DEADLY FAILURE OP-ED: A collar was not enough: Botswana’s failure to protect its research elephants from trophy hunters

Information from Botswana indicates that two satellite-collared elephant bulls were shot by trophy hunters on 3 and 4 September, in separate hunting areas and on separate hunts. Both animals were identifiable research elephants. Both wore collars. Both were apparently observed and assessed before they were shot.

And, extraordinarily, Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) officials were reportedly present.

That last detail is a serious one because this should not be allowed to dissolve into another convenient argument about whether a hunter could or could not see a collar. This is not simply a question of poor judgement by two hunting parties. It is a question about the ethical and regulatory credibility of Botswana’s wildlife management system… and trophy hunting in general.

If a government official accompanies a trophy hunt precisely because the activity requires oversight, and a protected research elephant is nevertheless selected, pursued and killed, then the oversight has failed at the most basic level.

When it happens twice, on consecutive days, the explanation becomes considerably harder to accept.

A failure before the trigger was pulled

Trophy hunting is routinely defended on the basis that it is highly selective. The hunter does not indiscriminately fire into a herd. Individual animals are located, followed, observed, assessed and ultimately selected. Tusks are examined. Age is estimated. Trophy quality is evaluated. The animal’s position is considered. The hunter manoeuvres for an appropriate shot.

That makes the suggestion that a substantial satellite collar around an elephant’s neck simply escaped everyone’s attention particularly difficult to reconcile with the supposed precision of the exercise.

If a hunting party can inspect an elephant carefully enough to decide that his tusks make him worth killing but not carefully enough to establish whether he is wearing a research collar, then something is fundamentally wrong with the standards governing the hunt.

And if visibility is genuinely so poor that the entire neck cannot be examined? Then do not shoot.

This should not be complicated.

The ethical burden must surely rest on those intending to kill the animal to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the animal is legally and ethically available to be killed. The elephant should not bear the consequences of uncertainty. Yet that appears to be exactly what happened.

Botswana has made this promise before

What makes the latest deaths particularly troubling is that Botswana has already confronted almost precisely this problem.

In November 2019, a collared bull elephant was shot in Controlled Hunting Area NG3 during a licensed hunt accompanied by a DWNP official. Botswana’s Ministry of Environment subsequently issued an unusually unequivocal statement: the killing of collared animals was “not permitted under any circumstances”, and transgressors could face measures including revocation of their licences.

The professional hunters involved surrendered their licences. The hunting industry itself condemned the incident as contrary to ethical hunting practice. The important point is not merely that Botswana expressed regret seven years ago. It promised to prevent it from happening again.

Now two more collared elephants are dead.

If the information surrounding these latest hunts is confirmed, Botswana’s authorities need to explain what actually changed after 2019. What additional safeguards were introduced? What instructions were issued to DWNP officers accompanying elephant hunts? What information about collared elephants is provided to hunting operators? Is there a database? Are locations communicated? Does anyone check before permission to fire is given? And, most fundamentally, who has the authority to say: No. This elephant cannot be shot.

A prohibition without an effective mechanism for enforcing it is not protection. It is merely a statement of intent.

The ethical blindness of the quota

There is a deeper problem here.

Much of the defence of trophy hunting rests upon population-level mathematics. Botswana has many elephants; a quota represents a small proportion of them; therefore the removal of a certain number is described as biologically sustainable.

But this reduces living beings to units within an accounting system. An elephant is not rendered ethically insignificant because there are other elephants. Nor are individual elephants interchangeable.

A research elephant demonstrates this particularly clearly because the collar makes his individual identity impossible to ignore. Someone knows this animal. Researchers have captured him, immobilised him, measured him and fitted him with expensive tracking equipment. His movements may have been recorded for years. His journeys across landscapes generate information about habitat use, corridors, water, seasonal movements, human-elephant interactions and the permeability of conservation boundaries.

He has, in other words, a biography. The satellite signal is effectively a record of a life unfolding across a landscape. When the elephant is shot, that record ends. You cannot simply put the collar onto another elephant and recover what has been lost, because longitudinal ecological information belongs to the particular animal that generated it.

A line Botswana has already drawn

The question now facing Botswana’s wildlife authorities is therefore considerably larger than how two hunting parties supposedly failed to notice two collars. It is whether a system that describes itself as regulated, scientific and ethical possesses either the capacity or the willingness to protect an elephant even after the state has explicitly determined that he should not be killed.

Because, if a visible research collar, a declared prohibition and the physical presence of a wildlife official are still not enough to keep an elephant alive, then one is entitled to ask what, exactly, Botswana’s protection amounts to.

A collar should have drawn an unmistakable line between the elephant and the gun. Twice in two days, that line was crossed. And that, perhaps more than anything, speaks to the state of the trophy hunting industry in southern Africa: a system so ethically compromised that even its most basic safeguards appear expendable. Rotten to the core. DM