Some are pushing trophy hunting as part of the solution, but not for the reason you might think.
Hunting elephants has left Leon Kachelhoffer with a strange mix of reverence and disdain for the animals.
"It's always fascinating that the biggest animal on Earth moves the quietest out of the lot," he says, rifle slung over his shoulder, tramping through scrubby bush in northern Botswana.
He squats to carefully inspect a footprint in the sand left by a huge bull elephant he says is just up ahead.
Footprints aren't the only sign we're on the right track.
"As you can see, he's ripped this branch off and kept going," says Leon, next to a shattered tree.
I ask him why they'd do that. "Idiots. Idiots is the only thing," he says.
Leon Kachelhoffer takes foreign clients hunting for elephants in Botswana.
Foreign Correspondent: Marty Smiley
Leon, a professional trophy hunter, often takes clients on weeks-long trips to stalk and kill elephants, targeting older bulls they think are past prime breeding age.
The African savanna elephant is listed as endangered but can be legally hunted for sport in Botswana, although it's still controversial — a fact Leon knows all too well.
In 2022, he briefly shot to infamy when a photo of a "big tusker" he and a client had just killed went viral, sparking a global outcry.
Hunting is not just a business for him — rightly or wrongly, he believes it's good for both elephants' survival and for the people of Botswana.
"For them, elephant are vermin," he says.
Botswana boasts the largest elephant population on Earth.
Elephant numbers here have doubled to 130,000 over three decades, in part due to anti-poaching efforts.
They are a huge drawcard for the country's tourism industry, which generates about 10 per cent of GDP and creates tens of thousands of jobs.
But this conservation success has brought with it big problems.
The elephants are popular with tourists, but locals' relationship with them is complicated.
While the elephant population has doubled, so too has the number of people in Botswana, leaving the animals and humans in a competition for space and resources.
Elephants destroy infrastructure such as fences and water tanks and raid farmers' crops during the harvest season, forcing some to leave their farms altogether.
Growing contact between elephants and humans has also turned deadly — for both.
About 100 people have reportedly been killed or injured by elephants in Botswana since 2010, no small number in a country of only 2.6 million.
It's not hard to see why.
As Leon leads us deeper into the bush, we find two elephants at the edge of a muddy pool.
Suddenly, one flares its ears — a warning before a charge — and splits the air with a raspy trumpet call.
Leon raises his rifle in the air and yells. The elephant turns and runs off into the bush.
Leon's right; its feet don't make a sound, and only the noise of breaking branches reveals its retreat.
"Imagine that bull coming at 40 kilometres an hour," he says. "Imagine a villager that's walking around looking for lost cattle or … at night trying to keep these elephants out of their fields.
"They've got nothing. They're completely defenceless."
'They're terrorising us'
Living alongside elephants is now a fact of life for many people across northern Botswana, where most of the country's herd roam.
Feelings about how best to co-exist with them are complex, ranging from a desire for limited culling to trying to move them to less-populated areas.
"Elephants are terrorists. They're terrorising us," says Leungo Motlakaleso, who lives on the edge of the world-heritage-listed Okavango Delta, a vast inland waterway.
His village of Shokomoka is sandwiched between the forest where elephants feed and the water where they drink.
As they transit through, they cause chaos.
"They come even into our farm fields. During the night they break in, they eat. Sometimes we wake up in the morning and find nothing," he says.
Shokomoka is mostly leaf huts and fences made with tree branches. There's no running water or electricity.
Locals desperately want to improve their lot, but safari trucks full of wealthy tourists just whiz by on the dirt road.
The village lacks the kind of tourist infrastructure that would make them stop.
Instead, they see only the downsides of Botswana's elephant boom.
"We don't benefit anything from them," Luengo says. "They are the ones benefiting from us."
Trophy hunting is supposed to be part of the solution to Leungo's conundrum.
Re-introduced in 2019, the sport is intended to garner revenue for locals to offset the hardship of living alongside these destructive giants.
Debbie Peake runs a trophy dealership in Maun, in northern Botswana, that employs dozens of staff.
In her workshop they process the heads, tusks and other body parts of animals killed by foreign hunters for export back to the client's home country.
It's a gruesome business.
A dozen elephant skulls are lined up next to rows of more than a hundred jawbones.
Nearby, a shipping container sits full of elephant hides, and piles of ivory are stacked up in a locked safe.
Workers reach into liquid-filled tubs to scrape meat and fat off bones.
Debbie says the hunting industry creates about 2,500 jobs and that part of the $100,000 foreign hunters can pay to stalk and shoot a single elephant goes towards conservation and local communities.
"If communities don't want to live with wildlife, they have that final say — they will simply demolish it," she says
"But if they see benefits from it and it creates a livelihood for them and it creates the means for them to be able to keep that traditional lifestyle, that's what it should be."
Debbie is at pains to point out that trophy hunting is not about population control.
"We have a population of 130,000 elephants-plus, and our [hunting] quota is 400. Do the maths. It's never going to control the population."
Taxidermy trophies at Debbie Peake's workshop in Botswana.
Foreign Correspondent: Marty Smiley
Instead, she argues it can bring foreign money into areas that otherwise might miss out.
Around 40 per cent of Botswana is dedicated to wildlife, but she says large swathes of the country aren't suitable for safari tourism or farming.
Hunting works in areas that "wouldn't be viable for photographic clients," she says. "Equally, there's no agricultural potential. You can't put cattle in there because there's no water."
Botswana has had a rocky history with trophy hunting.
In 2014, then-president Ian Khama introduced a moratorium on the practice, worrying it was damaging the country's wildlife credentials in the eyes of the world.
Five years later, his successor Mokgweetsi Masisi reinstated it, citing high levels of elephant-human conflict and the impact the large elephant population was having on livelihoods.
Botswana's new government is banking on tourism to boost the economy.
Foreign Correspondent: Marty Smiley
The international community has weighed in too — celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres, Ricky Gervais, Piers Morgan and Joanna Lumley have all vocally opposed trophy hunting.
"Elephants are terrorists. They are terrorising us."
— Leungo Motlakaleso
More recently, the UK parliament passed a vote supporting a ban on importing hunting trophies and Germany floated a similar idea in an effort to curtail the hunting industry.
The Masisi government hit back by threatening to send thousands of elephants to Berlin and London so people could see what it was like to live alongside them.
It's a subject that rankles hunters like Leon Kachelhoffer too.
"What perplexes me is [in] countries like the US and the UK, you can pheasant shoot and you can deer shoot, you can go and hunt moose and things like that, but we can't hunt our wildlife. Why not?" he says.
"I don't know why we are looked down upon as Africa that we can't look after our own resources."
He agrees with Debbie Peake that trophy hunting can help communities "realise a benefit" from elephants by creating "an incentive to set aside land and to tolerate the animals".
An alternative solution
That system, however, isn't working for everyone.
Leungo Motlakaleso says he has no idea how much money is being generated from trophy hunting in his area, and his community has never seen the benefit from it.
"[We] don't even know how many elephants are supposed to be killed in our area," he says. "How would we know about the money?"
He's not the only local who feels this way.
Oaitse Nawa, founder of the Elephant Protection Society, says there are only two entities that benefit from trophy hunting: "the hunter and then the government".
He grew up next to the Okavango Delta and was a safari guide for many years.
Now, through his NGO, he's trying to help communities live alongside elephants without killing them.
Both he and Leungo think attracting elephants away from villages by creating artificial waterholes could keep communities safe and bring in tourists.
Neither want to see elephants killed for sport. "It's cruelty to animals — it shouldn't happen," Leungo says.
Oaitse is desperate to convince locals — and the world — there is another way.
Walking through the scrub near Shokomoka, he motions for us to stop and be quiet when we come across a herd of elephants.
He has no gun, no weapons. The herd calmly passes within metres of us.
"There's a difference between fear and respect," he says. "The hunters, they have fear of nature because they know that what they are doing in nature is bad."
He has many complaints about trophy hunting, including his belief that killing older males actually makes the human-elephant conflict worse because it removes role models for the younger animals in the herd.
He also takes issue with one of the supposed benefits of trophy hunting for locals.
After an elephant is killed, hunters allow villagers to take the meat from the carcass. Locals hack at it with axes and knives to collect it before it goes off.
The hunting community says it's an important source of protein for grateful villagers.
Leungo and Oaitse find that deeply insulting.
"Being given meat is like you are treated like hyena or scavengers," Oaitse says.
"This is how black people have been treated for quite a long time. But now we are in the modern world. We need education, we need transport, we need to compete with other cultures.
"We value money, not meat."
Resolving human-elephant conflict and the role trophy hunting plays is something Botswana's recently elected president, Duma Boko, needs to grapple with.
Since he won office late last year from the pro-hunting president Mokgweetsi Masisi, activists and conservationists like Oaitse Nawa have been lobbying him to ban trophy hunting.
In theory, they have reason to be hopeful.
In an op-ed written in 2019, Boko slammed Masisi for reintroducing trophy hunting and his desire to resume selling ivory, saying there was "simply no need for these policies".
Boko wrote then that the money trophy hunters might bring to the country is "sure to be offset by losses in wildlife and ecological tourism".
However, hopes of a policy change for those opposed to hunting are fading.
In December, the Boko government released more than 400 elephant permits for the 2025 hunting season.
"One thing that I can advise to this cabinet, they should have lots of consultation to the community," Oaitse says.
"Those people that are the ones that are very important and those are the people that go and queue and cast their vote."
Watch A Majestic Menace tonight on Foreign Correspondent at 8pm on ABC TV, ABC iview and YouTube.
