Two collared elephants, two consecutive days, wildlife officials reportedly present — because apparently privilege has its privileges, and one of them is not having to notice a satellite collar.
On September 3rd, a hunting party in Botswana stood over an elephant, decided his tusks were worth taking, and somehow failed to notice the government-grade research collar around his neck. The next day, a different party did the exact same thing to a different elephant.
Two satellite-collared research bulls, both identifiable, both wearing hardware that had been recording their movements for research purposes. And, according to reporting from Daily Maverick, Department of Wildlife and National Parks officials were reportedly present at both hunts — not absent, not looking the other way from some far-off office, but standing there while it happened.
Let’s start with the version of this story that's easiest to believe, because it's the one everyone keeps offering: nobody saw the collar. The argument goes something like this: a collar is small, an elephant is enormous, and in thick bush a hunting party's eyes are on tusks, not neck hardware.
Except that's not actually how a trophy hunt works, and anyone defending it that way knows it. A trophy hunt isn't a chance encounter. It's a deliberate, methodical process — track the animal, get eyes on him, assess his tusks for length and mass and symmetry, judge his age, consider the angle, wait for the shot. That's not a glance. That's an inspection. You don't get to claim forensic-level scrutiny of a set of tusks and then plead legal blindness about the several pounds of collar sitting directly beside them.
So if it wasn't an accident, what was it?
This is where I stop being able to give you a comfortable answer, because I don't have one — but I do have some research that gets uncomfortably close.
There's a body of psychology research on why people pay tens of thousands of dollars to kill large, dangerous animals for pleasure, and it converges on something called “costly signaling theory.” The idea, stripped of jargon, is that the expense and difficulty of a kill isn't an obstacle to status — it is the status. Researchers who study hunters' faces in trophy photos have found this borne out almost literally: genuine, involuntary "pleasure smiles" show up significantly more often when hunters pose with large, dangerous animals than with small or harmless ones. The bigger and riskier the kill, the more real the joy.
That research doesn’t tell us why the two elephants in Botswana were shot. But it does lead to the question: If achievement and rarity are part of what makes a trophy valuable, how does a collar change the animal’s value? To a conservation scientist, it says: this animal matters; don’t interfere with the experiment. To someone operating inside a culture in which unusual, difficult and exceptional kills carry status, does it say the same thing?
If that theory holds, a collared research elephant isn't a liability to avoid. It might be the single most valuable trophy on offer. Killing the forbidden animal, in front of the people whose job was to protect it, apparently isn’t a bug in this incentive structure. It might be the feature.
And there’s a precedent. In 2022, professional hunter Leon Kachelhoffer accompanied the killing of one of Botswana's celebrated big tuskers in NG13, a bull carrying a tusk reportedly weighing more than 100 pounds. Afterward, on a podcast, Kachelhoffer didn't sound indifferent to the animal. He spoke about remorse and sadness, about thinking of the life the elephant had lived. “To be in a position to hunt a bull like that,” he said, “it's an incredible privilege.” Privilege. That word interests me more than almost anything else he said.
That's appreciation-and-achievement research IRL. Studies analyzing hundreds of hunters' own accounts of satisfying kills found "achievement" as the single most common theme, followed by secondary satisfactions researchers categorized as appreciation—the experience, nature, adventure and meaning surrounding the hunt—and affiliation, the social connection that comes with it. None of that requires the animal to be common. It requires the animal to be notable. A research collar doesn't hide an elephant's significance. It broadcasts it.
The cost goes far beyond one life.
Programs like Elephants Without Borders have spent nearly two decades fitting satellite collars on elephants across the Kavango-Zambezi region — the sprawling, five-country conservation area that Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Angola all share. Each collar generates a location ping, sometimes hourly, for years. That data is how researchers have mapped elephant migration corridors across international borders, identified where fences are quietly strangling movement between countries, and tracked where human settlements and elephant ranges are on a collision course before that collision happens. It's slow, expensive, cumulative science. You cannot buy two years of an elephant's movement history. You can only wait for it to happen and record it as it does.
When a collared elephant is shot, the record doesn't pause. It ends. You can’t strap the same collar onto a different elephant and pick up where you left off, because the data was never about elephants in the abstract — it was about that elephant, his particular habits, his particular route through a particular landscape. Killing him doesn't just end a life. It ends the acquisition of knowledge that took years to build and can’t be rebuilt by proxy.
And here's the part that makes the whole thing feel less like an oversight and more like a system working as intended.
Botswana has been here before. In 2019, a nearly identical case played out — a collared bull shot in a licensed hunt, a DWNP official present, a Ministry of Environment statement afterward declaring that killing collared animals was "not permitted under any circumstances." The hunters involved surrendered their licenses. The industry condemned it. Promises were made.
Seven years later, two more are dead, in the same way, under the same kind of supervision, with apparently none of the safeguards that were promised. Botswana's hunting industry has a documented pattern well beyond this: independent audits and investigations have documented cases in which hunting quotas were sold below expected values, community revenues were poorly administered, and private operators captured a far larger share of the eventual hunting value than the trusts holding the quota. A hunting concession quota was reportedly reallocated to a company connected to a wanted international rhino poacher; and some operators are known to use aerial spotting to locate big tuskers before a hunt even begins, which tells you plainly that finding a specific, valuable animal is a planned, resourced part of the business — not an accident of circumstance. I can't say with certainty that money changed hands to make these two hunts happen the way they did. Nobody's been named. But a system this porous doesn't need explicit bribery to fail. It just needs everyone involved to correctly guess that almost nothing will happen if they don't ask too many questions.
Here's my actual opinion, since I clearly have one: this is stupid.
Not just unethical — stupid, in the most expensive and avoidable sense. If what you're actually chasing is the achievement, the appreciation, the story your hunting buddies will nod along to, there’s a whole industry built to give you exactly that without erasing years of research and detonating whatever credibility the government's protections had left.
I don't know whether the collars made the elephants more desirable. What I do know is that everyone involved was operating inside a system that was supposed to make those elephants unmistakably off-limits.
When a protection fails this completely twice in twenty-four hours, seven years after everyone promised they'd fixed exactly this problem, I'm not interested in hearing once again “they didn't see it”.