Mokgweetsi Masisi, president of Botswana has threatened to send 20,000 elephants to Germany in a dispute over conservation.
Earlier this year, Germany’s environment ministry suggested there should be stricter limits on importing trophies from hunting animals.
Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi told German media this would only impoverish people in his country.
He said elephant numbers had exploded as a result of conservation efforts, and hunting helped keep them in check.
Germans should “live together with the animals, in the way you are trying to tell us to”, Masisi told German newspaper Bild. “This is no joke.”
Botswana is home to about a third of the world’s elephant population – over 130,000 – more than it has space for.
Herds were causing damage to property, eating crops and trampling residents, Masisi said.
Botswana has previously given 8,000 elephants to neighbouring Angola, and has offered hundreds more to Mozambique, as a means of bringing the population down.
“We would like to offer such a gift to Germany,” Masisi said, adding that he would not take no for an answer.
Animal rights groups argue that trophy hunting – shooting an animal and then taking its head or skin back home as a trophy – is cruel and should be banned.
Germany is the EU’s largest importer of African elephant trophies, and hunting trophies overall, according to a 2021 report by the Humane Society International.
Botswana banned the practice in 2014, but lifted the restrictions in 2019 after facing pressure from local communities.
The country now issues annual hunting quotas, saying that it provides a good source of income for local people, so they are less tempted to poach wild animals, and that it is licensed and strictly controlled.
