What you see and what you don’t: The challenges of wildlife conservation in Botswana

By Hailey Brookins of Carleton College

Some of the most engaging conversations I have had since arriving in Botswana have been about the complexities of wildlife conservation. In conservation discussions, it is very easy (and all too common) to oversimplify the intricacies of applied conservation biology. To be successful, conservation sciences must not only consider the needs of wildlife but also must ensure that the needs of peoples who are living alongside these animals are met. In Botswana, rural communities are the most affected populations by wildlife management policy, but they are often ignored in the creation of those policies. This lack of concern for rural people was apparent in how the 2014 hunting ban was implemented. I had the opportunity to discuss the history and effects of the hunting ban with KC and Dix, two of our instructors local to Botswana. I supplemented the information from these conversations with projects from Round River student alumni, including Interviews with Community Escort Guides: Herbivore and Carnivore Populations, Hunting Ban Effects and Transect Evaluation, Local Perceptions of Wildlife in Ngamiland Five Years After Botswana’s Hunting Ban, and Human-wildlife conflict in four villages around the Okavango Delta.  These conversations and past projects demonstrate the challenges of conservation when stakeholders across the country have different priorities regarding wildlife management. Now, in 2019, with the ban being lifted, a lot of attention – both locally and from Western countries – is being drawn to hunting practices in Botswana. While it is important to encourage conversation about global conservation, some Westerners speak about hunting practices without a complete understanding of the wildlife in Botswana and the people who live alongside it.

Botswana has a complex history of wildlife and land ownership policy. In 1990, the government of Botswana passed a tourism policy that tried to encourage rural communities to participate in the tourism industry. Following the creation of this policy, the federal government encouraged communities to establish community trusts. Along with the creation of these trusts, communities regained control of parts of their land through the creation of concession areas; delineated areas of land across the country. With this control, the local community trusts could use their concessions by creating community-use areas, developing ecotourism infrastructure (like campgrounds and roads), or leasing the land to private companies who specialize in either photographic tourism or hunting safaris.

In 2008, the president of Botswana issued a directive that banned all hunting within a twenty-five-kilometer radius of all national parks and international boundaries. In concessions that were leased by hunting safari companies, they could continue hunting until their leases expired. However, in 2009, the president issued another directive that banned all hunting within the radius, regardless of the lease status. In 2012, the federal government held a consultative workshop in Maun to discuss the fate on hunting across the country of Botswana. Policy makers had conversations with many land and wildlife stakeholders including private companies who leased the land, community trusts, interested NGOs, and government officials. After this meeting government officials were sent to consult with rural communities, the people most affected by changes to ecotourism, land, and hunting policies. They were met with a diverse collection of opinions from rural people who each had different experiences with photographic tourism, hunting safaris, and human wildlife conflict. In 2014, two years after these meetings, a presidential directive was issued that banned all hunting across the country.

Accompanying this hunting ban, the Botswana Tourism Organization in partnership with the federal Department of Lands took back control of the leases that they had granted to the community trusts. After this seizure, for community trusts to access money which was payed to them through land leases, they had to go through the federal government. Unsurprisingly, many rural communities never saw this money. Now, not only were these communities losing money to the federal government, but many of the private hunting safaris didn’t renew their leases after the hunting ban was put in place. For example, in NG34 outside of Sankoyo village, part of the community’s concession was leased to a man named Johan Calitz, who runs a hunting safari company called Johan Calitz Hunting safaris. When his lease ended, the Sankoyo trust pleaded with the federal government and was granted an extension to continue hunting in NG34 until they built infrastructure for photographic tourism. As soon as this extension ended and Calitz was no longer able to accept hunting clients, he left NG34 and no longer leases land anywhere in Botswana. Even with the provisional extension given to Sankoyo to extend hunting, the community trust was left operating at a 40% deficit. Without the amount of money from quotas granted before the ban, the trust had only 84,000 pula (8,400 USD) per month for operations. This money came from another partnership that Sankoyo’s community trust had with a company called Wilderness Safari (the Santawani Partnership), and it was not enough to sustain the trust. This lack of funding meant that community trusts had less money to employ local people and for day-to-day operations. The problem of leasers not renewing their contracts following the hunting ban left many rural people with low incomes and high rates of unemployment, and this situation was not unique to Sankoyo. As rural communities began to feel the impacts of these changes, they began to speak out against the government. After threats of litigation, the government eventually regranted the community trusts the rights to control the leases on their concessions, and last month Botswana’s hunting ban was reversed.

During the series of directives that shaped Botswana’s land leases and hunting policies, people in rural communities were angry. They weren’t upset solely because of the changes in hunting policy but because they weren’t properly consulted before policy changes were implemented. When instituting the hunting ban, the government didn’t prepare proper infrastructure in other industries, like photographic tourism, to ensure that Batswana who lost jobs in the hunting industry could find other work. The lack of consultation with rural communities continued with the lifting of the ban this year, as the decision was made by policy makers who didn’t discuss the change with villagers. The lack of proper planning in both the creation and removal of the hunting ban combined with the government taking away community trusts rights to control their leases has left concerned local communities feeling ignored and mistreated by their government.

Rural communities aren’t the only ones who are unsupportive of the federal government’s rash decision making. Western onlookers, from conservationists to celebrities, have shown public outrage at Botswana’s decision to allow hunting again, particularly of elephants. An overwhelming number of these influencers who have been highly vocal about the change have little (or no) understanding of the complexities of hunting in Botswana as a source of income and as a wildlife management tool. Most Westerners fail to discuss that there are both advantages and drawbacks to the recent policy change.

Private hunting safari companies pay community trusts for the rights to use the land through leases, and they also often provide jobs for rural peoples who don’t have many other employment opportunities. People who were employed by hunting safari companies before the hunting ban including trackers, skinners, waitresses, cooks and housekeepers were paid 1000 to 2500 pula per month (10 pula translates to 1 USD), plus generous tips from clients ranging from 1000 to 5000 pula each trip. Hunting also created jobs for community escort guides, who were hired by the community trusts to ensure that hunting safaris were following hunting regulations. When local people lost their jobs in hunting camps after the ban, many of them had extremely limited employment opportunities. This significant wave of job losses was especially salient in rural communities. In Sankoyo, people were forced to seek employment in a government drought relief program known as Ipelegeng which pays only 500 pula per month (50 USD) or to abandon their homes and villages entirely to search for jobs elsewhere.  

Hunting safari companies are not the only industry interested in concession areas in Botswana. Other private leasers focus on photographic tourism, which also employ local people. One of the main claims from people who support the hunting ban is that photographic tourism can replace hunting safari companies by ensuring that leases are still filled, and that people continue to have jobs. However, photographic tourism has not successfully been a direct replacement for hunting safaris. Employees at photographic lodges (not including guides who make up a small minority of employees) make significantly less than hunting guides (700 to 900 pula per month) and the tips are often less generous. However, it is important to note that people employed by hunting only receive income during the hunting season (a six months period) while people employed by photographic tourism have jobs all year long. People employed by hunting companies make more money each month, but they can only rely on that income for half of the year. Another important economic comparison between hunting and photographic tourism is that hunting safaris, when established, begin making money for community trusts within a few years. Photographic tourism operations, because of marketing and development requirements, take at least five years to produce a profit for local communities and often only break even.

People across Botswana have held jobs in the hunting safari or photographic tourism industries (and sometimes both), so not everyone agrees about what the hunting policy should be. Round River students in 2013 conducted interviews with tour guides and found that they had varying opinions of how the hunting ban would affect revenue and employment in rural villages. 27% of respondents said that the hunting ban was positive because photographic tourism employs more people than hunting safari companies. 33% said the ban was negative because of revenue loss, and 27% said it was negative because of loss of employment opportunities. Their responses depended on which rural community the guides were from. Guides in Mababe and Chobe saw the hunting ban as negative, while in Khwai all guides saw it as positive. These differences are likely because people in Mababe and Chobe “rely on hunting camps for employment” (Nisi, Pfeifle, and Piazza 12), while people in Khwai are employed by photographic tourism companies. This variation in response between rural community members employed in tourism demonstrates the complex nature of conservation decisions. The needs of people who relied on hunting as employment and those who rely on photographic tourism need to be considered, especially considering that these two industries cannot exist simultaneously in the same area.

Hunting, if employed thoughtfully, can be a useful tool in wildlife management. One way in which hunting helps rural communities is by pushing elephants away from human civilization. Elephants are highly intelligent, and before the hunting ban was in place, they associated the smell of humans with gunshots and tended to stay further from people and accompanying development. When the hunting ban was implemented, elephants lost this fear of humans and began moving into rural settlement areas and causing devastating human-wildlife conflict. Now, elephants frequently knock down fences and destroy other structures. These images are just a few depictions of the destruction elephants have caused to human settlements in rural communities in northern Botswana.

Along with destroying structures, elephant crop raiding is one of the most prominent examples of conflict between human and wildlife. Agriculture employs many rural Batswana, so a lot of people rely on crop yields for income. Without hunting to drive elephants away from human settlements, the instances of crop raiding have skyrocketed and rural farmers in Botswana now lose a significant amount of agriculture income to elephant crop raids. These raids are especially problematic for farmers whose crops are their sole source of income. There are tactics to deter elephants from accessing crops, like setting up beehives or chili peppers, but these methods are not always effective or accessible to farmers in rural communities. The government of Botswana created a compensation program to help rural farmers whose fields are destroyed by elephants. However, without the proper infrastructure or funding, the government often can’t distribute this money to farmers. As a result, farmers living alongside elephants struggle to protect their livelihoods.

As elephants enter settlement areas, they pose a threat not only to structures and crops, but also to safety. In Mababe village, the same place where the elephant bent the window frame (above), elephants have invaded the school yard and health posts. These invasions are especially frightening for local children and parents because almost all the children who go to school in this village walk to and from classes every day. To mitigate the danger elephants pose to schoolchildren, the principal of the school in Mababe bought a car to drive them away. Each day, he arrives to the school yard early and stays late to drive off the elephants and to ensure that local children can safely walk to and from classes. Even with these elephants management tactics, many days school children in Mababe must wait before walking to class or home until the elephants move a safe distance away.

Because of the devasting effects that wildlife (and elephants in particular) have on rural communities, human-wildlife conflict is arguably one of the most important considerations when making decisions about hunting in Botswana. According to the Round River students’ paper from 2018 titled Local Perceptions of Wildlife in Ngamiland Five Years After Botswana’s Hunting Ban, 100% of local people they interviewed noted an increase in elephant populations (Galliani, Nadel, and Nelson 11) after the hunting ban was implemented. While this doesn’t necessarily indicate an increase in the number of individual elephants across the country, it does indicate that there are more elephants in and near the villages. In another student paper titled Human-wildlife conflict in four villages around the Okavango Delta, students conducted interviews of rural community members and found that 66.3% of respondents experienced an increase in wildlife problems after the hunting ban was implemented (Dodge and Borgmann 7). The increase in elephant sightings, as well as in human-wildlife conflict, needs to be considered by those creating wildlife management strategies. Too often these policies are created in Gaborone, where local politicians aren’t experiencing the direct effects of human-wildlife conflict. It is imperative that federal officials make a concerted effort to understand how changes to elephant movement patterns are detrimental to people in rural villages before creating and implementing hunting policies.

On top of threatening peoples’ property and safety, the hunting ban also severely impacted rural people’s subsistence meat consumption. When trophy hunters harvested an animal in Botswana before the ban, the meat was distributed among local community members for free. Because of this distribution, game meat made up a big part of the diet and protein intake of rural communities. With the implementation of the hunting ban, rural communities were no longer receiving this meat from trophy hunters, so many people lost access to a resource that they relied upon. Round River students in 2013 found that most interviewed community escort guides (66%) argued that the hunting ban would influence local meat consumption. Again, communities that leased their land to hunting safari companies felt the effects of this more than communities who relied on photographic tourism. For the communities that did depend on this meat, particularly because many already have challenges with food insecurity, it is important to consider that hunting is also a subsistence practice for many in rural Botswana.  

Although hunting can be an important tool in providing subsistence and reducing occurrences of human-wildlife conflict, it needs to be utilized thoughtfully and responsibly. The African continent is home to some of the world’s last breeding populations of incredible and endangered megafauna, and it is important that these animals are given proper protection whether hunting is permitted or not. Before the hunting ban, the hunting season in Botswana was April through September. Many animals begin breeding in September, so these hunting seasons were designed to allow wildlife to successfully reproduce and reestablish healthy populations. For the hunting season of 2019, the first in five years, the government established the hunting season to be from September through end of November. This means that animals will be hunted during their breeding season, and this added stress during a time of repopulation could be a serious threat to wildlife. If hunting is to be used as an effective wildlife management tool, regulations must account for the ecological needs of wildlife to ensure the continuation of healthy populations.

The challenges with employment, human-wildlife conflict, and unethical hunting regulations mean that hunting in Botswana has become highly controversial, and for good reason. The hunting bans were a continuation in the trend of Botswana’s federal government disregarding the needs of rural communities; hunting policies were not ensuring that their needs were being met. Human wildlife conflict (with elephants in particular) has steeply increased since hunting has stopped, posing serious threats to locals living in rural villages. Although hunting can be used as a tool to mitigate this conflict, it needs to be implemented properly, and some of Botswana’s hunting regulations for 2019 do not account for the ecological needs of wildlife during their breeding seasons. Because of the complexities of wildlife conservation in Africa and the seriousness of human wildlife conflict, Western environmentalist influencers need to think twice before denouncing hunting as a tool for successful wildlife management. Elephants and other wildlife have a right to be protected, but the needs of local communities also need to be at the center of conservation discussions if wildlife protection is to be ethical and successful.