Elephant conservation in Botswana

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Botswana is home to about a third of Africa’s remaining savanna elephants, over 130,000. But it is a burden as well as a blessing. It puts pressure on local communities, and the cost of conservation is huge. Climate change means elephants are moving into new areas in their search for water and in some parts of this sparsely populated country there are more elephants than people. Jo Dwyer travels to northern Botswana, where safari-based tourism helps drive the economy. Elephants bring in the tourists, but conservation is a balancing act.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:09.1	This is what everyone's come to see.
0:11.6	They've all come to see the elephants.
0:14.4	There's a lot of jostling at the waterhole as new elephants arrive.
0:19.8	Woo, there's more elephants coming.
0:21.8	There must be about 40 elephants here now.
0:24.4	And all the tourists around taking photos and completely spellbound.
0:30.5	Oh, the elephants are amazing.
0:32.1	Wow.
0:32.4	I mean, we did see an absolutely huge herd of elephants.
0:37.1	But yeah, I can't actually say how many. There's been so many.
0:41.5	Everybody was saying this is the place to come if you want to watch beautiful elephants.
0:46.3	It's early evening at a remote waterhole in northern Botswana, a part of the world where there are more elephants than people.
0:54.3	In this particular district, I'm told there are four elephants for every one person.
0:59.7	It's great for tourists, but it puts a huge strain on local communities.
1:08.8	He has problems with elephants.
1:10.8	They always come into his field. The elephants will just cause distinctions. He has problems with elephants.
1:13.2	They always come into his field.
1:15.3	The elephants will just cause distraction.
1:18.4	So conservation here means protecting wildlife and protecting local people, and that's expensive.
1:22.4	We're talking of millions of dollars.
1:24.2	It is not only the protection of the animals,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.