By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick For as long as elephants have shared landscapes with people, they’ve also carried the weight of controversy. In southern Africa in particular, images of toppled trees and stripped bark often spark alarmist claims: too many...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Aucamp’s first major conservation intervention signals comfort with a worldview in which wildlife remains a consumable asset, governed primarily through quotas and markets, expected to justify its existence through commodification and...
By Dave Balfour and Sam Ferreira - Daily Maverick The ‘elephant problem’ debate tracks this logic: dead or damaged trees with signs of elephants being involved equals evidence of too many elephants which requires their numbers to be reduced. This intuitive response...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick What these numbers document is not conservation under pressure, but extraction at scale. They expose trophy hunting not as a people-centred conservation model, but as a market-driven industry serving a narrow, global elite. South...
By Stephanie Klarmann - Daily Maverick Inaccurate and misleading language is being used to justify the commercial exploitation of wildlife and discredit those who advocate for animal welfare and wellbeing. It’s time to set the record straight. Antagonistic narratives...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick For years, the DA has distinguished itself by arguing that good governance is not about who governs, but how. The George countercomplaint places that claim under unprecedented strain. Is it still the party that defends institutions...
By Rhett Ayers Butler - Mongabay The death of Craig, a widely known super tusker from Amboseli, drew attention not just because of his fame, but because he lived long enough to die of natural causes in a period when elephants with tusks like his are rarely spared....
By Ross Harvey - BusinessDay As the dust settles on the latest UN climate summit in Belém, one thing is now unavoidable: the world is not on track to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Analyses of the COP30 outcome and the UN’s latest synthesis of...
By Ryan Truscott - Mongabay In Southern Africa, people live alongside elephants, but not always peacefully. The growing reports of human-elephant conflict have triggered calls for elephant culls in some countries, like Zimbabwe. But conservation groups are working...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick 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...