In April 2024, Botswana’s then-president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, made headlines for his government’s threat to send 30,000 elephants to Germany and the United Kingdom so that Europeans could try living alongside the creatures.

In April 2024, Botswana’s then-president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, made headlines for his government’s threat to send 30,000 elephants to Germany and the United Kingdom so that Europeans could try living alongside the creatures.

“This is not a joke,” he said.

The bizarre proposal was a response to proposed legislation in the U.K. and Germany that would ban trophy hunting, making it illegal for their citizens to kill elephants and other wild animals abroad and bring their remains back home to display.

Polls show that 85 percent of the German and British publics support trophy import bans. In 2019, when Botswana lifted its own wildlife hunting ban, which had been in place since 2014, there was vocal opposition from Western celebrities and activists, with some even calling for boycotts of the country. Trophy hunters make easy villains, and African elephants are easy to love. The world’s largest land animals, they stick together in multi-generational matriarchal herds. They call each other by names, and when one dies, they linger over their bodies, seeming to mourn each other.

But in Botswana, home to more elephants than any country in the world, the picture is more complicated. The herbivores, which can weigh up to 15,000 pounds, are wreaking havoc—destroying centuries-old forests, stealing farmers’ crops, and, according to local sources I spoke with, killing people in the most affected areas at a rate as deadly as car accidents in the United States. As celebrities and powerful NGOs campaign against trophy hunting, many locals see it as a lifeline.

A triangular warning sign with an elephant on it stands next to a paved road. Other signs line the road in the distance.

“These people don’t know how we are living,” said Kutlwano Russel, a 41-year-old widow, mother of two, and advocate for her impoverished community in the outskirts of the elephant-dense Okavango Delta. The bumpy road to her 400-person hometown of Mababe is dotted with elephant crossing signs; during our journey together, multiple herds meandered across our path.

Globally, the African elephant population was obliterated by the ivory trade in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Botswana, however, elephant numbers have more than tripled since the 1980s. The government’s aggressive anti-poaching and conservation policies have made it a destination of choice for elephant “refugees” migrating from less protective countries. Today, one-third of all African elephants—about 132,000, according to the most recent count—reside in Botswana.

Russel said that hungry elephants rip off the roofs of homes in town in the middle of the night, plundering sorghum and maize and startling the humans sleeping inside. Many people there have given up on farming because elephants raid their crops incessantly, she said: “Today, the seeds germinate, tomorrow morning there’s nothing in the field.”

A man sits on a chair and gestures next a twisted and ripped wire fence.

Russel’s community got in on the trophy hunting business more than 20 years ago. Like several others in Botswana, their community trust—a legal entity established to manage natural resources—is all