Why Botswana Is Lifting Its Ban On Elephant Trophy Hunting

Lebalang Ramatokwane surveys a jagged hole in the cement wall surrounding his half-built guesthouse on the outskirts of Kasane, a small tourist town in the far north of Botswana. A few days earlier, an elephant had knocked down part of the wall in two places, and now he's wondering if he should beef up security before paying customers start to arrive.

"They are not only damaging what you see here," Ramatokwane, a 37-year-old medical scientist, says. The thousands of elephants that roam freely around Kasane regularly destroy farmers' crops and pose a real threat to people, he says. "These are wild, wild, wild animals. They are not conditioned."

Botswana is home to some 130,000 elephants, more than any country in the world. For years, trophy hunters from the U.S. and Europe came to Botswana to hunt large male elephants, paying tens of thousands of dollars to head out into the bush with a professional hunter and send a tusked trophy home to mount on their wall.

But in 2014, Botswana's government, then led by former president Ian Khama, temporarily banned trophy hunting, citing declining wildlife numbers. The move was widely applauded by international animal welfare groups,