If Botswana carries out its proposal to permit the world’s largest elephant hunt quota, it will provoke a fierce reckoning over science, politics and the fate of Africa’s remaining giant tuskers. If you wanted a masterclass in how to turn a conservation success story into a global controversy, Botswana has just written the syllabus. The government’sdraft 2026 quota– authorising a record 430 elephant trophy hunts,the largest anywhere on Earth – has landed with the thud of a dropped tusk.
It’s bold, it’s defiant, and it’s being sold as practical management. But according to leading elephant scientists Dr Mike Chase and Dr Scott Schlossberg, it is alsoprofoundly misguided– and more than a little self-sabotaging. This is why: the fight over elephants isn’t really about numbers.
It’s about which elephants are being killed, how that destabilises the survivors, who really benefits and what the cost will be to Botswana’s economy and reputation. And when you zoom out – across the maps, the quotas, the economics, the behavioural science, the MoUs and the marketing spin – you begin to see the shape of a national strategy that isn’t just risky. It’s irrational.
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For years, trophy-hunting advocates have leaned heavily on the “only 0.3%” argument: only a tiny portion of elephants are hunted each year, so what’s the fuss? Chase and Schlossberg flatten that idea with a single insight: the key issue isn’t how many elephants are killed, butwhich ones. That 0.3% slice isn’t random.
Trophy hunters target the same demographic poachers do – the last great big-tusked adult bulls. These “elders,” as the Chase-Schlossberg review calls them, make up less than 1% of the population, but they are disproportionately important. Remove the elders and you don’t just reduce numbers – you reshuffle the social logic of elephant society.
Models presented in the review show that combined hunting and poaching pressures could halve the number of older bulls and reduce the population of middle-aged bulls by a quarter. That’s demographic collapse, not management. It is also a recipe for a different, lesser future: a Botswana where the last iconic tuskers – the ones tourists travel across the world to admire – vanish quietly, cut out of the gene pool by economics disguised as ecology.
There’s a story told often in Gaborone: hunting reduces human-elephant conflict. Communities feel safer. Fields are spared.
Tempers cool. It’s neat, it’s comforting – and according to the science, it’s not true. The Chase-Schlossberg review synthesises decades of behavioural research, including studies showing that elephants exposed to violence – culling, war, poaching, trophy hunting – become:
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