25/09/2019
Elephant Hunting Has Returned to Botswana. But There Is a Way to Stop It
Botswana, the flat, sparsely populated, land-bound country in southern Africa—sustained by diamond mining, cattle raising, and high-end tourism—is an unlikely candidate for an international public relations debacle. It is Africa’s oldest continuous democracy, with smooth transfers of power since gaining independence from Britain in 1966. It’s one of the least corrupt countries in Africa (according to the watchdog NGO, Transparency International). And ever since the mid 1980s, it has been the continent’s leader in matters of conservation.
It shows. “Botswana is like Africa 100 years ago” is how the country’s wilderness areas were described to me ahead of my first trip there in 2015—vast unfenced expanses where animals roam free.
Chobe National Park and the Okavango, the huge inland delta that is Botswana’s great natural wonder, are home to the largest concentration of African elephants in the world, some 130,000 these days—fully a third of the continent’s total, 415,000. (The rest are scattered among 36 other countries.) Its lion prides, in this era of predator vanishings, are robust.
Fly over the channels of the Okavango in a helicopter and you’ll see vein-like patterns in the shallow water below—“hippo highways,” they are called, watery traces of the animals’ preferred migration routes. The safari-chic lodges tucked in amid this natural splendor are small, discreet, and determinately low-impact, and you have a virtual guarantee of never experiencing that game-drive mood killer, the “jeep jam.” (Because of the excellence of what they offer, the lodges are also among the priciest in safari land, and taxes levied on them contribute substantially to Botswana’s foreign exchange.)
