By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Legalising trade will remove the stigma that rhino horn is illegal and could entice many more consumers into the market. The demand will then outstrip the legal supply and poaching will increase. This will push security measures beyond...
By Ross Harvey - Business Live There are three major problems with the idea that elephant numbers have exploded If you’ve had a conversation with anyone recently returned from the Kruger National Park (KNP), you’re likely to hear: “It was lekker, but there are too...
By Ryan Truscott - Mongabay In parts of Southern Africa, elephants engage in “hedging” by breaking off the branches of hardwood mopane trees, snapping their trunks in two or pushing them over. Consequently, large areas of mopane forest are transformed into shrublands,...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick The government’s plan to create mega-landscape conservation areas equal to seven Kruger Parks seems a brilliant idea but – according to wildlife NGOs and a law centre – it has fundamental flaws and should be redrafted. This is the...
By Joel Konopo - Botswana Guardiansun Why do politicians inflate the value of recreational hunting and community benefits when the economic evidence in favour of trophy hunting is thin? When a Botswana delegation visited the United Kingdom in March this year to...
By Shola Lawal, Aljazeera Across Africa, growing populations and shrinking habitats are putting people and wildlife on a collision course. Farmers and researchers are devising unlikely tools to keep elephants at bay. An elephant family arrives to drink from a water...
By Adam Cruise - AllAfrica Botswana has threatened to send 10,000 elephants to the UK and another 20,000 to Germany as UK and European countries move toward banning the import of hunting trophies. According to President Mokgweetsi Masisi, Botswana is heavily...
By Ross Harvey - Business Day Southern African nations are at it again. Nyasha Chingono reported in late May that those “hosting the largest elephant populations in the world made a fresh pitch…to be allowed to sell their $1bn ivory stockpiles”, purportedly...
Rosalie Ann Modder-Oyefeso, Enviro New Nigeria In April 2018, a group of Forest Elephants surged out of the undergrowth of Omo Forest in Ogun State and ambled across the Benin-Sagamu Expressway, bringing traffic to a standstill and killing one foolhardy passerby...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick The wave of elephant poaching over the past two decades appears to have substantially subsided while prices of ivory have collapsed, but there remain serious threats to some elephant populations. According to the 2024 report from the UN...