A Zimbabwean conservation group has vowed to identify a German hunter who shot one of the largest elephants seen in the country, so the man can be publicly vilified like the killer of Cecil the lion.

Johnny Rodrigues, chairman of the Zimbabwe conservation taskforce, confirmed that the man, as yet unnamed, had a permit when he shot the male elephant last week. The animal was unknown to Zimbabwean experts and is believed to have wandered across the border from South Africa, he said.

Such old, large elephants were almost never sighted, Rodrigues said. “They’re very, very rare. His tusks weighed over 54kg (119lb) – that’s unheard of. You might have 10,000 or 15,000 elephants, but only one in that herd who’s so majestic and iconic.”

The German hunter had paid a lot of money to go on a four-day hunt and had the correct licence and permit to shoot an elephant, Rodrigues said. He added that killing such an elephant was wrong and the hunter should experience similar treatment to Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who faced public protests after he shot Cecil, one of Zimbabwe’s best-known lions, in July.

Rodrigues said: “We don’t know who this hunter is but we will find out. The authorities and the hunters’ association are trying to protect him, but ... we’ve got his photograph. We will identify him and when we do we’ll leave the public to do what they did to Walter Palmer. People like that deserve it.

“He had a permit but he should have used his common sense to say, this is a majestic animal, and to report it to the authorities or to conservation groups. We would have collared it,” said Rodrigues.

“We have our frontline investigators on this and we will find out his identity and we will make it public. What he’s done is just greed. He’s not guilty of breaking the law by not having a permit and a licence. He had all that. But to shoot an iconic animal is wrong.”



While Palmer learned this week he will not face criminal charges in Zimbabwe for shooting Cecil, he faced weeks of protests after returning home.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the German man paid almost £40,000 to shoot a series of animals in Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou national park. The newspaper reported that some hunters say the elephant might have been the biggest shot in 30 years.

Rodrigues said he only knew of two similar-sized elephants in Zimbabwe, one of whom had been killed by a poacher. Such is the size of their tusks, the elephant often drags them along the floor.

“These big animals, when they get sighted, should be collared,” he said. “There should be a law to prevent them being killed. Yes, they have gone past their productive life, but these hunters are acting like gods and taking their lives away. We should be protecting them, utilising them as a marketing tool, so tourists go and see them.

“Let’s have some ethics. Just because they have money, they don’t need to do it. It’s only so they can mount them on a bloody wall. What is that?”