Last week, King Charles was drawn into a row over a topic dear to his big Green heart, that of wildlife conservation. Proposed new legislation, the Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill, which would ban the bringing into Britain of trophies gained from the shooting of endangered big-game like elephants, lions, dinosaurs, unicorns, and suchlike, was objected to by several ambassadors from potentially affected African nations like Botswana, South Africa, Tanzania, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia. They threatened to raise the issue at a forthcoming Commonwealth Summit in October, in order to publicly embarrass King Charles, who was due to attend, health permitting.
The Africans’ problem was that, in seeking to save endangered species’ lives in this way, the arrogant Great White Chiefs of Westminster would only do more harm than good: native Africans knew best how to manage their local wildlife, not distant and clueless foreigners who wished more to ostentatiously virtue-signal than to bestow any actual benefit. According to the ambassadors, big-game hunting, which brought in plenty of tourist dollars, was “a vital part of the funding mix for conservation programmes across southern Africa, many of which are globally renowned for their success in protecting and enhancing biodiversity”.
Furthermore, a bit like Al Gore’s beloved polar bears, some of the ‘endangered’ animals due to be protected from alleged looming extinction by the U.K. Government Bill turned out not to be endangered at all. Take African elephants, which, their numbers recovering greatly over recent years, are not technically classed as being endangered any more as most people think, just ‘vulnerable’, like every other protected minority group is deemed to be these days, human or otherwise.
Thanks to the success of their recent domestic conservation schemes, for example, Botswana is currently absolutely swamped with wild elephants, over 130,000 of them, running about loose all over the place and causing complete chaos, like illegal migrants on the Dover coast. By comparison, Botswana has only 2.7m human residents, making for an approximate ratio of one elephant for every 20 humans.
So packed with pachyderms is the country that Botswana is literally now giving the damn things away – it donated 8,000 to neighbouring Angola, and has been touting them around endlessly elsewhere. Pretty soon, Rwanda will probably be offering to put them on flights for resettlement there, to fill up all those otherwise empty migrant apartments Rishi Sunak kindly funded the building of so recently. One of the few realistic ways of keeping numbers down is to allow culling of the animals via trophy-shooting.
The Elephantom Menace
In April, when Germany likewise spoke of passing a hunting-trophy import ban similar to the one proposed for the U.K., Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi said that if the Bundestag did so, he would have no option but offer its members a free “gift” of 20,000 elephants for German politicians and voters to “live together with… in the way you are trying to tell us [to do]”, adding he would not take no for an answer. Botswana’s Wildlife Minister Dumezweni Mthimkhulu has likewise threatened to ship 10,000 live elephants to our very own Hyde Park so King Charles and his deluded subject could “have a taste of living alongside” them like Botswanans have to do.
It is not only the fact that money from hunting-based tourism is Botswana’s second-largest source of national income after diamond-mining (probably also soon to banned under Western eco-pressure, as diamonds, like coal, are ultimately made from compressed carbon) which poses a problem. Amazingly, it turns out that wild animals like elephants can also sometimes be slightly dangerous!
Hooligan herds were trampling crops, damaging buildings, and stomping natives to death. It may somehow have escaped Western politicians’ notice, but elephants are very large creatures – almost elephantine in scale, in fact – and opposing culls of them is not quite as consequence-free for most humans as conceited townie politicians ordering bans on culls of, say, badgers, squirrels or fieldmice is over here in Blighty. Country-dwellers in Botswana itself were actively aching to be allowed to shoot the giant vermin in the head once again, their numbers and wandering-range having increased dramatically since a previous hunting ban (later lifted) had been imposed back in 2014.
According to Minister Mthimkulu: “In some areas, there are more of these beasts than people. They are killing children who get in their path. They trample and eat farmers’ crops, leaving Africans hungry.”
Save the Elephants – Kill the Africans! That’s a slogan the World Wildlife Fund hasn’t yet tried, for obvious reasons, but in practice that may well be what such counterproductive Western eco-measures truly result in: a bit like how when Greentard Western politicians go round refusing Africans the funding to develop their own gas- or oil-based power-grids in order to ‘save their lives’ from long-term global warming, thereby condemning them to die more immediately from lack of reliable electricity supplies for their tedious little hospitals and so forth. (The WWF did once accidentally appear to campaign to kill white people rather than pandas, though – see an old article of mine about the mishap here.)
In short, even if trophy-hunting were indeed to be banned once more in Botswana, as Western nations like the U.K. and Germany are effectively trying to legislate for through the back door, the nation’s elephants would still have to be shot and killed anyway, just by poor black natives, not rich white foreigners: the Botswanan Government’s genuine proposal under such circumstances was to chop them all up into little pieces and turn them into pet-food!
Elephants’ Graveyard
When news of this almost parodically callous-sounding idea leaked out back in 2019, it led to perhaps my all-time favourite online petition being created, aimed directly at the evil, elephant-slaying President Masisi:
The petition to better regulate “human-elephant interactions” doesn’t even make internal sense. On the one hand, Botswana’s booming elephants, like Al Gore’s polar bears, are falsely described as being “on the brink of extinction” – and yet, elsewhere, it is boasted that the country was “one of the last bastions of safety” for them up until extremely recently, so much so that it was home to “one-third of all African elephants”, harbouring “130,000, the most of any nation”.
And when the document describes elephants as being “poached” what, in practice, does this actually mean? Might the actual case be that certain locals, selfishly tired of seeing their worthless children and crops trampled to death by marauding dangerous beasts, are simply taking matters into their own hands and shooting the animals dead themselves, Government permission or not, Dirty Harry-style?
Two responses from Western signees (if that’s even a word) to the petition below the line were particularly telling, I feel:
I’m not usually very sympathetic towards accusations of so-called ‘neo-colonialist attitudes’ on behalf of white Westerners, thinking this to be generally just a line of manipulative moral blackmail used by Third Worlders to get free cash and aid from naïve, guilt-ridden Lefties in Europe and America. But in this specific limited instance I think I’d probably make an exception.
How can it be that Botswanan elephants, living in Botswana, do not “belong” to the actual Botswanans themselves to look after and manage on the ground as they themselves see fit, but to an entirely random (I presume) white man named Steve W. living in Canada? Probably because, according to the presumably equally Caucasian Pauline S. of the United Kingdom, the primitive, know-nothing, Botswanan darkies in question are all just a tribe of “savages”. I bet, under different circumstances, Steve and Pauline are good little Green Party voters who donate to BLM and think it’s racist to have any national borders. Personally, I think borders are wonderful things – if maintained properly, they can protect helpless Botswanans from morally superior idiots like them.
Who Are the Real Dumbos Here?
Just a suggestion, but might it possibly the case that almost all do-gooding European voters and politicians – even Donald Tusk – probably know next to nothing at all about niche and obscure issues like the specific ins-and-outs of elephant conservation in Botswana? A classic 1997 episode of Chris Morris’s satirical Channel 4 fake news programme Brass Eye would suggest this is indeed the case.
Click on this link, and observe how Morris successfully duped a number of credulous celebs into thinking that one elephant named Karla in a German Zoo had become so distressed by her poor-quality living conditions that she had stuck her trunk up her own arse and began sucking in her own head. A zookeeper had gone around the back to try and yank it back out, but had been hoovered up inside the elephant’s highly capacious “dung-pump mechanism”. Indeed, that very phrase was used by Morris’s incontinently animal-loving victims, from romantic novelist Jilly Cooper to TV magician Paul Daniels, who were duped into saying it on camera as part of a spoof charity campaign. You almost suspect President Masisi’s threat of turning his elephants into Pedigree Chum was performed in a similar spirit of jest, just to see if the ever-emoting Western fools who opposed him would actually fall for the whole thing.
I may not be able to pronounce their names, but I’m completely on the side of Dumezweni Mthimkhulu and Mokgweetsi Masisi here – and not simply because I personally would be more than willing to pay good tourist-money to fire a bazooka into a yawning hippo’s mouth just to see what would happen. I’m sick to death of busybody Africans and Asians coming over here to Europe and telling us all how to live our own lives. I think it’s equally reasonable of Africans and Asians to resent us doing precisely the same thing over there. Here’s an idea: why don’t we each of us agree to just stay right where we belong and start minding our own bloody business for once?
If the Labour Party, who appear every bit as obsessed with signalling their own abstract virtue rather than doing any actual concrete practical good in the world as the Tories currently are, press on with Westminster’s stupid and counterproductive Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill once they come to power in six weeks’ time, then I sincerely hope that Botswana et al follow through on their threat to publicly embarrass King Charles at his Commonwealth Summit this October.
It’s being held in Samoa, so maybe Africa’s bullied Presidents and Prime Ministers could pack their rifles into their trunks and do a little exotic wildlife hunting themselves while they’re out there. Samoa has no elephants to murder itself, of course, but as the next best thing, they could just shoot King Charles with a tranquiliser dart, whip out a panga and hang his severed head on a wall mounted on a big wooden plaque instead. His ears are certainly large enough to make any difference between the two species indistinguishable to most non-qualified zoologists.
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Well, that is a bit of a blow for the alarmists.
Actually, 33% less blow.
Don’t worry, before you can say “anthropogenic global climate catastrophe”, it will be labelled “misinformation” by the fact checkers, and we can all get back to panicking.
Another interesting meteorology article. The term Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) was new to me. No doubt the relationship between it and other weather events is complex and not fully understood. As to the belief that we have much influence over the weather system as a whole globally, that is, as you say, simplistic.
Slightly off topic, but some might like to watch the interview on GBN’s 19:00 programme with someone who was, err, critical of the new colliery in Whitehaven. A full-on climate scaremonger! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suY1rqIt5GQ from about 9:20 on.
Nearly every time I explain to my friends that actually the world is cooling and the energy in our climatic system is reducing because the only source of that energy, the sun, is heading towards a grand solar minimum I am looked at as if I am insane.
Luckily I have always been able to ignore people who don’t bother researching these effects and who believe that black is white because the MSM tells them so. I expect to see them run over on a zebra crossing.
The problem we have is it is no longer about whether climate change is/is not a threat and whether Man is/is not the cause because there is a whole new thing which has actually become disconnected and exists on its own -decarbonisation, the march to Net Zero.
This is the same as CoVid. Actual evidence showing Covid was zero risk for 99%+, and evidence that the ‘vaccines’ did not stop disease or transmission, that they were in fact increasing infection, severity, deaths, causing deaths and injury, became disconnected from the vaccination campaign which still is being pressed on people.
Neither Net Zero nor CoVid vaccination are validated or repudiated by evidence, they have a whole life of their own.
These facts cannot possibly be true because the computer models say otherwise.