In addition to million-acre leases in Botswana, Rann has a hunting concession in Tanzania and a 5,500-acre rare-game ranch outside San Antonio. The economic downturn did not put much of a bite in Rann’s business, a happy fact he credits to the addictive nature of hunting’s elemental pleasures: “Our clients might not buy a new car as often, or buy a second or third home, but they’re still going to go hunting.” But this new hunting ban is poised to do to Rann’s elephant-hunting business what economic calamity could not.
There’s been a regulated hunting industry in Botswana since the 1960s. Before the ban took effect, the government was issuing roughly 400 elephant-bull tags per year, of which Jeff Rann was allowed to buy about forty. And counterintuitively, even in the presence of an active bullet-tourism industry, Botswana’s elephant population has multiplied twentyfold, from a low point of 8,000 in 1960 to more than 154,000 today. These healthy numbers, as people like Rann are keen to mention, mirror elephant populations in other African countries where hunting is allowed. Despite a recent uptick in poaching problems, both Tanzania (with 105,000 elephants) and Zimbabwe (with 51,000) have seen similar patterns of population growth. Kenya, on the other hand, banned elephant hunting in 1973 and has seen its elephant population decimated, from 167,000 to 27,000 or so in 2013. Some experts predict that elephants will be extinct in Kenya within a decade.
But Satsumo, the Department of Wildlife and National Parks employee who’s tagging along on the Waldrips’ safari, believes that Botswana’s hunting ban may ultimately turn out badly for the elephants. “There will be more poachers,” she says. “More elephants will get out of the reserve. They will go to people’s crop fields. The hunters pump the water for them, but now they will have to move to the villages to find it. It’s a bad thing. It’s a very bad thing.”
