PRESIDENT MASISI, OVERTURN YOUR ELEPHANT MASS KILLING STRATEGIES IN BOTSWANA

Botswana will allow and promote the trophy hunting, mass culling, starving of its elephants and will process their remains into canned food for pets. Unreal but true! This is the final proposal of the 21st of February 2019.

Despite being flooded by six months of pledges coming from scientific representatives, international animal protection organizations and general public across the globe, the Cabinet Sub-Committee on Hunting Ban has just submitted to the President a shocking proposal which not only would lift the hunting ban implemented in 2014 by former President Ian Khama, it would promote and fund a series of measures to drastically and aggressively reduce the elephant population across all the nationally protected areas of the country, which alone are hosting  37% of the African elephant population.

The Committee recommended the President to implement the following:

• Hunting ban be lifted.
• Develop a legal framework that will create an enabling environment for growth of safari hunting industry.
• Manage Botswana elephant population within its historic range
• Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) should undertake an effective community outreach program within the elephant range for Human Elephant Conflict mitigation
• Strategically placed human wildlife conflict fences be constructed in key hotspot areas
• Game ranches be demarcated to serve as buffers between communal and wildlife areas.
• Compensation for damage caused by wildlife, ex gratia amounts and the list of species that attract compensation be reviewed.   In addition, other models that alleviate compensation burden on Government be considered.
• All wildlife migratory routes that are not beneficial to the country's conservation efforts be closed.
• The Kgalagadi southwesterly antelope migratory route into South Africa should be closed by demarcating game ranches between the communal areas and Kgalagadi Wildlife Management Areas.
• Regular but limited elephant culling be introduced and establishment of elephant meat canning, including production of pet food and processing into other by products.
  

The mass culling of elephants was a practice previously used in other countries like South Africa and was dismissed decades ago since it was an indefensible, very cruel, ineffective and scientifically unsound practice to control populations.

Culling operations had greatly impacted surviving elephants and dangerously changed their behaviour and relationship with peers and humans until today. It is not an acceptable method to mitigate the conflict between the pachyderms and the local populations.

The previous leadership has greatly invested into building a solid photographic industry in Botswana in the past years but eco-tourism and blood baths don`t match; tourists of the world will not like to support a country which turns global iconic symbols into dog food; Botswana could certainly become, for its atrocious policies, the object of international condemnation and suffer a hugely negative impact for years.

On the other hand, the conspicuous revenues promised by the trophy hunting industry during the last 20 or 30 years, do not seem to have turned the neighbouring countries` communities into wealthy citizens. The examples of the South African, Namibian and Zimbabwean Social Development lie before everybody`s eyes.

WE REQUEST THE PRESIDENT OF BOTSWANA TO OVERTURN ANY DECISION IN FAVOUR OF LETHAL AND DEVASTATING STRATEGIES FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF ELEPHANTS

SIGN THE PETITION