Zimbabwe plans to sell the right to shoot as many as 500 elephants for as much as US$70,000 per animal to help fund the upkeep of its national parks.
The hunting season, which takes place over the southern hemisphere winter, is to resume this year after the COVID-19 pandemic scuppered plans to have elephants shot by foreign tourists last year.
Zimbabwe has the second-largest elephant population in the world, while neighboring Botswana has the largest. Both have been criticized by environmental groups for their plans to profit from elephant hunting.
Photo: Reuters
Botswana is resuming hunting after a five-year ban. Zambia and Namibia also have substantial elephant populations.
“How do we fund our operations, how do we pay our men and women who spend 20 days in the bush looking after these animals?” said Tinashe Farawo, a spokesman for the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, in an interview on Saturday last week. “Those who are opposed to our management mechanism should instead be giving us the funding to manage better these animals.”
The right to shoot an elephant is to cost between US$10,000 and US$70,000 depending on its size, Farawo said.
The parks authority is self-funding and its revenue has also been slashed by the plunge in the number of the tourists. The elephants are to be shot in hunting concessions rather than the parks frequented by photo-safari tourists.
An excessive number of elephants, Zimbabwe has close to 100,000, has also increased the number of accidents when people encounter them, Farawo said. These include damage to crops and occasional fatalities when the elephants encounter people.
So far this year 1,000 complaints have been made to the authority compared with 1,500 in all of last year.
“The distress calls from the communities have been increasing due to human-wildlife conflict,” Farawo said. “So far 21 people have lost their lives and last year 60 people.”
The southern African nation draws most of its hunters from the US, Russia, Mexico and the EU. In addition to paying for the license to kill an elephant, the tourists pay professional hunters to guide them, and have their trophies treated by taxidermists and exported back to their home nations.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly