Poachers kill 26 elephants in Chobe

AT LEAST 26 elephants, their faces hacked off and their tusks removed, lay in congealing blood on Botswana’s Chobe National Park floodplain.

Poachers had killed them within sight of a Wilderness Safaris lodge and the Linyanti Bush Camp.

The park is home to the greatest elephant herd in the world and the jewel in the crown of the sprawling, five-country Kavanga-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (Kaza).

Of huge concern is that the slaughter occurred in a park protected by the Botswana Defence Force, one of the most efficient anti-poaching operations on the continent.

As the chopper descends, conservationist Mike Chase of Elephants Without Borders shakes his head in disbelief.

“This is shocking,” he says as we duck beneath the throbbing chopper blades.

“We’ve never had poaching here on this scale. In the two years of the Great Elephant Census, which we’ve just completed, this is the worst single incident of poaching I’ve seen. And right in our own backyard!”

On the Botswana side there’s no human habitation, but on the Namibian bank is a village. The poachers are probably coming from across the river, where there are also hunting concessions.

“It could be Zambians,” Chase says as he circles the carcass. Hard to tell.

The Luiana and Sioma Ngwezi national parks further upriver in Angola and Zambia have been heavily poached. “Poachers are going after elephants wherever they can find them.”

Over the past decade, elephants have been retreating to Botswana as poaching in the other Kaza countries – Angola, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe – has increased.

Satellite tracking by Elephants Without Borders between 2011 and 2014 showed that except for limited movement in Namibia’s Mdumu National Park, elephants remained mainly in Botswana.

Tracking also shows poaching and hunting are blocking their seasonal migration routes.

In July, residents at a Namibian tourist lodge on the banks of the Kavango River watched as men armed with AK-47s opened fire at about 40 elephants grazing across the river in Angola.

According to one of the tourists, the men appeared out of the bushes on the Angolan side of the river.

The census of savannah elephants by Elephants Without Borders has found herds across Africa are being decimated for their ivory, mainly for the Chinese market.

Between 2007 and 2014, in 15 countries, the number of elephants declined by 144 000 or 30 percent. In the past five years in Tanzania, the population has plummeted by an alarming 60 percent and in Mozambique by 53 percent.

Grant Woodrow, of Wilderness Safaris, says tourism could serve to put brakes on poaching, but he is concerned Chobe could be a conduit for poachers.

“The government needs to step on this quickly and hard.”

Chase says the virtual elimination of herds in neighbouring countries has made poachers move south.

Carcasses on the Chobe floodplain could mark the beginning of an assault on the once-safe Botswana herds in the greatest elephant sanctuary on earth.