A young bull elephant called Z16 has walked nearly 12,000 kilometers across Botswana, Zambia, Angola, and Namibia in just two years. His journey—tracked by researchers via a collar fitted in Zambia—reveals something quietly radical: elephants don't need culling. They need corridors.
Southern Africa's elephant populations are actually stable or growing. The problem isn't too many elephants. It's that the land connecting them has been carved into fragments. When a herd can't move freely between protected areas, they collide with farms, villages, and fences. Humans get angry. Calls for culls get louder. But there's another path.
The Sobbe Corridor Model
In northwestern Namibia, the Sobbe Corridor cuts through the Zambezi region like a lifeline. It's a stretch of land that lets elephants move between Botswana, Zambia, and Angola without crossing human settlements. Environmental anthropologist Emilie Köhler has watched elephants use this route for years. She noticed something that stopped her: the trees inside the corridor have crooked, worn boughs—shaped by countless generations of African savanna elephants rubbing their backs as they passed through. The marks of centuries, written in bark and wood.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News Detox"They come into Mudumu National Park, then they use the Sobbe Corridor to move into the Zambezi State Forest and then go into Zambia and Angola," Köhler explains. "It connects different protected areas, but also links movements between different countries, which makes it extremely important."
The elephants follow an ancient rhythm. Each day, they journey from safe havens away from human settlements toward the Zambezi River, then back again. They've been doing this for generations. The corridor simply keeps that path open.
What makes this approach different from culling is that it addresses the root problem rather than treating the symptom. Culls are temporary, traumatic, and contentious. Corridors are permanent infrastructure for coexistence. They cost less in the long run and they don't require killing thousands of animals to manage a problem that's really about land use.
Southern Africa has the space to make this work. The region has vast protected areas and conservancies. The challenge isn't biology—it's politics, funding, and the will to connect what humans have separated. Z16's 12,000-kilometer journey proves the elephants are ready. The question is whether the region's governments and conservation organizations will match that commitment by protecting the routes that make such journeys possible.
If they do, the region's elephant populations could thrive without the cycle of conflict and culling that has haunted conservation for decades.
