Wildlife

Hunter shoots and kills one of Zimbabwe’s ‘biggest ever’ elephants

One of Zimbabwe’s biggest ever elephants has been shot dead by a German hunter who paid nearly £40,000 for the paperwork, just months after famous lion Cecil was mourned worldwide.

The giant animal is thought to have been between 40 and 60 years old, and could be the largest killed in Zimbabwe for more than 30 years.

Its tusks alone weighed a combined 120lb, an exceptional size even for an African elephant.

A picture taken just minutes after the killing shows the hunter and his guide grasping hands in celebration, one of them sitting on the elephant’s front leg as his body lies on the ground.

The hunter killed the gentle giant on October 8 in a private hunting zone bordering Zimbabwe’s southern Gonarezhou National Park, The Telegraph reported.

He had paid $60,000 dollars for a permit granting permission to slay a large bull elephant as part of his 21-day hunting itinerary. He hoped to go home able to boast of killing the Big Five, which also included leopards, lions, buffalo and rhinoceros.

But conservationists said they were outraged by the killing, saying the government should preserve its animals as part of the national heritage and refuse to issue permits.

The news comes less than a week after rangers found 26 elephants poisoned by cyanide in Zimbabwe, killed for their ivory.

Baboons Black Out Zimbabwe Radio Station

A troop of rogue baboons forced a radio station off the air in Zimbabwe, where the government is often blamed for using oppressive censorship and intimidation to silence its critics.

The staff of YA-FM, in the central mining town of Zvishavane, was initially puzzled when the remote mountaintop transmitter went off the air since there were none of the power cuts that sometimes plague the facility.

When engineers arrived and found the station’s fibre optic cable had been chewed through, they also saw baboons nearby.

“I’m told there were more than five of them that ate into the cable,” radio station head Munyaradzi Hwengwere told the country’s Chronicle newspaper. “When we got to the tower, we saw the baboons scurrying away”.