I have been to Chobe Park twice. 1994 and 2000. Over-run with Elephants then. I don’t know what it looks like today. Probably still going strong.
Things, in the rest of Africa have changed, a lot.
First, Paul Allen was behind closing Elephant hunting in Botswana. He’s got his fingers heavily in Zambia as well. He’s an ideologue with the money to seriously effect hunting regulations. We haven’t seen the last of him. He is a serious problem.
In about 2010-11 the Chinese funded poaching of Elephant became a noticeable and serious issue. Areas that were flush with Elephant, suddenly weren’t. I have seen, firsthand, the before and after of this in Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. I know it was very bad in Tanzania, but I haven’t been back to see the effects.
Here is what happened. African countries grant mining leases and construction projects to Chinese companies. They send in their Chinese labor and management. Those guys sub out the Elephant poaching. At first they would pay $50/kilo, then as they became more scarce, $80, $100, $150 and last I heard up to $200/kilo.
They don’t care if it’s bulls or calves since it all gets carved up into useless trinkets anyway. It’s disgusting.
They exported 40’ shipping containers full of tusks. Occasionally, you would read about a container being seized on its way into China. I guess they forgot to pay someone off? Or someone in the gov decided to steal it for themselves. Anyway, it was common.
I was in Mozambique in 2013. This was an incredibly remote area. Charter in and drive 3 hours to get to this site … where there was a huge cell tower. I looked around and cheap Chinese 50cc motorcycles and cell phones were ubiquitous in a community of mud huts.
I’m convinced it’s part of the poaching infrastructure. I didn’t see any economic justification for a cell tower in the middle of a hunting concession.
We had three anti-poaching game scouts with us that we were dropping off to patrol the area. But, what good can 3 guys do against a network of cell phones and motorcycles?
One ph known for his Elephant hunts would regularly cut a track and find poachers tracks intercepting the Elephant track before they could catch up to it. They would turn around and go find another.
Pasanisi, who never had an Elephant poaching issue in his far Southern blocks of the Selous, started encountering poachers in 2012 or so. That was a huge wake up call.
All the progress Africa made to build up its Elephant populations was wiped out in the span of 3-5 years.
