Living With Elephants in Chobe: Botswana's Hard Bargain

Living with elephants is an everyday reality in northern Botswana. Around Chobe National Park and the town of Kasane, elephants cross the highways, drink from the Chobe River beside lodges and homes, walk through villages at night and raid farmers' fields. Botswana holds the largest elephant population of any country, commonly estimated at around 130,000, and many of them live outside national parks, on land shared with people.

That makes the region one of the world's great conservation successes and one of its hardest negotiations. Elephants bring visitors, jobs and international admiration. They also destroy harvests, damage water points, threaten lives and keep families awake guarding their crops. The central question is not whether elephants should be protected, but who carries the cost of protecting them.

Chobe and Kasane: where elephants and people meet

Chobe National Park, often described as Botswana's first national park, lies in the north of the country along the Chobe River. In the dry season, when pans and seasonal pools inland have dried, elephants move to the river in very large numbers, and the riverfront can hold some of the densest gatherings of elephants anywhere in Africa.

Kasane sits right on the park's edge. Residents grow used to elephants crossing the road at dusk, browsing on trees in the town and leaving tracks between houses. Many visitors find this magical. For people who live there, it also means planning walks to school or work around animals that can weigh several tonnes and do not recognise a town boundary.

The wider landscape is part of the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, known as KAZA, which links protected and community lands across Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Elephants move freely across these borders, which is why their numbers in one country cannot be understood without looking at the region as a whole.

Crop raiding, fences and compensation

For a subsistence farmer, a single night's visit from a group of elephants can destroy a season's maize, sorghum or melons. Families in elephant country often spend harvest weeks guarding their fields after dark, banging drums, lighting fires and shining torches. Elephants also damage water tanks and pipes, and encounters at night can be fatal for people and animals alike.

Botswana's government pays compensation for some losses caused by wild animals, including crop and livestock damage. Farmers commonly describe the process as slow and the payments as falling short of the real cost, while officials point to the scale of the claims. Fencing is another contested tool. Long veterinary fences, built to separate cattle from wildlife and protect the beef export trade from disease, have also blocked wildlife movement, and their effects on migrations have been criticised for decades.

Chilli, bees and other ways of keeping the peace

Because elephants are intelligent and adaptable, no single deterrent works for long on its own. Communities, researchers and conservation workers have tried many low-cost methods, often in combination:

• Chilli: elephants dislike capsaicin, so fences smeared with chilli and grease, or bricks of dung and chilli burned to make an acrid smoke, can discourage raids.
• Beehive fences: elephants avoid bees, and hives strung along a field boundary can deter them while producing honey.
• Early warning and guarding: lights, noise and shared alerts help neighbours respond together.
• Changing farming: crops that mature earlier, or that elephants find less attractive, and fields grouped together rather than scattered in the bush.

None of these are cures. They work best when local people help design them and when they cost less, in money and sleep, than the losses they prevent.

Living with elephants: who carries the cost?

Tourism income from elephants flows to lodges, operators and the national economy, while the costs of living with them fall heavily on rural households. Botswana has tried to narrow that gap through community-based natural resource management, in which community trusts can earn income from wildlife on their land. How fairly that income is shared, and how much say communities have, are long-running debates.

Hunting is the sharpest of them. Botswana banned commercial trophy hunting on public land in 2014 and lifted the ban in 2019 after national consultations in which conflict with elephants was a major theme. Supporters argue that carefully limited hunting brings income to rural communities and gives them a stake in wildlife; opponents argue that it is unethical, harms elephant society and does little to resolve conflict. The argument became international in 2024, when Botswana's then president, angered by proposals in Europe to restrict trophy imports, offered to send 20,000 elephants to Germany. Behind the headline was a serious point: people in Botswana resent being told how to manage animals by countries that do not live with them.

Kazungula: where four countries almost meet

Just east of Kasane, the Chobe River joins the Zambezi at Kazungula, where Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia come extraordinarily close together. Botswana and Zambia share only a tiny stretch of border here, so short that geographers have long debated whether the four countries meet at a single point. Since 2021 the Kazungula Bridge, a road and rail crossing over the Zambezi, has linked Botswana and Zambia directly.

Why this matters on foot

Walking in elephant country is a specialist safety question, not a test of courage. Elephants are generally peaceful when given space, but a surprised group with calves, or a bull in musth, can be extremely dangerous, and dense bush, river crossings and dusk all raise the risk. The expedition's rules are clear: no walking after dark, never approaching, following or filming dangerous animals on foot, and current local knowledge always overriding a map. How the walk handles the northern corridor will be decided on the advice of Botswana wildlife professionals and the people who use those roads, and any section that is not walked will be declared openly. Our article on whether it is safe to walk across Africa explains how those decisions are made.

The planned route crosses into Zambia at Kazungula and continues towards Mosi-oa-Tunya. In Chobe, the story the expedition hopes to tell is about residents, farmers, guides and conservation workers, not close encounters. Human-wildlife conflict is one of the themes where the kindness ledger may respond to a need identified locally. You can sponsor the walk before it begins from Cape Agulhas in December 2026.

Frequently asked questions

How many elephants are there in Botswana?

Botswana's population is commonly estimated at around 130,000, the largest of any country, though numbers shift as elephants move across borders.

Can you see elephants in Kasane town?

Often, yes, especially at dusk and in the dry season. Keep well back, stay in a vehicle where possible and never approach them.

What is human-elephant conflict?

It describes the damage and danger that arise when people and elephants share land: lost crops, broken water supplies, injuries and deaths on both sides.

Where do four countries meet in Africa?

At Kazungula on the Zambezi, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia come almost to a single point, though whether it is a true quadripoint is debated.