Why is Botswana threatening to send 20,000 elephants to Germany?

It would be strange to see an elephant at Yonge-Dundas Square.

Luckily, Yonge-Dundas Square is not in Germany and Canada has not annoyed Botswana. I feel like I’m in high school and working on a geography paper. Or a project on animal diplomacy. Or an essay on bizarre international threats.

A CNN headline this week: “Botswana Threatens to Send 20,000 Elephants to Germany …”

It seems Germany has recently proposed stricter limits on hunting trophy imports over fears of poaching. This has annoyed Mokgweetsi Masisi, Botswana’s president.

As he told the German newspaper Bild: “It is very easy to sit in Berlin and have an opinion about our affairs in Botswana. We are paying the price for preserving these animals for the world.”

Let me preface this by stating I am an animal lover. I drove my daughters to school this morning and spotted a poodle out for a walk in hot pink boots and matching coat. I couldn’t stop laughing. Animals give us our humanity. They should always be protected.

That said, President Masisi makes a valid point.

Thanks to conservation efforts and a military crackdown on big game hunting, Botswana’s elephant population has almost tripled to 130,000 since 1984. If my high school math is right, that’s about 65 million kilograms of elephants in a territory of 581,000 square kilometres.

That’s a lot of per capita elephant. Living in parts of Botswana is like driving a Honda Odyssey with a camel in the back. There is no room for other passengers.

So what is the human leader supposed to do? Elephant herds are destroying property. They are trampling residents. They are creating food shortages by feasting on crops. They are wreaking havoc on infrastructure. A telephone pole to an elephant is a toothpick to us.

We whine about raccoons in Toronto. Imagine if you looked out your patio doors and a five-ton, tusked behemoth was chomping your maple tree after crushing your patio sectional from Canadian Tire. You think traffic is a mess now? Imagine if the DVP was shut down in rush hour because 40 elephants were sunbathing and playing with groundhogs.

Botswana doesn’t want to hurt its elephants. Botswana loves its elephants. It just doesn’t know what to do with its elephants because it has too many elephants. Angola may take 8,000. Mozambique is pondering 500.

But that’s still not enough.

A few years ago, Zimbabwe basically had a global wildlife sale of exotic animals. All ecosystems were strained by overpopulation and drought. The country made $2.7 million by just selling 90 elephants to China and Dubai. That revenue was poured back into conservation programs. Everyone was happy, including the travelling elephants spared an execution.

The planet needs biodiversity. We should do everything we can to protect endangered species. But it’s not really fair to expect certain countries to shoulder this burden if the quality of human life plummets as a consequence.

Mr. Masisi is not threatening to send 20,000 elephants to Germany this week because he wants to ignite chaos at the next Oktoberfest. (As an aside, remind me to tell you the story about how a very nice and possibly colour-blind white supremacist once showed me around Munich. I learned quite a lot about the Rathaus-Glockenspiel that afternoon.)

Masisi is frustrated. He’s got elephants coming out the wazoo.

It’s easy for the rest of us to care about animals when we are darting in and out of condos and offices on land once roamed by mammoths and mastodons, dire wolves and short-faced bears. We have the luxury of championing animals we do not live among.

Neighbourhood cats terrorize my bird feeders. It would be even more stressful if I had to be on the lookout for sabre-toothed tigers. Rhinos are majestic beasts. But all things considered, I’d prefer to not see one charging my car in the parking lot at Best Buy.

Elephants, the largest land animal, are truly amazing. According to the WWF, they have 150,000 muscles in their trunks. Newborn calves can walk an hour after birth — my daughters were still face-planting into ottomans after 14 months. Elephants have empathy and photo memory.

But elephants also take up a lot of space and resources.

So if the world wants elephants, the world should help find suitable habitats for elephants when their home countries are at max occupancy. If Ontario can have one African Lion Safari, why can’t we have 10 more? Hey, Botswana, send a few elephants to Cambridge. Doug Ford will sort it out.

If every country framed animal conservation as global and not local, Botswana would not need to fantasize about putting 20,000 elephants on Lufthansa flights between Gaborone and Hamburg. Botswana would get the help it deserves.

Elephants do not want to emigrate. But it’s preferable to getting killed.