In Botswana, a conservation success story has come with deadly consequences
Stephanie March, Marty Smiley, and Matt Davis, ABC
March 31, 2025
See link
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-01/botswana-elephant-conservation-trophy-hunting/105077698
for photos.
Hunting elephants has left Leon Kachelhoffer with a strange mix of
reverence and disdain for the animals.
“It’s always fascinating that the biggest animal on Earth moves the
quietest out of the lot,” he says, rifle slung over his shoulder, tramping
through scrubby bush in northern Botswana.
He squats to carefully inspect a footprint in the sand left by a huge bull
elephant he says is just up ahead.
Footprints aren’t the only sign we’re on the right track.
“As you can see, he’s ripped this branch off and kept going,” says Leon,
next to a shattered tree.
I ask him why they’d do that. “Idiots. Idiots is the only thing,” he says.
Leon, a professional trophy hunter, often takes clients on weeks-long trips
to stalk and kill elephants, targeting older bulls they think are past
prime breeding age.
The African savanna elephant is listed as endangered but can be legally
hunted for sport in Botswana, although it’s still controversial — a fact
Leon knows all too well.
In 2022, he briefly shot to infamy when a photo of a “big tusker” he and a
client had just killed went viral, sparking a global outcry.
Hunting is not just a business for him — rightly or wrongly, he believes
it’s good for both elephants’ survival and for the people of Botswana.
“For them, elephant are vermin,” he says.
Botswana boasts the largest elephant population on Earth.
Elephant numbers here have doubled to 130,000 over three decades, in part
due to anti-poaching efforts.
They are a huge drawcard for the country’s tourism industry, which
generates about 10 per cent of GDP and creates tens of thousands of jobs.
But this conservation success has brought with it big problems.
The elephants are popular with tourists, but locals’ relationship with them
is complicated.
While the elephant population has doubled, so too has the number of people
in Botswana, leaving the animals and humans in a competition for space and
resources.
Elephants destroy infrastructure such as fences and water tanks and raid
farmers’ crops during the harvest season, forcing some to leave their farms
altogether.
Growing contact between elephants and humans has also turned deadly — for
both.
About 100 people have reportedly been killed or injured by elephants in
Botswana since 2010, no small number in a country of only 2.6 million.
It’s not hard to see why.
As Leon leads us deeper into the bush, we find two elephants at the edge of
a muddy pool.
Suddenly, one flares its ears — a warning before a charge — and splits the
air with a raspy trumpet call.
Leon raises his rifle in the air and yells. The elephant turns and runs off
into the bush.
Leon’s right; its feet don’t make a sound, and only the noise of breaking
branches reveals its retreat.
“Imagine that bull coming at 40 kilometres an hour,” he says. “Imagine a
villager that’s walking around looking for lost cattle or … at night trying
to keep these elephants out of their fields.
“They’ve got nothing. They’re completely defenceless.”
‘They’re Terrorising Us’
Living alongside elephants is now a fact of life for many people across
northern Botswana, where most of the country’s herd roam.
Feelings about how best to co-exist with them are complex, ranging from a
desire for limited culling to trying to move them to less-populated areas.
“Elephants are terrorists. They’re terrorising us,” says Leungo
Motlakaleso, who lives on the edge of the world-heritage-listed Okavango
Delta, a vast inland waterway.
His village of Shokomoka is sandwiched between the forest where elephants
feed and the water where they drink.
As they transit through, they cause chaos.
“They come even into our farm fields. During the night they break in, they
eat. Sometimes we wake up in the morning and find nothing,” he says.
Shokomoka is mostly leaf huts and fences made with tree branches. There’s
no running water or electricity.
Locals desperately want to improve their lot, but safari trucks full of
wealthy tourists just whiz by on the dirt road.
The village lacks the kind of tourist infrastructure that would make them
stop.
Instead, they see only the downsides of Botswana’s elephant boom.
“We don’t benefit anything from them,” Luengo says. “They are the ones
benefiting from us.”
Trophy hunting is supposed to be part of the solution to Leungo’s conundrum.
Re-introduced in 2019, the sport is intended to garner revenue for locals
to offset the hardship of living alongside these destructive giants.
Debbie Peake runs a trophy dealership in Maun, in northern Botswana, that
employs dozens of staff.
In her workshop they process the heads, tusks and other body parts of
animals killed by foreign hunters for export back to the client’s home
country.
It’s a gruesome business.
A dozen elephant skulls are lined up next to rows of more than a hundred
jawbones.
Nearby, a shipping container sits full of elephant hides, and piles of
ivory are stacked up in a locked safe.
Workers reach into liquid-filled tubs to scrape meat and fat off bones.
Debbie says the hunting industry creates about 2,500 jobs and that part of
the $100,000 foreign hunters can pay to stalk and shoot a single elephant
goes towards conservation and local communities.
“If communities don’t want to live with wildlife, they have that final say
— they will simply demolish it,” she says
“But if they see benefits from it and it creates a livelihood for them and
it creates the means for them to be able to keep that traditional
lifestyle, that’s what it should be.”
Debbie is at pains to point out that trophy hunting is not about population
control.
“We have a population of 130,000 elephants-plus, and our [hunting] quota is
400. Do the maths. It’s never going to control the population.”
Instead, she argues it can bring foreign money into areas that otherwise
might miss out.
Around 40 per cent of Botswana is dedicated to wildlife, but she says large
swathes of the country aren’t suitable for safari tourism or farming.
Hunting works in areas that “wouldn’t be viable for photographic clients,”
she says. “Equally, there’s no agricultural potential. You can’t put cattle
in there because there’s no water.”
Botswana has had a rocky history with trophy hunting.
In 2014, then-president Ian Khama introduced a moratorium on the practice,
worrying it was damaging the country’s wildlife credentials in the eyes of
the world.
Five years later, his successor Mokgweetsi Masisi reinstated it, citing
high levels of elephant-human conflict and the impact the large elephant
population was having on livelihoods.
The international community has weighed in too — celebrities such as Ellen
DeGeneres, Ricky Gervais, Piers Morgan and Joanna Lumley have all vocally
opposed trophy hunting.
More recently, the UK parliament passed a vote supporting a ban on
importing hunting trophies and Germany floated a similar idea in an effort
to curtail the hunting industry.
The Masisi government hit back by threatening to send thousands of
elephants to Berlin and London so people could see what it was like to live
alongside them.
It’s a subject that rankles hunters like Leon Kachelhoffer too.
“What perplexes me is [in] countries like the US and the UK, you can
pheasant shoot and you can deer shoot, you can go and hunt moose and things
like that, but we can’t hunt our wildlife. Why not?” he says.
“I don’t know why we are looked down upon as Africa that we can’t look
after our own resources.”
He agrees with Debbie Peake that trophy hunting can help communities
“realise a benefit” from elephants by creating “an incentive to set aside
land and to tolerate the animals”.
An Alternative Solution
That system, however, isn’t working for everyone.
Leungo Motlakaleso says he has no idea how much money is being generated
from trophy hunting in his area, and his community has never seen the
benefit from it.
“[We] don’t even know how many elephants are supposed to be killed in our
area,” he says. “How would we know about the money?”
He’s not the only local who feels this way.
Oaitse Nawa, founder of the Elephant Protection Society, says there are
only two entities that benefit from trophy hunting: “the hunter and then
the government”.
He grew up next to the Okavango Delta and was a safari guide for many years.
Now, through his NGO, he’s trying to help communities live alongside
elephants without killing them.
Both he and Leungo think attracting elephants away from villages by
creating artificial waterholes could keep communities safe and bring in
tourists.
Neither want to see elephants killed for sport. “It’s cruelty to animals —
it shouldn’t happen,” Leungo says.
Oaitse is desperate to convince locals — and the world — there is another
way.
Walking through the scrub near Shokomoka, he motions for us to stop and be
quiet when we come across a herd of elephants.
He has no gun, no weapons. The herd calmly passes within metres of us.
“There’s a difference between fear and respect,” he says. “The hunters,
they have fear of nature because they know that what they are doing in
nature is bad.”
He has many complaints about trophy hunting, including his belief that
killing older males actually makes the human-elephant conflict worse
because it removes role models for the younger animals in the herd.
He also takes issue with one of the supposed benefits of trophy hunting for
locals.
After an elephant is killed, hunters allow villagers to take the meat from
the carcass. Locals hack at it with axes and knives to collect it before it
goes off.
The hunting community says it’s an important source of protein for grateful
villagers.
Leungo and Oaitse find that deeply insulting.
“Being given meat is like you are treated like hyena or scavengers,” Oaitse
says.
“This is how black people have been treated for quite a long time. But now
we are in the modern world. We need education, we need transport, we need
to compete with other cultures.
“We value money, not meat.”
Resolving human-elephant conflict and the role trophy hunting plays is
something Botswana’s recently elected president, Duma Boko, needs to
grapple with.
Since he won office late last year from the pro-hunting president
Mokgweetsi Masisi, activists and conservationists like Oaitse Nawa have
been lobbying him to ban trophy hunting.
In theory, they have reason to be hopeful.
In an op-ed written in 2019, Boko slammed Masisi for reintroducing trophy
hunting and his desire to resume selling ivory, saying there was “simply no
need for these policies”.
Boko wrote then that the money trophy hunters might bring to the country is
“sure to be offset by losses in wildlife and ecological tourism”.
However, hopes of a policy change for those opposed to hunting are fading.
In December, the Boko government released more than 400 elephant permits
for the 2025 hunting season.
“One thing that I can advise to this cabinet, they should have lots of
consultation to the community,” Oaitse says.
“Those people that are the ones that are very important and those are the
people that go and queue and cast their vote.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-01/botswana-elephant-conservation-trophy-hunting/105077698