephant in northwestern Zimbabwe.

He considers himself lucky to be alive following the assault one afternoon in May 2021 near Mabale village on the outskirts of Hwange National Park, the country's biggest.

But the injuries have left him unable to fend for his family of six.

Dube was tending his cattle when "suddenly I found myself face-to-face with an elephant".

He sprinted off, without realizing he was running straight into the path of another elephant.

"There was no time for me to evade the second elephant. It attacked me swiftly and I blacked out," he said in the local Ndebele language.

Dube said he's still puzzled "why the elephant didn't finish me off".

"I am lucky to be alive but I am now useless as I can no longer do any physical work, including looking after my cattle," he said sitting on a stool by a cooking fire at his homestead.

At least 60 people have been killed by elephants in Zimbabwe since the start of the year, compared with 72 over all of 2021 year.

With some 100,000 elephants, Zimbabwe has the world's second-largest population after Botswana, and about one-quarter of the elephants in all of Africa.

More than half of those pachyderms live in and outside the unfenced Hwange, a wildlife park nearly half the size of Belgium, some 14,600 square kilometres (5,637 square miles) of vegetation.

Elephants roam freely from Zimbabwe's sprawling and unfenced game reserves and it is common to find herds crossing or resting along the main highway from Hwange to the nearby prime tourist resort of Victoria Falls.