Tanzania hunting permits a threat to elephants in Amboseli

WildlifeDirect Chief Executive Paula Kahumbu. [File, Standard]

Elephants in the Amboseli Game Reserve face potential threats due to the hunting permits given yearly by the Tanzanian government.

Marking World Elephant Day on Monday, August 8, Doctor Paula Kahumbu, Chief Executive Officer at Wildlifedirect explained how the cross-border wildlife now endangers the Kenyan elephant population.

According to Tanzanian policy, their government usually issues about 100 permits for hunting elephants yearly.

"I don't know what happened last year, Tanzania issued permits to hunt elephants on the Tanzania side in a place called Enduimet which is one of the game management areas.

They had five permits, and they shot five elephants," said Kahumbu.

So far, five elephants have been killed of which four are believed to have originated from the Amboseli population in Kenya.

This is contrary to Kenya's policies that declared hunting illegal in 1997.

The governments of Kenya and Tanzania have always forged a mutual understanding of the importance of elephants for tourism, science, ecology, and heritage.

There are about 2,000 elephants in Amboseli-Kenya, and about 600 of them cross the border and move to the Tanzania side.

However, she said that In Tanzania hunting is now part of their practice to pay revenue to the government.

Kahumbu cited a particular conservancy in Tanzania that was transferred to a new management called Kilombero North under a lease in 2021 which has fueled the hunting of elephants.

"The conservation community immediately raised an alarm and they started burning the carcasses of these elephants. But when you are burning a carcass so that scientists don't identify that elephant it raises lots of questions," she posed.

She said that hunters have tried sanitising what they do with stories of them being ethical, killing only older and male elephants.

Kahumbu added that the hunters even justify their actions claiming that they hunt the elephants and feed the community with the meat.

Hunters in the past had agreed not to touch the research population of the elephants respecting the areas.

Kahumbu opines that the companies that get leased to manage the conservancy areas should know how to edge out the elephant.

She gave a tale of an elephant named Gilgil who was killed by the hunters when he was just 35 years old because of his supper tusker.

"They said he was old beyond his breeding age, well he wasn't. Gilgil we now believe was the son of another elephant whose name was Dianaisist, who at the age of 63 was still breeding," she narrated.

Kahumbu said that the bad practices of poaching have led to a decline of 75 per cent of Tanzania's elephants over the past five years.