I am not a scientist, and I cannot speak for the ATE researchers, but I will offer my personal stance nonetheless. I am always trying to see and at the same time protect the last refuges of primeval nature. I know that we no longer have many of those, and a small park like Amboseli, surrounded by areas increasingly influenced by humans, cannot fully qualify anyway, but I can only say for myself that every additional human interference makes a nature reserve less attractive for me. In that sense I am a deeply conservative person.

Look at southern Africa, where you have elephant culling, artificial waterholes for wildlife, etc. What you see there is no longer nature. It is something artificial that looks different from what it used to be originally, and nobody knows any more what it would look like if humans would leave it in peace or what it looked like before humans asserted their wildlife management.

The similarly negative example in Kenya is Lake Nakuru National Park. It is a relatively small, fully fenced area, and there are no elephants in it. This means that the entire vegetation is very unnatural for Africa, because elephants have their own, natural way to "manage" vegetation, and without elephants plants grow in very different patterns and distributions.

The park looks strange to everybody who knows typical African vegetation types. It is not really typical African nature—it is an artificial creation. It is not a nature reserve in the true sense of the words.

Its only redeeming feature is the lake itself, but that is spoiled in different ways, by contaminated waste water from the nearby city of Nakuru and by reduced water inflow due to water catchment in the agricultural area surrounding the park.

My personal opinion is that you cannot preserve some aspects of primeval nature while managing and thus altering others. Nature is an incredibly complex network of causes and effects that we humans have not nearly fully understood.

As to the suffering of the animals during droughts, this is a "feature" of nature. There have always been droughts. Animals always suffer during some periods in time, and many stop procreating or even die during such times. All animals try to over-procreate and expand during good times, when they probably also feel well and enjoy their lives, but during bad times they suffer from lack of food and water, from diseases, and from increased predation. (Simplified, one could say that life is good for predators when it is bad for herbivores and vice versa.)

There is another argument against interference. Scientific research is spoiled by every interference. Human interference can invalidate research results.

Of course there are also counter-arguments, for example that we may be creating hardships in the first place by damaging the environment and that it may be immoral not to help sentient beings like elephants, but humans have never shown much inclination to change their own ways for the better, and while some would like to help elephants, others want to kill them because of competition over resources, because they believe that fewer elephants than the ecological equilibrium are somehow better, for sport (if hunting qualifies as a sport), trophies, ivory. All taken together, non-interference may well be better for the elephants and for nature in general.

Apart from all these fundamental considerations it may not be possible to raise enough funds to buy the very large amounts of grass that would be needed to feed hundreds, not even tens of thousands of large wild animals or just the 1,500 elephants that move through Amboseli. I cannot think of any widely convincing argument for feeding only the elephants, while letting all other animals starve. Also, as far as I know, most other areas in Kenya also experience a similar dry season, so there is no obvious place to take grass from. And elephants do not eat just grass, they need a fair number of different plant species.

All in all, I don't foresee that any such feeding programme will ever come into being.

Please take this comment as the personal opinion of a layperson, not as scientific judgment, particularly not by ATE. I just hope the researchers agree with some of my points.