https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...e-data-says-otherwise/?utm_term=.a7568baade89
If the logic of killing elephants to save them strikes you as questionable, you're not alone.
As of 2014 the African elephant population stood at an estimated 374,000, according to the Global Elephant Census, a massive and costly effort to measure the continent's remaining savanna elephant population. That's down from an eIt's theoretically possible, of course, that population declines would be even worse without the legally sanctioned killings of hundreds of elephants a year. But there are also a number of very good reasons to suspect that trophy hunting does not bring any great benefit to Africa's elephant populations.
For starters, the hunting of elephants brings in very little revenue. A 2017 report by Economists at Large, an economic analysis firm based in Australia, found that in eight African countries, trophy hunting amounted to less than 1 percent of total tourism revenue and 0.03 percent of the countries' total gross national product. A 2015 National Geographic report found that only minimal amounts of revenue from game hunting actually trickled down to the communities managing elephant populations. Government corruption is a big factor in this, with authorities keeping hunting fees for themselves and seizing wildlife lands to profit from hunting and poaching.
Zimbabwe, in particular, has been rife with bad wildlife management practices, which is why the Obama administration banned elephant trophy imports from the country in the first place estimated 10 million elephants at the turn of the 20th century, and from 600,000 of the animals as recently as 1989.