The one, the only... Chobe National Park, Botswana!
We were on our way to the famous Chobe National Park, in northern Botswana. This visit was somewhat troubling for me. In May, Botswana's president had announced an end to a five year ban on elephant hunting. Elephant hunting? There were calls for a boycott against Botswana. Botswana is a bright spot for African savannah elephants, with over 100,000 in the country. The proposal was to permit around 400 elephants to be killed by trophy hunters, who presumably would pay $30-50 thousand dollars to kill each of these animals (at $40,000 each, that would come out to $16 million). There's roughly an equal number of elephants being poached for their ivory each year in Botswana. I'm going to editorialize on hunting elephants for a moment. Just scroll down to the white rhino photo below to skip my ramblings. But the overall populations of both forest and savannah elephants in Africa are in steep decline (espe...