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.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in