Cape Town — When Dr Mike Chase banks the small survey plane over northern Botswana’s mopane woodlands, he can see the country’s wildlife story written in the dust below. Carcasses — some months old, others more recent — lie scattered along ancient elephant paths, mute evidence of drought, hunting and poaching. Farther ahead, the shadows of living elephants stretch across the floodplains of the Chobe.
But the aerial view tells a different story — one that challenges years of political messaging and sparks a contentious debate over how one of Africa’s largest elephant populations should be managed. Chase, who leads Elephants Without Borders (EWB), has spent two decades studying Botswana’s elephants from the air. His latest report , with co-author, Scott Schlossberg, shows irrefutably that the country’s hunting programme — reinstated in 2019 and expanded since — is based on flawed assumptions, outdated models and an incomplete picture of the pressures elephants now face.
“ Botswana’s crisis is not one of too many elephants — it is one of too little understanding,” he says. “We don’t have an elephant problem. We have an information problem. Everyone has an opinion, yet too few rely on evidence. Too many opinions. Too little truth, and the science capable of guiding us is too often left unused.”
A Population That Isn’t Growing — But Is Changing
For more than a decade, Botswana’s government has stubbornly maintained that the country is home to too many elephants and that their growing numbers are putting pressure on people and landscapes. Yet aerial surveys conducted in 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 show a remarkably consistent figure: about 130,000 elephants in the north, which holds 94% of the country’s population, contradicting the claims of population growth.
The new EWB report confirms what scientists have been observing quietly for years — that this number has not risen significantly in over a decade. Instead, another trend has emerged: carcass ratios, a key indicator of mortality, have been steadily increasing. Higher carcass ratios signal a rise in deaths from poaching, drought, disease or hunting.
Between late 2023 and mid-2025 alone, EWB documented at least 120 poached elephants, almost all of them adult males. The pattern reflects an earlier surge in 2017–2018, when up to 400 elephants were believed to have been killed. The scale of these deaths matters not just for the numbers themselves, but for the type of elephants being lost.
The Selective Pressure on the Last Great Bulls
Botswana reopened trophy hunting in 2019, issuing quotas that have increased annually. This year’s quota of 431 elephants represents about 0.3% of the population — a figure defenders of hunting often describe as insignificant.
Chase argues that this statistic obscures the real ecological impact.
“ The quota of 410 elephants is often shrugged off as ‘only 0.3% of the population.’ But this statistic is dangerously misleading,” he says. “The real threat is not how many elephants are killed; it is which elephants are being removed. This is not random offtake. Trophy hunters and ivory poachers selectively target the rarest animals in Botswana: the last great bulls, the oldest males, that carry the largest tusks. These elephants represent only a tiny fraction of the population.”
Older bulls, 40 to 60 years old, carry tusks large enough to attract high-end hunting clients. They represent a tiny percentage of the population — perhaps 1–3% — and play an outsized role in elephant society. They father most calves due to female mate choice, teach younger bulls’ social behaviour and seasonal movements, and act as cultural memory keepers for drought-hard landscapes.
Modelling in the EWB report shows that hunting at current levels could halve the number of bulls aged 50 and above and reduce bulls aged 30 and older by nearly a quarter compared with a scenario without hunting. These declines are amplified when drought or poaching is added into the equation. Critically, the government's justifications of hunting quotas do not take drought or poaching into account.
Climate and Conflict: A Changing Landscape
Northern Botswana is scorched ever more frequently by drought. Climate projections for southern Africa indicate that severe dry seasons could occur in up to 40% of years by 2080. During drought, elephants crowd around diminishing water sources, increasing the likelihood of conflict with communities and disease transmission.
Drought also affects the long-term structure of elephant populations. Calves and reproductive females suffer higher mortality during dry years, reducing the number of future males that will eventually reach trophy size. When hunting and poaching selectively remove older males at the same time, the demographic pyramid begins to narrow from both ends.
Hunting Blocks as “Sink” Landscapes
One of the report’s more striking findings is that many hunting concessions function as “sink” areas — landscapes where elephants die faster than they can be naturally replaced. The only reason these areas still produce huntable bulls, the researchers argue, is that males disperse from protected areas like Chobe National Park and Moremi Game Reserve.
These dispersal patterns, however, may be changing. Survey teams noted shifts in elephant distribution between 2018 and 2022, suggesting that some elephants are beginning to avoid hunting areas altogether. If that trend continues, the supply of older bulls will diminish regardless of how large the overall population is.
Old Models and Missing Data
The EWB report scrutinizes the scientific basis for Botswana’s hunting quotas. It finds that the primary model used by the Department of Wildlife and National Parks was developed in 2011, relying on survival rates that were not based on field data and assuming steady population growth without accounting for density dependence — a key factor in any large mammal population. Density dependence means that as an elephant population gets larger and more crowded, natural pressures like food scarcity, drought, and competition automatically slow its growth.
The model also assumed annual elephant emigration to neighbouring countries at levels not supported by survey data. These assumptions, the report argues, make the model unsuitable for guiding present-day hunting policy, especially under current pressures.
Repeated requests by researchers for basic quota data — including tusk measurements, ages and sex of hunted elephants — have gone unanswered.
A Nation Weighing Its Choices
Botswana’s government maintains that hunting is a tool for reducing human-elephant conflict and generating revenue for rural communities. Some community leaders support hunting for the income and employment it provides. Others argue that photographic tourism, which depends on reliably viewing large, impressive elephants, is far more lucrative and sustainable.
Chase warns that increasing extraction — whether through bigger quotas, longer seasons or opening new concessions — risks undermining both sectors.
“ Increasing quotas, prolonging hunting seasons, or opening new concessions will not fix our economic or ecological problems. On the contrary, these actions accelerate the depletion of the very resources on which communities and the hunting industry depend.”
Botswana’s tourism sector contributes about 12% of GDP and supports more than 100,000 jobs. Large bulls are a particular draw for photographic tourists, some of whom travel specifically to see the last intact populations of big-tusked elephants.
It remains to be seen how the Botswana government will respond to the latest EWB analysis. The country remains a global stronghold for elephants, holding roughly a third of Africa’s remaining savannah population.
But Chase believes that the future of Botswana’s elephants now depends on whether policy can be re-aligned with the realities unfolding in the field.
“ After 25 years of fieldwork and months of analysis—and after enduring no small amount of pressure simply for speaking the truth—I feel this may be my last chance to speak openly in a space dominated by politics, vested interests, and pseudoscience. ‘Sustainability’ has become a buzzword—too often used to justify the very practices that undermine it .”
