This month, the South African government will put into effect a plan authorising the lethal management of elephants.

After a 14-year moratorium, culling - systematic killing - will be allowed in the name of conservation. The decision claims justification from a 476-page report drafted by a group of scientists convened to discuss the state of elephants. Yet this decision is based on a false reading of the evidence.

Science does not support the assertion that elephants are imperilling biodiversity and are widely hazardous to human safety.

Unlike other African nations, almost all the elephants in South Africa are impounded behind fences in parks and reserves with little direct human contact. The report admits that elephants pose negligible threats to public safety.

Far from destroying their environment, there is no substantive evidence that elephant effects on habitat and other species are other than localised and reversible. Indeed, more robust evidence shows that elephants play an essential positive role in maintaining ecosystem health and function.

The claim that elephants are overpopulated is also spurious. Elephants are on the verge of being lost, their survival doubtful.

Humans have expanded into nearly all areas of elephant habitat. Present populations are merely a fraction of what existed before European colonisation and today, elephants exist only in meagre pockets. There is barely half the number of elephants in Africa than there were 20 years ago. Their devastation has gone so far as to trigger lasting genetic changes, including - in extreme cases - tusklessness.

Humans have out-competed nature: mass killings and restricted space have created conditions that undermine elephants' ability to function normally.

Under pressure to resume ivory and skin sales and expand private ownership of live animals, the South African government has misused science and turned elephants into commodities.

Treating science selectively to achieve political and economic ends is bad enough; worse is the disregard for those whom they are proposing to kill. "Whom" is accurate, for after decades of study the criteria once used to distinguish critically between elephants and humans and thus rationalise their subordination are not valid.

Elephants, like humans, have culture, stunning intelligence, complex communication, vocal learning, episodic memory and show intention and self-awareness. They feel grief and other strong emotions.

Tragically, we now know that elephants can even experience psychological disorders. A year and a half ago the New York Times Magazine ("Are we driving elephants crazy?") reported that infant elephants who witness the death of culled mothers and family grow up to become unprecedented "serial killers", in separate cases killing over 100 endangered white and black rhinoceroses and attacking one another and people.

As with human children who experience war, elephant orphans have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Further, wild elephants are exhibiting other trauma-induced disorders that transmit and promulgate across generations. Stressed mother elephants show depression and indifference to their infants in distress.

When elephants and humans are put side by side, researchers are hard-pressed to come up with significantly meaningful differences in terms of brain, behaviour, emotion and mind. By force of its own evidence, science shows elephants to be sufficiently like ourselves to necessitate an ethical status rather than being treated as depersonalised commodities. Neuroscientists, ethologists, ecologists and psychologists concur that the proposal to commodify and control elephants through killing undermines conservation of the species and their ecosystems.

The only urgent elephant problem in South Africa is the need to save them from certain destruction.

There are multiple options and intermediate steps to improve life for elephants and their landscapes.

These choices work with, not against, ecological processes for the renewal of elephant society as it once was: a great civilisation.

The creation of protected corridors that allow elephants to move across landscapes is one way that would alleviate pressures on ecosystems in fenced, isolated reserves.

Small private reserves are essentially large zoos resembling more closely captive conditions. Integration, not separation (a cross-species echo of apartheid), allows people to develop coexistence with elephants, as they did before colonial pressures and values subjugated both human and animal communities.

The decision to cull brings humankind to a momentous choice: do we defend science or do we allow it to be manipulated like the elephants under the guise of a righteous cause?

We reel in horror from the legacies of human "culls" genocides, ethnic cleansing and wars that humans visit upon each other, also in the name of a good cause.

In the face of our best and brightest research, can we knowingly inflict this on another species?

Will we continue to lurch down the path of extinctions and violence?

Or will we, once and for all, reject killing as an inevitable choice to solve our problems?

GA Bradshaw PhD, PhD The Kerulos Centre, United States
Keith Lindsay PhD, Amboseli Elephant Research Project, Kenya
Dr Dame Daphne Sheldrick DBE MBE MBS DVMS, Kenya
Allan N Schore PhD, UCLA, US
Cynthia Moss, director, Amboseli Elephant Research Project, Kenya
Joyce Poole PhD, Elephant Voices, Kenya
Lori Marino, PhD, Emory University, US
Ian Redmond OBE, Ape Alliance, Britain
Marc Bekoff PhD, University of Colorado, US
Will Travers, CEO, The Born Free Foundation, UK and US

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