Elephants can travel up to 50 miles a day. And because the majority of them live near national borders, that means an elephant that begins its evening in Botswana may be in Angola by the morning.

Here’s the catch: Angola’s elephants have greater protections under international law than Botswana’s. In fact more than half of Africa’s elephants live in border regions where as soon as they cross that arbitrary line, the level of protection they have changes.

That’s according to a new study in the journal Biological Conservation in which researchers analyzed savanna elephant population data to demonstrate the importance of “transboundary” conservation efforts—when governments and organizations cooperate to manage and protect migratory elephants regardless of political boundaries.

The problem with that