This was a very old elephant. They started tracking him when they saw his dung had unchewed grass and bark - it means old and possibly big bull - the animal's last teeth had worn down and he is not chewing properly. Like all old elephants, he was beginning to starve. His days of breeding were long over - he was in no condition to fight younger breeding bulls. His was to be a slow, solitary death, trying to avoid predators until the dry season rendered his food woody and totally impalatable for him. Death is not pleasant for old elephants - starvation isn't easy, and a huge old animal caught by predators suffers terribly, bit by bit. By contrast, he was stalked and taken with a single brain shot from forty yards. He knew nothing about it.
He was one of just four bulls on this years government quota for block NG13, an area with about 29,000 elephants. The licensed PH, Mr Kachelhoffer, is a Motswana (a Botswanan national).
The elephant was an impressive size because this was his first appearance (talk about luck!) - the area NG13 is almost impenetrable - no roads, no shops, no tourists, no nothing except remote villages. He was NOT a tourist attraction. Nobody was aware he was there, because hunting is only now opening up again after the previous Khama moratorium on hunting (see below). It is the locals who, after many kgotlas (village meetings or courts) and piddling about by lawyers, agreed to let the safari company hunt their land, NG13, for $110,000 per year, plus extra per animal and help with a community vehicle, plus 30 employed to start roads. Hunting is the only real income in this area of subsistence farming.. Many people in the area have given up trying to grow food because of the expanding elephant population. People like this are the folks who asked the present President, Masisi, to do something about the elephant problem. For them, an elephant is a nasty, dangerous five ton garden slug that won't take no for an answer if he fancies your family's sorghum or corn plot. His evening meal or two is your family's annual food supply.
The 350 happy people who received the meat probably fed three more people each. The tracker, a local man, thanked the elephant with sincere reverence for giving his life to the people he now fed and lived in turn.
In all, a humane and fitting end to a great old man - the perfect moral and practical trophy, and a demonstration of sustainable consumptive use of a local resource. Trophy hunters have nothing to apologise for where the hunting is RATS - responsible, accountable, transparent and sustainable.
The rubbish spouted about this "rare, tourist-attracting, genetically important, blah, blah, blah" elephant by ex-President Khama is because Khama hates President Masisi for democratically replacing him. Masisi, once elected, answered the call by his Batswana people living in the north to do something about the damn elephants and the fear and deaths from elephant attacks. President Masisi re-instated carefully controlled hunting to provide jobs, income and compensation and show something is being done. Without it something being done, local people turn a blind eye to poachers, who solve the problem for them. The problem is that poachers often use poisons and kill loads of other things, too, apart from rhinos.
At the same time, previous President Khama had (allegedly!!) stopped all hunting because he had a cosy private monopoly arrangement with an eco-safari operator, Joubert, to take over all the hunting grounds for their photo-tourism partnership. It was a disaster for people and wildlife, and one of the reasons they kicked Khama out. Now, Khama runs around the world making trouble for President Masisi by drumming up animal rights willing donkeys to his cause. Typical of these is the CBTH, a UK parasite private company that collects money from the public to save animals, but doesn't save a single one. It is run by crafty shyster Eduardo Goncalves, who lifts photos of legal hunts from hunting websites and uses them to denounce hunters for "murdering wildlife to extinction". That is his profitable con trick and he is welcome to challenge me in court for saying so. He is the main source of all the "evil hunter" articles around the world that cause concerned debates here on AH too. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, he trousers all the donations.
The story of this big elephant was released to the world press by Africa Geographic, a crafty play on the name of its illustrious National namesake. In reality, though, it is just a pretentious travel agency run by a pushbike riding, bunny-hugging accountant who trucks hundreds of photo-tourists into the bush, turning popular wild places into little better than busy theme parks ....spot an eco- touristy connection running thro' this story, anyone??? It takes 100 photo tourists to replace the income from one trophy hunter. Africa Geographic hates hunters, too. It has nothing to do with animal welfare and everything to do with milking kindly, animal loving but entirely gullible punters.
Anyway, folks, that's a bit of the background to this story. Have a lovely day and may all your brass end up warm......meanwhile, there is a hunter somewhere who is dong cartwheels round his gun room and a taxidermist with tears in his eyes.........
