The third Monday of July each year is Botswana’s President’s Day. As a result, the whole country gets two days off in addition to the weekend. In light of the long weekend, a few other interns and I made plans to travel north to Kasane, a town near where the borders of Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Namibia meet and the site of the gateway to the famed Chobe National Park and Victoria Falls. As driving from Gaborone to Kasane would have taken at least ten hours, we flew on Air Botswana, which we have now learned to be somewhat unpredictable in its operations and scheduling. A few days before departure, I received an email informing me that our return flight back to Gaborone had been pushed back by an hour. Two days before departure, an airlines representative called to inform me that our flight to Kasane had likewise been pushed back by two hours. One day before departure, another email informed me that the return flight to Gaborone would be departing at the originally scheduled time. I suppose it’s difficult to blame the company when it only has two planes and has to judge how best to utilize them without constantly losing money. In the end, we suffered no major delays.
During our first day in Kasane, we visited the office of Elephants Without Borders (EWB), a Botswanan non-profit dedicated to elephant conservation, research, education, and information sharing. Botswana has the largest elephant population in Africa, partially thanks to its conservation policies in the past and a five-year hunting ban imposed by former president Ian Khama. With the growing number of elephants comes growing incidents of human-elephant conflicts, and in May, the Government of Botswana announced that it would lift the hunting ban. The international uproar that followed the decision was immediate. Ellen DeGeneres tweeted about it, and boycott campaigns spread on the Internet.
Digging a little deeper though, elephants are not just tourists-attracting animals here. Botswana’s current president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, was in Las Vegas for a diamond conference just a week after the government lifted the ban. When a protester interrupted his speech and accused him of having blood on his hands, he said, “Imagine if you choose […] to walk through your lands. And 500 meters away from it, or 200 meters away from it, in some instances a hundred meters away from it, you encounter an elephant. What would you do? […] [O]nce [the elephant] made up its mind [to charge], you’re finished. And when an elephant finishes you, it’s not a pretty sight.” Such is the reality for many Batswana (people of Botswana, plural of Motswana).
In an effort to find the balance between sustaining elephant populations and protecting human livelihoods, EWB had to first establish how large the elephant populations actually are. Dr. Mike Chase—EWB founder and director, the first person to receive a PhD in elephant ecology, and a fifth-generation Motswana—has been conducting aerial surveys of elephants and other wildlife since 2001. The latest round with a released report, flown during July to October 2014, estimated 129,939 ± 12,500 elephants in northern Botswana. While the number of elephants hasn’t changed much compared to the 2010 estimate, when EWB previously conducted aerial surveys over the same area, the concentrations of elephant herds in various areas had changed, possibly due to elephant movements.
From a conservation standpoint, a stable number of elephants is not necessarily a cause for concern. EWB’s worry stemmed from their 2018 aerial surveys, during which Dr. Chase and the team found evidence of increased elephant poaching. EWB, as a part of their standard operating procedure, notified the government upon finding the poached elephant carcasses. The government, however, had reduced the capacity of its anti-poaching unit to deal with well-armed poachers starting May 2018 and did not respond to EWB’s calls for action. This culminated in several news articles and the BBC reporting that EWB had found 87 poached elephant carcasses halfway through their aerial surveys in September 2018. Dr. Chase eventually completed the surveys and submitted a completed, peer-reviewed report (which has not been released to the public) to the government in January 2019.
EWB’s latest findings did not receive a welcoming reception in Botswana. Many accused Dr. Chase of false reporting and attacked him personally. The government publicly questioned his methods—but at least acknowledged that poaching is a threat in Botswana. This was in February 2019. The government announced the lifting of the hunting ban in May 2019.
For Botswana, human-wildlife conflict presents a complicated dilemma. On the one hand, these majestic animals are essential for the ecosystem and bring tourism money into the otherwise little-visited southern African country. On the other, living with the largest elephant and other wildlife populations, which consume a large amount of natural resources, hampers the economic development and livelihoods of ordinary Batswana, especially those living in rural areas that on subsistence agriculture. McNutt et al. (2018) found in interviews of 62 heads of households in northern Botswana that two-thirds of them reported livestock losses to wildlife predators. Using lethal control means was twice as likely in households which were denied government compensation. With an election in October, the Botswana government is in a tough spot navigating between calls for conservation and concerns of its citizens—people can vote, but elephants cannot.
As a part of our EWB visit, we got to see three elephant calves in their orphanage. EWB cares for the calves that lost their families with a full team of staff, with the eventual goal of rehabilitating them back into the wild. The calves were playful, about the size of an SUV, and hairy, which I did not expect. One of them has an affinity for grabbing things (and human body parts) and gladly wiped her trunk all over me and the other interns. It was exceptionally entertaining to see their baby tantrums when a poor warthog wandered in and one of the elephant calves immediately went to chase it out of eyesight, trumpeting constantly at the same time. I hope that these babies will eventually be able to do the same on their own in the wild and that elephants’ trumpeting can continue to be heard for the future generations to come.
Reference
McNutt, J. W., Stein, A. B., McNutt, L. B., & Jordan, N. R. (2018). Living on the edge: characteristics of human-wildlife conflict in a traditional livestock community in Botswana. Wildlife Research, 44(7), 546-557.