Botswana’s head of state is making the federal government an offer that many would like to refuse. He wants to give the Germans wild animals: “20,000 wild elephants for Germany. That’s no joke,” says President Masisi. What’s behind it?
Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi told the “Bild” newspaper that he was dead serious about the offer. He wants to donate 20,000 elephants to the Federal Republic. The Germans should “live with the animals the way you try to tell us,” said Masisi. “That’s no joke.”
The reason for this unusual gift is Germany’s Environment Minister Steffi Lemke’s plan to further restrict the import of hunting trophies into the European Union. Minister Lemke’s office announced: Specifically, there are discussions at EU level about extending the import permit requirement to other, highly protected and endangered animal species. The Green politician is a declared supporter of further import restrictions on hunting trophies. She regularly comments on this at the beginning of the year, namely whenever Europe’s largest hunting fair “Jagd und Hunde” is held in Dortmund’s Westfalenhalle.
The event has been held in Dortmund for over 40 years with well over 80,000 visitors and around 800 exhibitors. After the Americans, German hunters are the frontrunners when it comes to hunting trips to Africa. Between 2016 and 2021, trophies of 3,779 animals of internationally protected species were imported into Germany, including 142 leopards, 138 hippos, 140 brown bears, 119 elephants, 103 lions – i.e. animals whose populations are considered “endangered”.
Botswana suffers from an overpopulation of elephants
To import you need a permit from the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation. This also checks the export permits from the countries where the animal was shot. Since 2021, the world’s leading species protection organizations have been calling for this import to be stopped completely. Some European countries have already banned the import of such trophies. After great excitement, France became the first country in Europe to stop importing lion trophies in 2015. In 2016, the Netherlands imposed a ban on the import of trophies of all endangered species. A corresponding law is being debated in Great Britain, and in Belgium the parliament there has called on the government to introduce an import ban. Finland has imposed an import ban in 2022.
Accordingly, Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi fears that such tightening of laws at EU level will destroy his business and thus his state budget and that the elephant problem in his country will increase immeasurably.
Botswana has been suffering from an enormous elephant overpopulation for years. The country is now home to more than 130,000 of the voracious pachyderms – and the number is constantly increasing. Up to 6,000 are added every year because almost all herds produce offspring again. But the increasing elephant population requires more and more living space because the herds migrate over hundreds of kilometers. Together they roam the savannah in search of food. An adult elephant eats 150 to 175 kilograms and drinks 70 to 150 liters of water per day.
Protecting species with an assault rifle
Botswana has so far had the advantage of having a large land area available on which only around 2.6 million people live. Almost a quarter of the country is designated as a protected area in which no humans are allowed to live, only wild animals such as elephants. In the eyes of international species conservation organizations, Botswana’s government has actually done everything right in the past: namely, it has placed the elephants under strict protection.
Review: Until 2015, poaching was a huge problem on the African continent. According to estimates at the time, an elephant was killed every eleven minutes in Africa in those years. At that time, international mafia organizations were making enormous amounts of money from the illegal ivory trade, especially towards Asia, where most of the buyers were. Animal rights activists first sounded the alarm in 2011 that there would soon be no elephants left unless a radical turnaround occurred.
A paradigm shift then took place in international nature conservation policy: in order to make species protection more robust, the global community decided to take targeted action against poaching. The logical consequence was to upgrade Africa’s national parks, better train game wardens and equip them with the most modern weapons and reconnaissance technology. In some countries, park rangers are now better trained than the soldiers of the state military units. They carry assault rifles, night vision goggles and have reconnaissance drones.
Botswana’s government, which receives a large part of its budget from the tourism sector, set a good example. Already in 2013, it passed a harsh anti-poaching law that stipulated life sentences for the illegal killing of elephants. It even allowed game wardens to shoot poachers if they entered national parks armed. Tshekedi Khama, Botswana’s environment and tourism minister and brother of then-President Ian Khama, even publicly warned: “If you come to Botswana to poach, there is a chance you will not return alive.”
Several poachers were killed
In 2015, local media reported that Botswana game wardens had killed 30 Namibians and 22 Zimbabweans they found poaching in parks near the border – a clear sign that the government was serious about its threats. With success: for years not a single elephant was killed in Botswana. The parks there were considered so safe that entire herds immigrated from neighboring countries. The country is now home to the largest elephant population in Africa.
But then the big drought came in 2019. Because of hunger and thirst, the elephants left the national parks, not all of which were fenced off at the time, and attacked the fields of neighboring farmers. That year they destroyed entire harvests and thus the livelihoods of the local communities.
To ensure that the animals do not starve and die of thirst, international animal protection organizations in neighboring Zimbabwe carted tons of animal food and water into the national parks, while the people around them received no help. Botswana’s government, on the other hand, wanted to improve the population and decimate the animals in order to solve the problem. Environmentalists took to the barricades against this project.
Shooting licenses finance nature conservation
Despite international criticism, the government finally decided in 2019 to allow hunting of elephants again in order to decimate the population and at the same time generate income from regulated hunting licenses. The elephant population in Botswana is not in danger, on the contrary: it is “far larger than Botswana’s fragile environment, which is already suffering from drought and the consequences of climate change, can safely cope with,” said the press release.
Since then, Botswana’s Ministry of the Environment, which is responsible for the country’s numerous national parks, has financed its nature conservation projects largely from the sale of shooting licenses. 300 elephants can legally be killed per season. According to Botswana’s official information, this is less than 0.3 percent of the total population – and does not endanger the stocks in any way.
A shot costs around 1,660 euros. This money usually goes back into purchases by the nature conservation authority. Apart from the rough diamond business, which the country has in abundance, Botswana has hardly any revenue in the state treasury. Most of it comes from the tourism sector, through which the country earns around two billion dollars a year – especially from wealthy Western, including German, hunters whose dream is apparently to kill an elephant once in their life.
Botswana’s President Masisi now fears that a ban on the import of trophies could endanger this model. In an interview with the “Bild” newspaper, he notes: “It’s very easy to sit in Berlin and have an opinion about our affairs in Botswana. We pay the price for preserving these animals for the world. “