Elephants in the plains of the Chobe
district in the northern part of Botswana, in 2018.CreditCreditMonirul Bhuiyan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
CAPE TOWN — Elephant hunting will resume in Botswana
after a five-year prohibition, the government of that southern African nation
said, despite intense lobbying by some conservation advocates to continue the
ban.
The Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources
Conservation and Tourism announced the decision on Wednesday, saying
that after “extensive consultations with all stakeholders,” the government had
lifted the ban based on the “general consensus from those consulted.”
The policy has long been hotly debated, both within
Botswana and in the broader international conservation community, as part of
the effort to find the best way to balance the economic needs of the country’s
people and demands of conservationists.
In recent months, Botswana has come under immense
international pressure to preserve the ban, including multiple petitions and threats of tourism boycotts. The Humane Society
International, an animal welfare group based in Washington, warned in March
that “reinstating trophy hunting and starting elephant culls could hurt the
country’s economy.”
The decision was met with outrage from some in the
international community. Celebrities like the talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres and the actress Kristin Davis have waded into the debate and
called for a boycott of tourism to Botswana unless the hunting ban was
maintained.
Botswana, long seen as a conservation success story,
has the largest elephant population in Africa, about one-third of the
continent’s total.
Some believe the resumption of hunting is an attempt
by President Mokgweetsi E.K. Masisi to win over rural voters before elections
that are schedule for later this year.
The ban was imposed in 2014 by his predecessor, Ian
Khama, an avid conservationist who won praise from many Western conservation
groups for his tough stance against poaching, including a controversial “shoot
to kill” policy to stop poachers. Mr. Khama also strongly opposed trophy
hunting. But just months after Mr. Masisi took office in 2018, he created a
committee to reassess the ban.
Mr.
Khama’s brother, Tshekedi, was removed as Botswana’s environment minister in
December after clashing with the new president over the hunting debate, a power
struggle that came to light when the animal rights charity Elephants Without
Borders claimed that a “poaching
frenzy” was taking place in the north of the country in 2018.
Scientists and Botswana’s government later pushed
back against the claims, accusing the charity of trying to
manipulate conservation policy and preserve the Khama family’s influence.
The hunting ban has
allowed Botswana’s elephant population to grow at a rate that is unsustainable
and starved preservation efforts of much-needed revenue, according to opponents
of the restrictions, a group that included not just the government but some
conservationists.
The Environment
Ministry pointed to the rising levels of human-elephant conflict as one of the
reasons for the decision to end the hunting ban. Rural farmers struggle to keep
elephants from eating their crops and trampling their fields, as the animals
often wander into farms and villages, sometimes with deadly consequences.
The government also
said that the Department of Wildlife and National Parks was ill-equipped to
deal with animal control issues, leading to long response times in dealing with
animals that posed a threat.
The ministry said
it wanted to ensure the reinstatement of hunting would be done in an “orderly
and ethical manner,” in accordance with the country’s conservation laws. It
cited a basic tension between economic arguments about what benefits people,
and the desire to protect the animals.
Advocates for
limited trophy hunting say that it can generate income for communities, which
could in turn support conservation efforts.
“By sacrificing 700
elephants per year we’re likely going to save more,” said Erik Verreynne, a
wildlife veterinarian and consultant based in Gaborone, Botswana.
The government did
not immediately provide details of its new policy, including how many elephants
it would allow hunters to kill, and whether hunting would be allowed to resume
immediately.
Botswana has some
27,000 elephants living outside wildlife management areas that often come into
conflict with farmers, according to Mr. Verreynne.
“Rural communities
endure the cost of human-wildlife conflict yet are largely excluded from the
income generated by tourist industries,” he said. Lifting the ban on hunting,
he added, could “be a tool to provide sustainability.”
In many rural
areas, Mr. Verreynne said, there was “antagonism forming against Western
influence and interference” that posed a far graver threat to conservation than
hunting. But other conservationists were firmly opposed to the idea of
reinstating elephant hunting.
In Africa, “an
elephant is being killed by poachers on average every fifteen minutes,” said
Don Pinnock, a conservation journalist and author of “The Last Elephants.” “Botswana is the last
refuge for these elephants, and suddenly that refuge is going to start hunting
them.”
It was a “tragedy,”
Mr. Pinnock added, that elephants had become “collateral damage” in the buildup
to elections. “The party is losing votes rapidly and wants to increase its
votes in the rural areas by allowing the hunting of elephants,” he said.
There are about 415,000 African elephants in the wild,
according to the World Wildlife Fund, spread over 37 nations. Their population
is considered “vulnerable,” down from between three to five million in the last
century, largely because of unregulated hunting.
Kimon de Greef reported from Cape Town, and Megan
Specia from London.
A version of this article appears
in print on May 24, 2019, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the
headline: Botswana Ends Elephant-Hunting Ban. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
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The New York Times, By Kimon de Greef
and Megan
Specia May 23, 2019
Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/world/africa/botswana-elephant-hunting.html
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