This is the Guardian. When it comes to conservation of wild animals you'd think it was simple.

Keeping them alive is good and killing them is bad.

But for Amy Dickman it became a lot more complicated.

So when I first came to Africa, I remember not even wanted to look at the game ranches that I would drive past in Namibia

because I felt it so repulsive.

As a professor specializing in human wildlife conflict at the University of Oxford,

she's been following a battle playing out right now on the borderlands of Kenya and Tanzania.

The area is home to a group of elephants including so-called super tuskers, which are older males with incredibly large tusks.

For 30 years they've been protected by an informal deal between the two countries,

but since last year five elephants have been

killed for sport on the Tanzanian side and more could be at risk. Who gets to

decide whose animals are they?

You know, they're not the Kenyan elephants coming to Tanzania.

When they're in Tanzania, they're Tanzania elephants.

By now, it's a familiar image to many of us,

a grinning torus with a gun in one hand and their hunting trophy at their feet

and when the photo goes viral it usually prompts a wave of revulsion.

But a growing number of conservationists are saying it might not be so simple after all.

And it's funny now when people see me as somebody who's advocating for this and that's not the case at all.

My aim is I want the number of horrible wildlife killings to be as low as they possibly can be.

So can killing for conservation ever be justified?

I'm Biodiversity reporter Phoebe Western and this is Science Weekly.

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