Botswana threatens to send 20,000 elephants
to Germany in trophy hunting row

Botswana's 'president' is full of elephant manure.

If you've ever actually traveled to these African countries for hunting, you find out that elephants are overpopulated and incredibly destructive. I've walked a lowveldt area where a group of elephants had fed thru a few weeks earlier. It plooked lije vandals with bulldozers had moved thru. Hundres of small trees were ripped up, and the roots gnawed. Our local guide tokkd us that elephants prefer the tender roots and are very destructive. A herd of elephants must have a gigantic range or they kill everything. It takes more than decade for a forested are to recover from a herd feeding thru. Elephants also regularly devastate small farmer's fields, stomping what they don't eat. Of course Americans and Europeans watch the phony Animal Planet propaganda shows and are convinced that elephants are endangered when they are actually overpopulating the available land for them to live on. I suggest that people do some research, most city folks are heavily propagandized on this topic, everything that they "know" is ecofreak BS.

I'm sure the German environmentalists know better about Botswana's needs than the locals. After all they are European and thus the smartest people ever while the Botswanans are just Africans and need Germans to tell them how to run their country.

Am not an environmental wussie. But, I like what Tarzan did to anyone who shot a elephant.

And elephants are dangerous animals. They will hunt down and crush a human being. I confess to having enjoyed following the elephant herd in China as it broke loose from the preserve they'd been given and traipsed (probably an inaccurate word) across China. They are very smart, but according to Ldotter #2 here, they do seem to lack a moral compass or ethics which take us bipeds into consideration.

Just wish they were smart enough to keep their little babies away from bodies of water with steep sides.

This could be a good 'The View' joke for Gutfeld!

Love the idea of threatening people with herds of elephants.

Martha's Vineyard!

Air fare. Licenses - one for each type of game. Guides. A Professional Hunter whose main job is to make sure there aren't any injured animals that can kill people roaming the countryside. Supplies and equipment - including one or two large caliber rifles that shoot rounds that you don't just pick up at Wal Mart. Taxidermy. Shipping. Updating the load bearing beams in your house (those elephant heads are kind of heavy). "... conservation efforts have led to an explosion in the number of elephants and ... hunting is an important means to keep them in check." Yeah. With foreigner willing to fork up $20k or more for one elephant (and probably a few other critters too), those local communities that would be impoverished want it.

Maybe Texas could send them a few thousand feral hogs.

Re #10, I ran into a MD at our shooting club range who was checking the sight-in of his elephant rifle. It was a beautifully engraved high grade Wesley Richards double rifle in some obscure giant caliber, something like 450 Nitro Express. We chatted a bit and he talked about going back for his 'next elephant'. I said, "I've hunted in Africa, but could only afford plains game. How much does an elephant cost?" He said, "Oh, about $35,000." I was not surprised. All the money, as you say, employs people and the hunting keeps the herds from overgrazing the veldt and cuts destruction of farm crops. I spent air fare for myself and wife, plus about $3600 for ten days of hunting for six trophies, impala, blesbok, kudu, zebra, warthog, blue wildebeeste, and picked up an extra wart hog and a gemsbok for extra fees. This included transportation in the country, deluxe accommodations and all meals, hunting clothes washed and ironed overnight and ready to hunt the next morning, and skinning and preserving trophies. I paid extra for mounting most of the heads, and for two rugs and we stayed an extra week after hunting, renting a car and driving around. We went to Kruger Park and other areas of tourist interest. The extreme elephant damage was seen in Kruger Park, with park ranger guides. South Africa was a beautiful country then, but has gone entirely to hell in the many years since the Communists have been wrecking it. In the early 2000s any American middle aged blue collar worker who really wanted to do it, could do an African plains game hunt. All that was needed was to drive their old pickup for another 2 or 3 years beyond when they normally would have purchased a new one. The money saved on the new truck payments would cover it. But elephant and cape buffalo are on a whole different scale. A cape buff cost at least $10K for the hunt at that time, and the elephant is triple that or more. Lions are just essentially unavailable to hunt these days, 99% of the time, they have been shot out of all areas but national parks because they are so destructive and dangerous in non-park settings. Occasionally there is a troublesome lion in the wild, but those get dispatched quickly. In the early 2000s Kruger park had, IIRC, 8000 elephants but judged that this was double what the park could sustain in the long term. They wanted to get up a hunting program to control herd size to what the park could handle. I don't know if they were able to get it, but RSA is such a mess that not many tourists go there any more.

Also, remember that big "eco" organizations in Europe and North America make huge profits off of the "save the elephant" campaigns. They WILL ALWAYS deny that there is any elephant overpopulation, no matter what the facts are on the ground. Web research gets almost exclusively propaganda from these "save the elephants" (and our phony-baloney jobs) organizations.

you cannot simply "Relocate" elephants from one african nation that has an overpopulation, to one that has a scarcity...because, just like the human populations of those same countries..."They don't get along well with each other" There is also the issue of rhinos attacking elephants, elephants attacking rhinos, and young male elephants, raised by single females with no older male influence, forming marauding gangs.

Botswana is one of the most stable, most peaceful, safest, longest running democratic republics in ALL of africa, with a GDP that has grown from about $70/year in 1966 to approx $10,000 per person now. 2/3 of the nation is Kalahari desert, and nearly 3/4 is game reserves. The "elephant Problem" used to be confined to WHITE elephants. Now it is becoming whites dictating about Elephants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant