"I have never hunted, and I never will. Especially not an elephant," writes AFP's Johannesburg correspondent Julie Jammot. "People willing to defend hunters are few and far between these days. Those who hunt for hunting's sake, for a 'trophy', are widely seen as criminals."

But when she travels to Botswana to report on a recent hunting ban, she sees villages hurting from lost tourism revenue, harvests destroyed by elephants emboldened to trample over fields. "By this point I have had to review some of my certainties," she writes.