Should we kill elephants to save them?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2019

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Botswana is home to the world’s largest population of elephants. And now you can hunt them. It’s a fascinating debate which pitches the moral question and knee-jerk reaction against killing endangered animals, against the economic and social reality of having more elephants than anywhere else on earth. Elephants can be very destructive when they encroach onto farmland and move through villages destroying crops and sometimes killing people. But conservationists are angry. They believe the move is political. It could also damage the country's international reputation for conservation and affect its revenues from tourism, the second largest source of foreign income after diamond mining. Alastair Leathead is the BBC’s Africa correspondent. He has spent a lot of time in Botswana and is caught up in the story. We got him into the Beyond Today studio to find out whether killing some elephants will save many more. Producer: Duncan Barber Mixed by Nicolas Raufast Editor: John Shields

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.6	Hello, I'm Tina Dehealey.
0:08.3	This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4,
0:10.9	where we ask one big question about one big story every weekday.
0:21.2	Today should we kill elephants to save them?
0:27.0	Now Botswana is home to the world's largest population of elephants and now you can hunt them.
0:39.0	In today's episode we're going to explore a fascinating debate which pictures a moral question
0:45.2	our natural reaction against killing endangered animals against the sometimes dangerous reality
0:49.9	of having a huge population of elephants which can mean for a lot of people elephants end up being their
0:56.2	neighbours. Hunting has just been reintroduced in Botswana after a five-year ban. It's caused as you can imagine a lot of
1:05.4	international outrage, but if you untangle the weeds of the debate, it becomes
1:11.7	clear how unclear all of this is. It's quite possible that by
1:17.0	killing some elephants you will save a lot more. You will find out why a bit later now the reason why talking about this today is because of a man called
1:26.8	Alistelith head
1:28.8	welcome to the podcast thank you very much I don't think we've had you on this before. No my first time. Do you listen? I do yes all the time.
1:35.4	Fantastic. I listen to it in the traffic in Nairobi which is terrible.
1:38.1	So I have lots of time to listen to it. What do you do for the BBC? The people you don't know.
1:42.1	Yeah I am the BBC? The people you don't know? Yeah, I am the BBC
1:43.2	Africa correspondent based in Nairobi Kenya but covering sub-Saharan Africa.
1:47.0	Alistair spent a lot of time in Botswana covering a lot of stories, including this one one he's become so caught up in it that he's
1:55.4	been labeled fake news by the local media. What's it like living next to an elephant?
2:07.0	Well, obviously I haven't done it myself, but everyone I've spoken to said it's rubbish.
	...

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