Botswana Lifts Ban on Hunting, Could Issue 400 Licenses

By Chris Eger

Botswana’s elephant population has grown to over 130,000 in recent years, leading to increasing human interaction, sometimes fatal. (Photo: Pixabay)
Citing increased human-wildlife conflicts and deaths after a five-year ban on elephant hunting, the African country of Botswana is now reinstating the practice.
Home to the largest population of elephants in Africa, Botswana says their herds have been exploding in size, growing from 50,000 in 1991 to more than 130,000 today. A 2001 government Elephant Management Plan recommended that Botswana’s environment could best maintain only 54,000 of the animals. This, according to President Dr. Mokgweetsi E.K Masisi, is “far more than Botswana’s fragile environment, already stressed by drought and other effects of climate change, can safely accommodate.”
The country halted elephant hunting in 2014 under pressure from animal rights groups and since then contends the ban has cost the national treasury P21 million (about $1.9 million USD) in the last year just in payments to those who have suffered crop and property losses to the animals, a figure up from P4 million five years ago. Worse is the cost in human lives.
“Since 2009 to date, 39 people have been killed by elephants. Of this figure, as many as 14 people were killed by

Source: Guns.com