Botswana is fed up. The country is home to almost a third of the world’s savanna elephants, a population that has tripled since 1984, and Botswana is often hailed as a conservation success.
But European nations, most recently Germany, are attacking a lynchpin of Botswana’s elephant management strategy: trophy hunting. The German environment ministry is pushing to ban the import of elephant trophies, which it began discussing in 2022, across the E.U. Last week, they delivered their plan to counterparts in Botswana, a spokesperson told NBC News.
Germany is one of the E.U.’s largest importers of hunting trophies. Animal trophies can be the entire hunted animal, or any part of it, like the head, skin, or tusk, kept as a souvenir.
The potential ban, which would disincentivize European trophy hunters from going to Botswana, sparked the country’s ire. In response, President Mokgweetsi Masisi said Tuesday that he will send 20,000 elephants to Germany from Botswana’s population of 130,000.
“It’s not a joke,” Masisi told the German tabloid newspaper Bild. But a spokesperson for Germany’s Federal Agency for Nature Conservation told NBC News, “There is currently no formal request of a transfer of 20,000 elephants from Botswana to Germany.”
“It is very easy to sit in Berlin and have an opinion about our affairs in Botswana,” Masisi said. “We are paying the price for preserving these animals for the world.” In Botswana, elephants kill livestock and trample crops and people.
While trophy hunting can seem like a visceral representation of how humans endanger animals, the relationship is complex. Trophy hunting is not “threatening the survival of species as a whole,” Dilys Roe, chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group, told NBC News. The IUCN is an international conservation organization that assesses whether species are threatened or endangered, and analyzes the measures needed to safeguard the natural world.
In fact, Roe said, trophy hunting could aid in conservation by “giving value to wildlife and therefore increasing the tolerance of local people to put up with dangerous wild animals on their doorsteps.”