Botswana government sold seven hunting licences on Friday as a result of the growing human-elephant conflict and the negative impact on livelihoods. Each permit will allow hunters to kill 10 elephants in “controlled hunting areas”.
The government issued quota is for the killing of 272 elephants in 2020. Bidders put down a refundable deposit of 200,000 pula ($18,000; £14,000). The lifting of the ban has been popular with many in rural communities, but has been heavily criticised by conservationists.
Many rural communities believe a return to commercial hunting will help keep the elephant population away from their villages, and also bring in much-needed income in places not suitable for high-end tourism.
The hunting would help areas most impacted by “human wildlife conflict”, wildlife spokeswoman Alice Mmolawa told AFP news agency.
Affluent conservationists’ attempts to bid for the licences and spare the elephants were thwarted by the authorities through a late condition of sale: that the permits could go only to bidders with hunting qualifications and demonstrable experience in hunting.
Audrey Delsink, Africa’s wildlife director for the global conservation lobby charity Humane Society International, called the auctions “deeply concerning and questionable”.
“Hunting is not an effective long-term human-elephant mitigation tool or population control method,” she told AFP.
Ross Harvey, an environmental economist in South Africa, told the BBC: “There is no scientific evidence to support the view of there being too many elephants.
“We know that Botswana’s elephant numbers haven’t actually increased over the last five years, we have a stable population. Elephants are critical to Botswana’s ecology.”
Africa’s overall elephant population is declining due to poaching, but Botswana, home to almost a third of the continent’s elephants, has seen numbers grow to 130,000 from 80,000 in the late 1990s. Botswana has the largest elephant population on the continent due to a number of reasons, including tight protection and civil unrest in neighbouring countries. The relative difficulty in accessing the wildlife areas coupled with the military threat to poachers has allowed the elephant population in Botswana to grow.
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