Nearly nine months after putting 170 elephants up for sale, the Namibian Ministry of Environment announced that it had sold 57 pachyderms on Thursday, August 12. The identity of the buyers is not yet known, but this sale allows Namibia to regulate the population of its elephants.
While the number of elephants in Africa has dropped considerably, their population in Namibia is doing well. The country now has 28,000 pachyderms, whereas in 1995 there were only 7,500. It is moreover to control their population that the government resorted to this sale. The elephants in the country are subject to increasing pressure, particularly from drought and poaching.
In the northeast of the country, where they are most numerous, these mammals live side by side with local populations. Farmers see their plots destroyed and their cattle killed. It is therefore to avoid conflicts between elephants and local people that 57 of them have been sold.
This sale allowed Namibia to collect 5.9 million Namibian dollars, or 34,000 euros. However, there is still some uncertainty about this sale: 42 elephants will be exported, but no information about their destination, nor about the buyers.
The NGO WWF remains positive, however. It hopes that this sale is well supervised and that it will allow the rejuvenation of the pachyderm population in certain countries where there are far fewer of them.