Botswana Wants Angola’s Exiled Elephants to Return Home
- Overpopulation would be eased in Botswana, minister says
- Angola’s decades of civil war drove the animals south
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Botswana may have found a solution to its elephant overpopulation: It’s going to encourage some of them to leave the country.
Botswana’s tourism industry, which accounts for a fifth of the economy, is heavily reliant on the world’s biggest elephant population, but the animals have become a political issue as there are too many of them and they destroy crops and occasionally trample villagers. Now, elephants are beginning to migrate into neighboring Angola and the governments of both countries are helping them do so by removing land mines left over from Angola’s civil war and tearing down fences.