"I hate elephants. Two simple reasons: They have widowed me, and they have left me without a harvest."

Said Lumba Nderiki, quoted in "I hate elephants’: Behind the backlash against Botswana’s giants" (WaPo).

Nderiki and her husband had been married 65 years before he was killed by an elephant in 2014. Like nearly everyone else in this cluster of villages, it has been years since her fields weren’t trampled and eaten up by what she calls “the giants.” She used to grow more than 100 bags of sorghum in a season. Last harvest, she salvaged three.

Growing resentment toward the animals among farmers here and around Botswana is upending the country’s politics and prompting the reversal of policies that turned tourism into Botswana’s second-biggest earner after diamonds. The furor has also spilled into a larger debate over race in a country where white foreigners and the descendants of colonialists control much of the conservation and tourism sectors while many who live outside the national parks eke out a living on government subsidies....

The country’s president, Mokgweetsi Masisi... said that in his view, the numbers of elephants are now “far more than Botswana’s fragile environment, already stressed by drought and other effects of climate change, can safely accommodate,” leading to a “sharp increase” in conflict between humans and elephants. He believes a limited, permit-based return to hunting can solve the crisis.....

Ephraim Simasiku, 71, spent a whole month stringing metal cans along a wire to create a fence around his farm that, with its glint and clang, might scare off elephants. He spends entire nights patrolling his field, full of the juicy watermelons that elephants love, with a flashlight and drum. Elephants ate 400 out of the 1,000 he planted this season.

"During the night, elephants. During the day, elephants,” he said. “A farmer like me can get no sleep.”

On the night of May 14, when all his other methods failed, Simasiku reached for his last resort: a .375 rifle. The next day, people came to his field from all over the enclave to take home a piece of the meat.