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.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
‘NO WORKABLE SOLUTION’: An official said Pakistan engaged in the spirit of peace, but Kabul continued its ‘unabated support to terrorists opposed to Pakistan’ Pakistan yesterday said that negotiations for a lasting truce with Afghanistan had “failed to bring about a workable solution,” warning that it would take steps to protect its people. Pakistan and Afghanistan have been holding negotiations in Istanbul, Turkey, aimed at securing peace after the South Asian neighbors’ deadliest border clashes in years. The violence, which killed more than 70 people and wounded hundreds, erupted following explosions in Kabul on Oct. 9 that the Taliban authorities blamed on Pakistan. “Regrettably, the Afghan side gave no assurances, kept deviating from the core issue and resorted to blame game, deflection and ruses,” Pakistani Minister of
RSS