Botswana's Elephant Hunting Auction: Licences, Prices and the Debate

Originally published 2020-05-15.

On 7 February 2020 Botswana held its first auction of elephant-hunting licences since it ended a five-year hunting ban. Seven packages were offered in Gaborone, each allowing a hunter to shoot ten elephants. Six of them reportedly sold, raising about 25.7 million pula, roughly $2.3 million, which works out to around $38,000 per elephant. The sale divided opinion sharply: farmers in elephant country welcomed it, while conservation groups called it short-sighted.

Here is how Botswana got there, what the auction actually involved, and why scientists, villagers and tourism businesses still disagree about whether hunting helps or harms the country’s elephants.

From hunting ban to auction

Botswana banned trophy hunting on public land in 2014 under President Ian Khama, a committed conservationist. The ban made the country a symbol of protection for African elephants and fitted its image as a high-value photographic safari destination, built around places such as the Okavango Delta and Chobe National Park.

Khama’s successor, Mokgweetsi Masisi, took a different view. After public consultations, his government lifted the ban in May 2019. Officials argued that elephant numbers had grown to a level that was causing serious problems for rural communities, and that regulated hunting could bring money and some relief to the areas most affected. Khama publicly criticised the decision, and the policy became one of the clearest breaks between the two leaders.

The auction followed in February 2020. The Department of Wildlife and National Parks offered seven hunting packages of ten elephants each, 70 animals in total. Bidding was limited to registered Botswana companies, which drew complaints from groups that wanted to buy licences simply to leave the elephants alive. The overall hunting quota for 2020 was reported to be around 270 elephants.

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— City's🐘 for Elephants & Rhinos (@CitysFElephants) February 7, 2020

How many elephants does Botswana have?

Botswana holds the largest elephant population of any country. The African Elephant Status Report published by the IUCN in 2016 estimated about 131,600 elephants in Botswana, close to a third of all the elephants counted across the continent. The same report put the continental total at about 415,000.

The trend in Botswana has been very different from much of Africa. Its herds grew over the past few decades while populations in parts of East, Central and West Africa collapsed under poaching. That success is part of the problem the government points to: more elephants, spreading into farmland and villages, means more conflict with people.

For the wider picture, the numbers are sobering. Africa is estimated to have held about 1.3 million elephants in 1979. By 1989 that had fallen to roughly 600,000, mainly because of the ivory trade, which was killing an estimated 75,000 elephants a year during the 1980s. In 2021 the IUCN split its assessment into two species, listing the African savanna elephant as Endangered and the African forest elephant as Critically Endangered.

The case for hunting, as farmers see it

For people who live alongside elephants, the animals are not a postcard image. A single herd can wipe out a season’s maize or sorghum in one night. Elephants damage water pipes and fences, and encounters on footpaths can be deadly. Villagers in northern Botswana have long complained that they carry the costs of living with wildlife while the benefits of tourism go elsewhere.

Supporters of regulated hunting make a few main arguments:

• Money for communities. Licence fees and hunting operations can bring jobs and income to remote areas where photographic tourism is limited.
• A reason to tolerate wildlife. The idea, often summed up as “if it pays, it stays”, is that people protect animals that bring them value.
• Selective, limited offtake. A quota of a few hundred animals is small compared with a population of over 130,000.

The IUCN has said that well-managed trophy hunting can create conservation incentives, while noting real concerns about legality, sustainability and ethics.

The case against, from conservation groups

Opponents were quick to respond. The South African EMS Foundation wrote to Botswana’s government before the sale and asked to be allowed to bid so that it could buy licences and not use them. It accused the government of acting as if it “does not care that elephants play a critical role in maintaining healthy ecological systems”, and argued that killing prime bulls undermines the ecotourism economy that depends on seeing them alive.

Eduardo Goncalves, founder of the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting, told The Independent that hunting works like artificial selection. Because hunters target the largest and strongest animals, he argued, they remove the genes a population most needs, leaving it weaker in the face of climate change and disease. Researchers have raised similar concerns: big males often father many young, and removing them can change a population’s genetics and social structure.

Economists have questioned the money too. A 2017 analysis found that trophy hunting made up less than 1% of tourism revenue in eight African countries, and critics argue that only a small share of hunting fees ever reaches local people.

'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.' #Botswana #elephants BBC News - Botswana auctions off permits to hunt elephants https://t.co/4n1nmNOuEy

— Christina (@CWitvrouwen) February 8, 2020

The environmental economist Ross Harvey, quoted by the BBC at the time, went further, saying there was no scientific evidence that Botswana had too many elephants. In his view, the conflict was a question of land use and corridors, not of numbers alone.

Poaching, ivory and a few common myths

Hunting licences and poaching are often discussed together, but they are different problems. Legal hunting is a licensed, limited activity. Poaching is illegal killing, mostly for ivory, and it has done far more damage to Africa’s elephants.

A figure often quoted is that around 100 elephants a day are killed for their tusks. That number reflects estimates from the worst years of the poaching crisis around 2011, when poaching was killing more than a tenth of some populations each year. Research published in 2019 found that the rate had fallen below 4% by 2017, partly as ivory prices dropped after China announced a ban on its domestic ivory trade, which came into force at the end of 2017.

Another common claim is that ivory is mainly used in traditional medicine. In fact, it has historically been carved into ornaments, jewellery, name seals, piano keys and other decorative objects. Rhino horn, not elephant ivory, is the product most linked to medicinal demand.

International commercial trade in ivory has been banned since January 1990, when the African elephant was placed on CITES Appendix I. Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe were later moved to Appendix II, which allows tightly restricted trade, and Botswana is among the countries with CITES export quotas for elephant trophies.

Is there a middle way?

Most experts agree that the real challenge is not choosing between people and elephants but finding ways for both to share land. Several approaches have shown promise:

• Wildlife corridors that let herds move between parks without passing through fields and villages.
• Deterrents such as beehive and chilli fences, which elephants tend to avoid.
• Compensation schemes that pay farmers quickly and fairly for crop losses.
• Community-run tourism, where villages share in income from lodges and safaris.
• Cross-border cooperation through the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, which links Botswana with Angola, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

As human populations grow and farmland expands, contact with elephants will only increase. Whatever one thinks of trophy hunting, it can at most be one small tool. Keeping elephants alive in Botswana over the long term depends on making them worth more alive than dead to the people who live closest to them.

Later in 2020, Botswana faced a different elephant crisis, when hundreds of animals died mysteriously around the Okavango Delta. Officials later linked the deaths to toxins from cyanobacteria in seasonal waterholes, a reminder that hunting is only one of several pressures on the country’s herds.

Sources: EMS Foundation, The EMS Foundation bid to save elephants from hunt in Botswana (February 2020); Wikipedia, African bush elephant (citing the IUCN African Elephant Status Report 2016); Wikipedia, Ivory trade; Wikipedia, Trophy hunting; Wikipedia, Mokgweetsi Masisi; IUCN, African Elephant Status Report 2016.