Assignment: Botswana - living with elephants

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 February 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The battle to keep the peace between people and elephants in northern Botswana. The earth’s largest land mammal, the elephant, is an endangered species. Poaching, habitat loss and disease have decimated elephant populations. But not in Botswana, which has the world’s biggest population of elephants. In the north of the country, in the area around the remarkable Okavango Delta (the world’s largest inland delta), elephant numbers are growing and they outnumber people. This can pose serious problems for the human population, particularly local subsistence farmers. A crop raid by elephants can destroy a family’s annual food supply overnight. Elephants also pose a risk to life in their daily commute between their feeding grounds and their water sources. John Murphy travels to the top of the Okavango Delta, to see what efforts are being made to keep both people and elephants safe, and to persuade locals that these giant animals are an asset not a liability. He also explores threats from further afield to this green jewel in the desert, the Okavango Delta, which animals and people alike depend on.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Global Story, with Smart Takes and Fresh Perspective, on one big news story,
0:07.8	every Monday to Friday from the BBC World Service.
0:11.3	Search for The Global Story, wherever you get your BBC podcasts to find out more.
0:17.0	It's hard not to be impressed by elephants, maybe even to love them.
0:25.0	But imagine if you're a farmer and they pull up all your crops,
0:29.0	you might feel a little babies big ones, babies,
0:33.0	oh wow, there's a whole troop of them going by.
0:38.0	Little babies, big ones,
0:41.0	loads of them.
0:45.0	Welcome to the documentary podcast from the BBC World Service.
0:49.0	This is another chance to hear assignment on the battle to keep the peace between people and elephants in northern
0:56.3	Botswana.
0:57.1	Still coming. And here's another troop. Wow, Minjita, that was pretty exciting. I mean they're less than a hundred meters away. How many of them do you think they were?
1:22.0	I would say, I'd say the way close to 150 close to 150
1:26.4	50 well yeah you can tell the they came in groups they came in groups
1:30.0	yeah you can see the first group was two mixed breeding heads and the second one was two
1:34.5	again mixed breeding head then the last two were kind of like three bulls in behind.
1:42.1	With their keen sense of smell, the elephants could sniff us out, so fortunately
1:47.2	they were avoiding us.
1:50.3	Some of them didn't seem very pleased.
1:51.7	They had their ears flapping.
1:53.2	Yeah. And you can tell with the speed they move whenever they are going to the river.
	...

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