Botswana Minister of Environment and Tourism Dumezweni Mthimkhulu is pissed enough over a bill moving through British Parliament banning the import of trophies taken on hunting safaris that he’s threatening to ship 10,000 live elephants to Britain and dump them in central London to let the Limeys know what it’s like living with a large surplus of the massive pachyderms, Sky News reports.
Mthimkhulu later told Sky it was more of a rhetorical something and they weren’t actually going to pull a Greg Abbott. Then there’s the whole thing about Botswana being landlocked and not having the naval or merchant marine fleet necessary to ship 10,000 elephants more than 5,000 miles north to Britain. Would probably be pretty costly and beyond the means of Botswana too.
That said maybe they could manage like 100. Why not just charter a cargo ship out of Namibia and then set the elephants loose by the docks? Botswana would probably go viral for that kind of stunt.
Anyway Mthimkhulu’s real point was that the elephant population is out of control and he says hunting is more like a culling, estimating that the circa 150,000 in Botswana is 100,000 too many since conservation efforts have worked too well from a nadir of 10,000 elephants in 1984.