Many of you were shocked by reports that GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons had killed an elephant. While we were rather surprised ourselves, we suspected that there was more to the story.

After a conversation with Parsons, our suspicions have been verified: There are many shades of gray in the situation; and Parsons is hardly the black-hearted, endangered-animal-killing nut that PETA and others have made him out to be.

“I’ve been going to Africa for six years,” he told us, “and I progressively became aware of the elephant situation and what a problem it is for the locals.”

The “elephant situation,” as it turns out, has been a complicated one for local governments and wildlife officials for years. As humans in Zimbabwe struggled to find room to live and farm, they have appropriated land previously inhabited only by wildlife. This has set up a natural struggle between human needs and animal habits, where subsistence farmers battle wildlife such as elephants to keep their crops from being destroyed.

The issue of human encroachment had driven several hundred of Zimbabwe’s 60,000 to 100,000 elephants out of the country by 2009, but Parsons says that in the country, elephants are still “very abundant” — at least according to the villagers whose livelihoods are threatened by elephant herds, which frequently come into a village and trample fields of corn and sorghum.

“In Zimbabwe, the people there are incredibly impoverished,” said Parsons. “They treasure an empty plastic water bottle. It’s heart-wrenching to watch … These people are all subsistence farmers, and if they don’t have a good harvest, they starve. That’s it — there’s no support, there’s no welfare, and if they starve, they will die.”

To keep elephants from trampling crops, villagers try building fires, banging drums, cracking whips and even building fences. But the light and noise are ignored, and the fences, Parson says, just get trampled. As for the idea of electric fences, Parsons asks the practical questions: Deep in the African bush, where will the electricity to power the fences come from? What contractors will build the fences, and who will pay for it?

Electric fences aren’t a realistic solution — not now, at least. So Parsons is one of a few hunters who hopes to solve the crop-trampling problem for these villagers in a different way.

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What Really Happened to the Elephants

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When these hunters are called on for assistance, generally by locals whose fields are being destroyed by a herd of elephants, they have a careful plan in place. In these circumstances, hunters avoid shooting elephant cows because of the matriarchal structure of an elephant herd. “Taking a bull has little or no impact on the social structure or herd size,” said Parsons.

“This farmer was desperate,” Parsons tells us of his most recent — and most controversial — trip to Africa. “He couldn’t get the herd out of his field. He asked us to come and deal with it.”

As his party approached the sorghum field that night, Parsons said, “There was no moon, no stars; it was pitch dark. I couldn’t see three feet in front of me. We were moving though the field, and all we could do was use our hearing to find them. That took an hour and a half.”

When the herd realized there were humans in the field about 15 yards away from them, Parsons said they turned to attack the group. At that point, the party turned on the lights they had available. “We picked out the largest bull,” Parsons says, “and we shot and killed it. The rest of the herd left and never came back.” The farmer was able to harvest what remained of his crop.

The killed elephant was then used by the villagers in that area as a valuable source of protein, a practice that even the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority has green-lit during times of economic hardship and hunger.

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The PETA Reaction

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Animal rights activists have taken a harsh tone toward Parsons’ actions, saying there are many other ways the elephants could have been removed from the fields. But as previously mentioned, Parsons says many of these methods have already been tried and have failed. “If you want to go and try to chase an elephant out of a field with a beehive, I’ll video it,” he quips.

But Parsons doesn’t return the rancor of his critics. “These people look at this from the context of being Americans. We’re well-fed and isolated from the process of growing and butchering meat. We see this, and we’re horrified. Their hearts are in the right place, but they just don’t understand what’s going on over there.”

Acknowledging that the situation is complicated, Parsons posed the difficult question, “If you had the choice to take a few elephants or to let people starve, what choice would you make?”

Many have accused the CEO of gloating about his kill in a photograph of him with the dead bull elephant; Parsons said his attitude was far from arrogant at the time.

“When you see me smiling in that picture, I’m smiling because I’m relieved no one was hurt, that the crop was saved, and that these people were going to be fed — the type of smile when you get a good report card or achieve a goal.”

Parsons shared some photos from his trip; have a look, and in the comments, let us know what you think of the whole shebang. Is it more complicated than you expected?