A major feature of Chobe National Park is its overwhelmingly abundant elephant population. The Chobe elephant herds comprise part of what is probably the largest surviving continuous elephant population remaining on this planet.
This population covers most of northern Botswana, the Caprivi region of Namibia, the upper Zambezi region of Zambia as well as north-western Zimbabwe.

Botswana`s elephant population is currently estimated at around 120,000.
This elephant population has built up steadily from a few thousand since the early 1900s and has escaped the massive illegal decimation that other populations experienced in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Chobe elephant are migratory, making seasonal movements of up to 200 kilometres from the Chobe and Linyanti rivers, where they concentrate in the dry season, to the pans in the southeast of the park, to which they disperse in the rainy season. The original inhabitants of what is now Chobe National Park were the San people, otherwise known in Botswana as the Baswara. They were hunter-gatherers who lived by moving from one area to another in search of water, wild fruits and wild animals. The San were later joined by groups of the Basubiya people and later still, around 1911, by a group of Batawana led by Sekgoma. When the country was divided into various land tenure systems, late last century and early this century, the larger part of the area that is now the national park was classified as crown land.

In 1931 the idea of creating a national park in the area was first discussed, in order to protect the wildlife from extinction and to attract visitors. In 1932, an area of some 24,000 square kilometres in the Chobe district was declared a non-hunting area and the following year, the protected area was increased to 31,600 square kilometres.

However, heavy tsetse fly infestations resulted in the whole idea lapsing in 1943. In 1957, the idea of a national park was raised again when an area of about 21,000 square kilometres was proposed as a game reserve and eventually a reduced area was gazetted in 1960 as Chobe Game Reserve. Later, in 1967, the reserve was declared a national park - the first national park in Botswana