In a shocking discovery this week at least 26 elephants, their faces hacked off and their tusks removed, lay in congealing blood on Botswana’s Chobe National Park floodplain. Poachers had killed them within sight of an exclusive safari lodge and the Linyanti public campsite. The park is home to the greatest elephant herd in the world and the jewel in the crown of the sprawling, five-country Kavanga-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), of huge concern is that the slaughter occurred in a park protected by the Botswana Defense Force, one of the most efficient anti-poaching operations on the continent. As the chopper descended to one of the kills, scattering vultures, conservationist Mike Chase of Elephants Without Borders (EWB) was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘This is shocking,’ he said as we ducked beneath the throbbing chopper blades. ‘We’ve never had poaching here on this scale. In the two years of the Great Elephant Census which we’ve just completed, this is the worst single incident of poaching I’ve seen. And right in our own back yard! On the Botswana side there’s no human community, but on the Namibian bank is a village. So the poachers are probably coming from over the river,…