Botswana and the Europeans recently had a spat regarding elephants. What was it all about?

“The Germans should live together with the animals, in the way you are trying to tell us to.” This was Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi threatening to send 20,000 elephants to the European country in his angry reaction to a suggestion by the Germany environment ministry for further tightening of restrictions on the importation of wildlife hunting trophies.

Masisi’s sentiments are reflective of the mood in Gaborone where in late March, thousands of Batswana (citizens of Botswana) marched to the British High Commission in protest against a draft law to ban importation of hunting trophies into the United Kingdom. In the course of the protest, that included the dispatch of a high-powered delegation to make presentations to the British parliament, Botswana’s Environment and Tourism minister Dumezweni Mthimkhulu had threatened to send 10,000 of the jumbos to London’s Hyde Park, just to give the British people “a taste of living alongside them.”

Why Batswana are angry with elephants

While the world is facing a crisis of a fast dwindling elephant population — ruthlessly poached for their ivory — for Botswana, it is the other way round. With an elephant population of 132,000 — the world’s largest — the Southern African nation’s 2,3 million citizens bitterly complain that they are effectively being crowded out by these jumbos.

Elephants are iconic animals for people in some Western capitals that need to be protected and treated with utmost care. But the image is totally different for an ordinary ethnic Motswana living in remote Northern Botswana. That is where marauding herds of hungry, angry elephants trample their precious food, demolish their corn stores, wreck their boreholes, flatten their relatives, prevent their children from schooling and impose a night-time curfew on entire villages.

“In some areas, there are more of these animals than people,” explained Mthimkhulu. “They are killing children who get in their path. They trample and eat farmers’ crops, leaving Africans hungry. They steal water meant for people from pipes. They have lost their fear of humans.” It is because of these cases of human wildlife conflict (HWC) that locals hate the animals with a passion.

Efforts to tackle overpopulation

With these elephants being nearly three times the country’s ecological carrying capacity of 50,000, Botswana is struggling to manage them. It recently donated 8,000 of them to neighbouring Angola and another 500 to Mozambique. Both countries are recovering from protracted civil wars that nearly wiped out their own elephant populations. However, experts say only a limited number of these largest land mammals can be translocated where long distances are involved, given costly logistical requirements.

Suggestions to hunt the elephants and use their meat to make pet food drew the ire of Western animal lovers.

Emotive trophy hunting debate

In 2019, Botswana lifted a trophy hunting ban previously imposed by former president Ian Khama. It cited high levels of human-elephant conflict as one of the ways to control its burgeoning elephant population. This has stoked an emotive debate about the efficacy of trophy hunting as a conservation tool. Although trophy hunting is endorsed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a wildlife conservation method, some groups insist that it is not a sustainable conservation practice.

A research by Professor Joseph Mbaiwa of the University of Botswana on the effects of the five-year (2014-19) ban on trophy hunting concluded that it was not a decision informed by any scientific evidence.

“After the hunting ban, communities were forced to shift from hunting to photographic tourism. Reduced tourism benefits have led to the development of negative attitudes by rural residents towards wildlife conservation and the increase in incidences of poaching in Northern Botswana,” Mbaiwa said in a report.

“The implications of the hunting ban suggest that policy shifts that affect wildlife conservation and rural livelihoods need to be informed by socio-economic and ecological research. This participatory and scientific approach to decision-making has the potential to contribute sustainability of livelihoods and wildlife conservation in Botswana,” he added.

Apart from reducing elephant numbers, trophy hunting has the added benefit of bringing some income to communities that co-exist with wildlife. Batswana communities get about $5 million annually from trophy hunting, which money goes towards conservation efforts, mitigating the effects of HWC as well as bringing income to local communities. Botswana is one of the few countries in Africa that pays compensation to victims of HWC.

However, most of these hunters come from the United States and Europe, tourism source markets that are now increasingly moving towards banning hunting trophy imports.

In order to maximise on trophy hunting, a declaration dated March 15, 2024, extended Botswana’s open season on hunting elephants from April 2, 2024 until  January 31, 2025. Typically, the hunting season would only last from mid-April to mid-September. The declaration therefore adds five more months of elephant hunting, infuriating opponents of the practice.

Stephanie Klarmann, a conservation psychology researcher based in South Africa, is adamant that trophy hunting does not contribute a solution to Botswana’s problem.

“Trophy hunting, in any case, would not solve an overpopulation issue as it only targets the largest and most impressive specimens, effectively depleting the elephant population of its strongest genes,” Klarmann wrote. “Selectively killing older bulls only serves to decimate genetic diversity. And if bulls beyond breeding age are trophy hunted, then this could never serve to control a supposed “overpopulation” of elephants.”

Opponents of trophy hunting are also quick to cite another research that concluded that the practice is of no real benefit to the communities that co-exist with the elephants and other wildlife, saying it was not uncommon for community members to each get as little as two Pula ($0.15) per year from safari hunting.

However, Niall Jones, an anti-poaching ranger for South Africa’s North West Park, which borders Botswana, says African elephant populations require nothing short of an entire continent to freely roam through to follow the rains and fresh pastures. But this is not possible. Hence the need to restrict the growth in their numbers.

“If used correctly, as hunting is very selective. Only non-gene pool critical individuals are sold for the purpose of hunting,” he said. “What happens if it is banned in full is that the local conservation authorities have no other option but to cull to ensure current populations have adequate food reserves to support themselves. That means it’s not just a bull here or there, but a quota for hundreds of heads in order to maintain sustainable healthy populations. One simply needs to take a look at Madikwe Game Reserve in the North West (of South Africa bordering Botswana) and you will see first-hand what elephant overgrazing does for the ecology of an area, and the negative effects on the quality of life of the animals left behind.’’

Some radicals, like Ron Thomson of the True Green Alliance, insist that trophy hunting on its own cannot help Botswana.

“In my opinion, Botswana is carrying twenty-times too many elephants,” Thomson wrote in an opinion piece. “That is 20X more than the sustainable elephant carrying capacities of their habitats.” The 80-year-old ex-game warden with 60 years of continuous experience in hands-on wildlife and national park management in Africa (1959 to 2019), who was involved in the massive culling of elephants in Zimbabwe in the 1970s, suggests that at least 100,000 elephants should be killed immediately in Botswana if ecological balance is ever going to be restored.

An African perspective

According to an IUCN 2021 assessment, the savannah elephant is endangered, and it is therefore considered to be facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild.

“Analysis of estimates from 334 localities across their global range indicates a reduction of more than 50 percent of the continental population in the past three generations (75 years) that is understood to be continuing and likely irreversible,” the report said.

It is on this basis that some conservationists are opposed to any efforts to reduce elephant numbers in any country regardless of the circumstances.

While it is not in dispute that elephants are endangered, it is their uneven distribution on the continent appears to be the source of the disagreement between 19 African elephant range states.

Six southern African states have more than 70 per cent of the total population, while the rest are battling to save theirs from slipping into extinction. Of the around 450,000 elephants on the African continent, 132,000 of these in Botswana, and another 100,000 in Zimbabwe while South Africa, Zambia, Namibia and Angola also have sizable numbers of them.

These southern African nations, which are struggling to control their elephant populations through trade and trophy hunting, face stiff opposition from those countries like Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda which are anxiously trying to stabilise and even increase their own dwindling elephant numbers.

Punished for wildlife conservation success?

Botswana and the other countries with huge elephant herds and other wildlife — a result of their robust conservation efforts — complain that by being refused permission to trade in products of some of these animals under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), they are effectively being punished for the success of their own conservation efforts.

The southern African nations have always complained bitterly that Western animal rights groups are notorious for exercising authority without responsibility within the CITES framework by insisting on upholding the controversial ban on ivory trade as the solution to elephant poaching. The countries want controlled and sustainable international trade in ivory and other wildlife products, a request that CITES has consistently turned down. Instead, more Western countries are seen going a step further to harm African wildlife conservation efforts by targeting the trophy hunting sector.

“The (UK) bill on trophy hunting ban is a socio-economic issue on communities who co-exist with wildlife because hunting is the only tool that is used to reduce the number and at the same time provide employment as well as financial incentives and meat for the communities,” Chieftainess Rebecca Banika from Botswana’s Chobe district told Down to Earth.

“The revenue generated is used to assist community members with funeral services, provide shelter for those who cannot afford to build themselves decent houses and pipes for clean water, pay school fees, transport and other necessities, to mention just a few,” she added.

She said what is worrisome is that those who are opposed to trophy hunting are not offering any viable alternative way for the African elephant range states to manage their overgrown wildlife resources.

President Masisi, who has accused the West of a neo-colonial attitude when it comes to dealing with African states, is not amused by the opposition that his country faces. “It startles and bamboozles me when people sit in the comfort of where they come from and lecture to us about the management of the species they don’t have,” Masisi told a regional meeting convened to discuss the problem of elephant over-population.

“They want to admire from a distance and in the admiration of those species, they forget that we too are species. They talk as if we are the trees and grass that the elephants feed on.”