In the lush, rolling savannahs that connect northern Tanzania with Amboseli National Park in Kenya, foraging elephants move back and forth across a sloping landscape in the shadow of snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro.
The animals are used to open top 4x4s full of tourists on the Kenyan side and don’t seem to feel any danger from visitors pointing at their phones. But what the animals probably don’t know is that just across the border on the Tanzanian side, which for three decades was as safe as the park, there are now people pointing guns, not cameras.
Since September, five bull elephants from a population centered on Amboseli have been shot and killed, likely by trophy hunters, in the Tanzanian portion of this wildlife corridor. At least two were so-called super-tuskers, with tusks so long they swept the ground.
There hasn’t been a similar group of rapid kills in the region since the mid-1990s. Conservationists say it shows a breakdown of a tacit agreement between countries that banned hunting in the border zone.
It also highlights the challenges the neighbors face in aligning different approaches to managing their shared wildlife heritage: Kenya bans hunting and receives all its wildlife revenue through sightseeing. While wildlife safaris are an important part of Tanzania’s economy, the country also allows wealthy tourists to shoot big game.
“This is heartbreaking to me,” said Cynthia Moss, an American zoologist who monitors the roughly 2,000 elephants in the Amboseli herd as director of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants. About 10 of Amboseli’s super tusks are left and another 15 or so remain in Kenya, he said. “I know these elephants. I know how much they trust.”
The killings have caused an uproar in Kenya. In April, dozens of leading environmentalists wrote an open letter to the Tanzanian government demanding that authorities ban hunting within 25 miles of the Kenyan border. Tanzanian officials remained silent. Government statements in the past have justified hunting on the grounds that it brings in millions in much-needed income.
Kaddu Sebunya, who heads the African Wildlife Foundation, a conservation organization based in Kenya, said it was unlikely the elephants were shot by poachers. He noted that there was no indication of an investigation by the Tanzanian authorities.
“If a poacher illegally killed an elephant in the same location, he would be dealt with by law,” he said. Tanzanian wildlife managers, as well as Kenya’s wildlife agency, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Elephant killings by Tanzania three decades ago sparked similar outrage and led to the announcement of a moratorium on hunting.
In December 1994, three Amboseli elephants were killed in quick succession near Longido, a town about nine miles from the border, sparking an outcry from Kenya. By May 1995, the Tanzanian authorities, under pressure from conservationists and scientists in Kenya and around the world, announced a nine-month ban on hunting in the area.
The moratorium, Tanzanian officials said, will be lifted once the two countries agree on a clear, defined conservation area in talks.
That’s where things get muddy. While old newspaper clippings confirm that the ban was announced, it is unclear if talks ever took place or if the nine-month restriction was ever lifted. There appears to be no evidence of further action. But for whatever reason, hunters avoided the area until recently.
Ms Moss and other conservationists in Kenya say there was an unspoken agreement between the two countries after the initial announcement, and it appears to have collapsed. Experts say they don’t know why. Tanzania’s conservation legislation has not changed.
Hunters, meanwhile, say the lack of clarity means the deal simply didn’t exist.
Tanzania has about 60,000 elephants today, up from about 316,000 in 1978. In Kenya, about 35,000 remain, out of about 160,000 around the same time.
As a keystone species, elephants not only shape ecosystems for other wildlife — creating watering holes with their tusks, for example, and dispersing seeds in their droppings — but their intelligence and complex social structure mean violent deaths. injure surviving elephants and result in aggressive behavior.
The larger, larger bulls that are targeted are considered vital for reproduction, as well as the transmission of culture and the maintenance of social order. Male elephants mostly live outside herds, and young bulls sometimes spend time with elders who impart knowledge such as where to forage and where to go when the seasons change.
They also model behavior. One study found that The absence of older males can make younger bulls more aggressive.
According to Mr Sebunya, the super tusks help even the youngest bulls know which people to avoid. “They’re told, ‘When you see these tourist vehicles, it’s fine, but if you see other types of vehicles, those are problems,'” he said.
The first elephant lost in the recent wave, Gilgil, a 35-year-old killed in September, was one such large tusk.
By singling out elephants like Gilgil, Ms Moss said, “it takes away the natural elements of competition and survival, allowing the younger, less tested, perhaps less vigorous, males to breed”.
Sports groups, on the other hand, claim that hunting, when managed properly, can be a net positive in a poorer country like Tanzania. (GDP per capital in the country is about $1,200, according to the World Bankcompared to about $2,100 in Kenya.)
Zidane Janbeck and Quintin Whitehead, who run Kilombero North Safaris – which offers hunting trips for elephants, lions, leopards and other big game – say the company shares a percentage of its revenue with communities that own part of the hunting area. (Kilombero said it paid the Enduimet Wildlife Management Area a total of $250,000 in 2023. Enduimet officials did not respond to a request for comment.)
In addition, human-elephant conflicts are increasing in Tanzania, in part because of rapidly growing rural population and also because of the more frequent and severe droughts in East Africa. But farmers are less likely to kill elephants that invade their fields, hunters say, if they know they will get a share of the proceeds from the hunt.
And setting aside well-managed wilderness areas for hunting means less land will be leveled for agriculture, they add.
Tanzania sets annual quotas for the animals to be hunted (50 elephants this year) and each hunting party must be monitored by an official.
Kilombero confirmed that she had hunted an elephant in the area where Gilgil’s body was found, had its tusks removed, but denied that she had killed a super tusk.
“We guarantee you, we are conservationists, we are not targeting large elephants,” Mr. Janbeck, who led the September hunt, said in a video interview. “We are doing everything according to the regulations in Tanzania. We are supported by the government. We have all the blessings from the local communities.”
In Longido, the locals seem divided.
On a recent weekday, a group of men gathered for late-night drinks and weighed their stances on trophy hunting. As long as it’s legal, fine, one old man concluded. A mild-mannered younger man objected, saying that killing for sport was not right.
But do men benefit from hunting income? “No,” they all said together, shaking their heads. Authorities are favoring wildlife and sport hunters but abandoning vulnerable farmers, they said.
“You have to get a loan to grow your farm and these elephants are destroying it and we don’t get anything,” said one farmer, Edward Masaki, 53, in Swahili with a heavy frown.
“Right now I have men guarding my farms day and night with flashlights,” he said. “The annoying thing is that you can’t kill the animals when they attack.”
He was referring to a nationwide ban on killing wildlife that Tanzania has put in place to protect against poaching. Killing animals without a license carries a severe prison sentence: from three to 30 years.
Meanwhile, conservationists across the border in Amboseli say they are waiting in terror, dreading news that another large tusk has been killed, even as they try to get a response from the Tanzanian government.
“All our appeals have fallen on deaf ears,” Ms Moss said. If the killings continue at the same rate, he said, Amboseli’s tusks will be gone in two years, transforming the ecosystem in unprecedented and negative ways.
“A hunted population becomes unnatural because people choose who should pass on their genes and who should not, who should live and who should die,” he said.
