Ivory poaching up in elephant haven

Ivory poaching increased in Botswana during a time when the country was praised for protecting the world’s biggest African elephant population with some of the toughest measures to protect the animals.

Some of those measures have now been dropped. Botswana suspended a shoot-to-kill policy and removed military-grade weapons from its antipoaching units in May last year, weeks after President Mokgweetsi Masisi assumed office.

The release of a study by Botswana-based Elephants Without Borders published Thursday that says poaching is on the rise comes weeks after the government lifted a trophy hunting ban on wildlife because it says too many elephants roam in water-rich areas where people grow crops, posing a threat to farmers. While the measure has been praised by local residents, conservationists and safari operators are worried it’ll hurt Botswana’s reputation as a safe haven for the animals. Tourism accounts for a fifth of the nation’s economy.

Even though Botswana’s elephant population is stable, evidence collected from extensive aerial surveys in 2018 suggests that poaching on the scale of hundreds of elephants per year has been occurring in the north of the country since 2017 and possibly earlier, according to the study published in the journal Current Biology. Botswana has an elephant population of about 130,000.

The group found 156 elephants killed in 2018 for their tusks, and it estimates that at least 385 were poached from July 2017 through 2018. Between 2014 and 2018, the numbers of “fresh and recent carcasses” are estimated to have increased almost sixfold.