Recent U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Ruling Sparks New Debate Over Elephant Hunting

08.05.2024 - 15:57 / forbes.com

Is hunting elephants the best way to save the species? That’s a question once again being raised in the conservation community after a recent ruling by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service that will make it more difficult to import legally harvested elephant ivory. Many scientists, however, are questioning the move as antithetical to the stated goal of bolstering elephant conservation across Africa.

The efficacy of elephant hunting continues to perplex governments across the globe—many of whom seem unaware of wildlife realities on-ground in Africa. The push by several western nations to halt ivory and other game imports while at the same time calling for an end to elephant hunting is ignoring a wealth of research that suggests that hunting bans have had unintended consequences—that is, that they’ve led to fewer, not more, elephants.

Meanwhile, leaders from several southern African nations where hunting is allowed have been warning western authorities that their elephant populations have grown out of control and that limited hunting offers the only viable management tool to restore populations to sustainable levels.

Germany’s recent move to ban all ivory imports led an irritated Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi to clap back at the decision by offering to ship 20,000 elephants to Berlin. The move garnered widespread international media coverage and highlighted the chasm between western policies and the wildlife realities with which several southern African nations are coping.

“It is very easy to sit in Berlin and have an opinion about our affairs in Botswana,” said Masisi. “We are paying the price for preserving these animals for the world…. Germans should live together with the animals in the way that they are trying to tell us to.”

Botswana is home to more than 130,000 elephants—roughly one-third of the remaining savanna elephants—and the five-year moratorium on elephant hunting in that nation was reversed in 2019 because it was not a conservation success story according to stakeholders that were assembled to review the results of the hunting moratorium.

A committee of local authorities, NGOs, conservationists, and others concluded that there was a negative impact from the hunting suspension—particularly for the community-based groups that previously saw employment from sustainable hunting. In addition, burgeoning elephant populations significantly increased the incidence of human-elephant conflict. A herd of elephants can destroy an entire season’s crop in a single night. For Masisi and other African leaders, international interference in their wildlife management affairs has become untenable.

If the belief that hunting bans save elephants and other African species, say southern African wildlife