Two small and hungry boys stand beside the body of an African elephant which they are looking forward to eating for their supper.

This startling and disturbing photograph shows the beast, felled by a bullet, about to be butchered in the remote Zimbabwean village of Tsholotsho before being cooked by locals who are currently enduring the country’s worst drought in 100 years.

The mighty tusker, killed by a professional hunter, was one of 200 wild elephants culled in the past month on Zimbabwe government orders to feed people facing a life-or-death battle for food and water.

The photo, given to the Mail by the boys’ father Qaphelani Mahlangu, will horrify many wildlife conservationists in the West and in southern Africa.

But a smiling Mr Mahlangu said: ‘We are pleased the elephants are being shot so we can eat them. 

‘We cut up the animal’s flesh and roasted it on a fire in the village square for everyone to share. My children enjoyed the rare taste of meat. We burned its carcass afterwards.’

The nation’s wildlife authority explained that hired hunters are targeting elephants in four areas of Zimbabwe, ‘where competition for food and water between humans and animals is worst due to the drought’.

The United Nations warned this week that one in three Zimbabweans is enduring a ‘hunger crisis’, in a country where it has not rained for 15 months. 

Children are all but starving in what the UN says could become a ‘full-scale human catastrophe’.

Zimbabwe has 100,000 elephants, the largest population of any country after neighbouring Botswana. 

When she announced the controversial cull last month, Zimbabwe’s environment minister Sithembiso Nyoni told the country’s parliament: ‘We have more elephants than we need, more than our land can accommodate.’

Inevitably, the state-sanctioned slaughter has provoked a backlash. A number of wildlife conservationists have declared it unethical and a ‘cruel violation’.

Others maintain it is demeaning to allow starving Africans to eat the animals – even if they need to do so to survive. 

Farai Maguwu, director of the country’s Centre for Natural Resource Governance, goes further. 

‘Making official the killing of elephants is one of the most disastrous decisions ever made in the history of conservation,’ he said.

Mr Maguwu warned that the cull risks valuable income from safari-loving, camera-clicking tourists, many of them British, who he says may no longer visit Zimbabwe on ethical grounds. 

‘The elephants are more profitable (to the people) alive than dead,’ he added.

Meanwhile Elisabeth Valerio, a conservationist at Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, which has a huge numbers of elephants destined to be culled, claims: ‘The trauma of (elephant) family members being killed can make these wild animals more aggressive towards humans.’

Her words are echoed by the powerful US-based animal rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta). 

So what is the truth? Is Zimbabwe right to have ordered elephant killings to save people?

The Mail visited this stunning country, where grinding poverty and deprivation exists side by side with extraordinary beauty, to investigate the rights and wrongs of the cull.

Last week, we were the first journalists be allowed into two villages where the killings are taking place.

In Tsholotsho, 70 miles from Zimbabwe’s second city Bulawayo, 25 elephants have been shot dead to feed the people.

The second village was Mbire, in the Mashonaland region to the north of the country, near the borders of both Zambia and Mozambique. 

Here, the conflict between humans and hungry, thirsty elephants has reached a flash point.

On our travels, we saw scenes that brought home the devastating effects of drought. Green and lush farmlands have been reduced to dust bowls.

 Hundreds of miles of tracks through the African bush are lined by dead trees as far as the eye can see.

The landscape of Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, resembles a desert land – and there is no sign of rain to come any time soon. 

Smallholders’ crops withered in the ground before they could be harvested in March. Villagers’ cattle and goats have died of thirst. 

Everyone wonders where the next meal, the next drink, will come from. 

In the contest for survival, rampaging elephants – which drink a bathtub of water every day – have trampled on humans at village bore holes.

They have attacked or killed farmers in fields to eat crops and even pushed over rondavels – the huts that are the villagers’ homes – to raid food stored inside.

Zimbabwe declared the drought a national disaster in April. Neighbouring Namibia followed suit in May and has also announced a cull on wildlife. 

It said half its population were struggling to find enough to eat and drink, and the nation would need to cull 723 animals including 83 elephants, 30 hippos and 300 zebras for meat.

The crisis has been driven by El Niño, a natural weather pattern originating in the Pacific which has led to sharply reduced rainfall in the region. 

Elizabeth Mrema, deputy executive director of the United Nations’ Environment Programme, has said the drought is causing ‘immense suffering’ to the people of southern Africa.

And she believes culls offer a partial solution. ‘Eating wild game for food is common practice in cultures across the world,’ she said last week. 

‘Provided the harvesting of these animals is done using sustainable methods… there should be no cause for concern.’

Zimbabwe insists the killings will protect both humans and elephants fighting the drought. 

It is targeting older bulls, in the same way that managed culls of ageing stags are used to prevent over-population and starvation among deer herds in Scotland.

The Highland stags are often shot by fee-paying foreign hunters, who provide a welcome income boost for Scotland and who mount the head and antlers to send home as trophies.

This trophy-hunting model is very much approved of in the farming village of Mbire where 1,200 households live beside the banks of the once-roaring Zambezi river, now reduced to a mere trickle in places.

Here, the Zimbabwean government already allows foreign trophy-hunters to shoot an annual quota of nine elephants a year.

The elephant meat is distributed to villagers, the council gets paid a hunting fee and the animals’ tusks are given to the hunters to take home. 

And yet locals insist this is not enough. There are so many elephants in Mbire that the Campfire Association, a charity founded in Zimbabwe to help communities, provides three full-time rangers to chase them back into the bush whenever the animals wander into the village and its neighbouring fields.

We were invited to an emergency Mbire council meeting of 60 villagers to discuss the ‘elephant problem’. 

There, to make their point, the Campfire rangers suddenly produced a mounted stag’s head with magnificent antlers from a deer that had been culled in the Highlands last year.

The dramatic – and very surprising – gesture in the thatched community hall in remotest Africa was to highlight Britain’s hypocrisy in allowing trophy hunters to shoot wild deer and take home the antlers, while condemning Zimbabwe for wanting to do the same with elephants.

Last week in London, celebrities including Dame Judi Dench, Ricky Gervais, Dame Joanna Lumley and Sir David Jason launched a petition demanding the Labour government help to stop the ‘cruel sport’ of trophy hunting in Africa.

The Conservatives had already attempted to do so by introducing a bill banning the import of African hunting trophies, including tusks, but this was ‘timed out’ because of the July election.

The new government’s manifesto promised a similar law, to ban imports of trophies to stop wildlife abroad being killed by British hunters.

Leaders of six southern African elephant-rich nations – including Zimbabwe – have reacted furiously, warning that such a bill ignores the role trophy hunting plays in bringing money into their countries and controlling wildlife numbers. 

A survey of Africans last year revealed that 57 per cent believe Britain is behaving like a ‘neo-colonialist’ power by poking its nose into their affairs.

Resource Africa, an influential organisation representing the thousands in rural Zimbabwe and other southern African countries facing the ‘elephant problem’, said a recent UK poll backing the import bill was prompted by British ignorance and populist virtue signalling.

One minister from an African nation who visited London this summer told me that UK politicians in ‘cosy Westminster offices’ are racist, and should mind their own business. 

He threatened to send 10,000 elephants to Hyde Park to ‘see how you like them living among you’.

Dr Shylock Muyengwa, a Zimbabwean village communities expert who arranged the export of the Scottish stag’s head to the Mbire council meeting, has condemned Britain for riding roughshod over Africa’s wishes. 

‘London politicians should respect the free will of our people on the management of our elephants,’ he said.

Campfire leaders are emphatic in their support for the government cull. They told us that Zimbabwe cannot cope with so many elephants and is right to ‘fight’ pro-animal campaigners. 

‘The meat will save our people,’ they added.

It is a valid view. As the drought bites, hundreds more elephants are marching across borders into Zimbabwe to find water. 

Mbire village, with the Zambezi river nearby, is a ‘hotspot’ of the fight for water between humans and animals.

When I asked those at the meeting whether elephant numbers should be controlled by trophy hunting and culling, hands shot up to say ‘yes’. 

One elderly man pulled me aside afterwards to add: ‘We are frightened of these animals and terrified for our children.’

Two weeks ago in Mbire, 67-year-old Cosam Kaiaiitmo, a farmer and grandfather, was trampled to death by an elephant as he tended to banana crops in his fields. 

He tried to run away, but the animal’s desperation for food and water had turned it into a killer.

Across Zimbabwe, official figures show nearly 50 people, some children, have lost their lives in conflicts between humans and wildlife since the drought began.

One person in Mbire who made a narrow escape in March this year was farmer and mother of two boys, Priscilla Mustianche, 36, who was almost killed by an elephant as she guarded her maize crop.

She was in a handmade wooden ‘watchtower’, one of many that now dot the fields in Mbire to guard against night-time crop raids by the animals.

‘My husband Ranganai had walked into the next field at 4am in the morning to patrol against elephants,’ Priscilla said last week. 

‘The big creature came and put his head and trunk in where I was lying at the top of the watchtower. I screamed and slid down the ladder to the ground.

‘As I ran towards my husband, the animal went back and pushed over the tower. It then stamped on the pieces on the ground. If I had stayed, I would be dead,’ she added.

The lone elephant had travelled less than half a mile into her field from the other side of the river, where it snoozed during the day on land owned by a safari lodge – and where shooting and culling is banned.

‘It walked across the river from its safe place to find food in our fields,’ Priscilla said. 

‘Afterwards, it will have gone back to the lodge and its herd. But it will come back.’

She and other women in the village told me the elephants’ hunger and thirst has made them more desperate.

‘They are no longer scared of humans. They are daring,’ said Noshy Dirawe, a 37-year-old mother of three, shaking her head.

One of the village’s Campfire Association rangers, 35-year-old Shylet Mugonapanja, held up the Scottish stag’s head for the Mail’s photograph of it with the Mbire villagers.

She said: ‘The dryness is emboldening the elephants. They come when the village is asleep. 

‘They want water from our bore holes. We have to stop them or we will die of thirst ourselves.’

Her words are likely to fall on deaf ears among the world’s pious conservation lobby which is hostile to Zimbabwe killing any of its thousands of elephants. 

The drought brought on a hideous debate over who should die: animals or humans.

Perhaps before they express judgement, Western critics of culling and hunting should meet twin brothers Msizi and Macedisi, both aged eight, in our photograph, who so enjoyed eating elephant meat.

They are small for their age because of a poor diet of vegetables, the local staple of maize porridge, and too little meat to provide essential proteins.

They wrote their names in my notebook before thanking me for my gift of a bunch of bananas and bottle of cola.

‘The elephant tasted sweet,’ Msizi informed me before his twin chirped up: ‘We are not scared of the elephants, but father says they can kill us so we are careful when we walk in the bush.’

Their village is desolate and parched, with every tree dead and the ground hard-baked by the sun.

Politely they ask me if, in my faraway country, we eat elephants to stop us from being hungry?

They giggle when I tell them we have no elephants in England and that Britons only ever see an elephant safely locked behind bars in the zoo – a word then explained to the boys by their father.

The plight of these two tiny children may be a wake-up call to the British politicians and celebrities who have never faced death from drought or the danger of wild elephants – yet want to stop starving Africans from shooting them to survive.