A good article in 'The Daily Telegraph' on the subject. Because it is behind a paywall, I have copied it below:
Why killing elephants might be the way to save Africa’s wildlife
Yes, it is repellent, but big-game hunting might be the counterintuitive way to save Africa’s threatened species
ByGraham Boynton27 August 2023 • 11:00am
A giraffe awaits skinning on a sheet, Eastern Cape, South Africa CREDIT: David Chancellor
If you sit out in the African bush for a few days, as I have just done, and watch wild animals come and go across the plains in large numbers, it is hard to imagine that these ecosystems might be under grave threat.
On the western border of
Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, massive herds of elephant and buffalo move in and out of view, prides of lions lurk in the shade of acacia trees scanning for suitable prey – zebras, eland, roan antelope – and families of warthogs scuttle past pairs of young male cheetahs, similarly on the alert, ready to hunt down the evening meal. Zimbabwe is where I spent much of my colonial youth half a century ago, and in the bush it remains much as I remember it.
Hwange is bursting with wildlife and if there is a problem, locals tell me, it is that there are simply too many elephants in Zimbabwe, and in neighbouring Botswana and South Africa. Here lies one of the conundrums facing 21st century African conservationists. Ask interested observers in Europe or the US and they would probably tell you that the elephant is endangered. Here in southern Africa, especially, there are now about 275,000 elephants roaming across Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia and South Africa.
And if the population continues to overwhelm ecosystems, as it has been over the past few decades, those animals will destroy vast swathes of the woodlands and thus threaten the lives of the other animals with whom they share this food source. For example, it has been estimated that the maximum carrying capacity of South Africa’s
Kruger National Park (just 440 miles south of Hwange) is 7,000 elephants – yet today it is thought there are more than 22,000 in the park. And it’s not just Kruger – the African elephants’ territories have been shrinking across the continent and that, combined with the growth of the human population, means they’ve been crowded into smaller and smaller territories.
Local scientists say the next inevitable drought in southern Africa will trigger a doomsday scenario. This will likely lead to an elephant die-off far greater than the calamity at Kenya’s Tsavo during the early 1970s, when an estimated 10,000 elephants died of starvation. A southern African tourism executive who asks not to be identified warns that when this happens, it will be ‘logistically impossible to produce enough food to keep these animals alive. But there will also be cattle dying in droves and people starving to death. The cry in the West will be, “Save the elephants,” but the rural Africans will be saying, “Screw your elephants, what about us?”’
A lion kill, Northern Cape CREDIT: David Chancellor
Solutions to the complex matter of Africa’s wild-species survival are constantly being analysed and debated by scientists and environmentalists, but nobody has come up with definitive answers to the problem of animals and people competing for the same habitat. And as
Africa’s human population continues to explode – about 1.4 billion today, predicted to reach almost 2.5 billion by 2050 and around four billion by the end of this century – these environmentalists continue to argue among themselves about the best way forward.
What they agree on is that the greatest threats to biodiversity are
illegal poaching, mainly orchestrated by international criminal syndicates; habitat loss caused by turning wild lands into agricultural space; and wildlife-human conflict as a result of shrinking rangelands and ever-growing rural populations. In this complicated eco-environment, it is also broadly agreed upon that wild animals have to pay their way, as it were, if they are to survive; to bring in benefits to the people who share the land with them.
Meanwhile, some 7,500 miles away from the African plains in our Houses of Parliament, British MPs have been attempting to push through a piece of legislation that they believe will contribute to the saving of Africa’s wildlife. Propelled by social-media activists and a chorus of celebrity voices,
the Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill is intended to curtail trophy hunting, a practice seen by some Western advocates (proponents of the Bill include film stars, media personalities, animal-rights activists and many vote-blue-go-green Tories) as an evil central to wild Africa’s decline.
Personally, I find big-game hunting distinctly unappealing and the idea of shooting an animal and then mounting its head on one’s study wall wholly distasteful. As a young boy growing up in then-Rhodesia in the 1960s, I did hunt – many of us hunted. Then, at age 16, on a weekend holiday at a friend’s farm, I shot a duiker, a small antelope. Being a pretty lousy shot I only wounded it and I then had to chase the limping creature across the bush, catch it and put it out of its misery. It was a deeply upsetting experience and the last time I shot an animal.
A trophy hunter sits with the elephant he shot and killed during the night, Zimbabwe CREDIT: David Chancellor
It is easy to see why anti-hunting activists are appalled by the images of hunters that now appear with grim frequency on social media. The sight of a corpulent Texan hedge-fund manager squatting over a lion kill or a Botoxed Barbie in combat gear gurning over a giraffe she has just shot, leaves a horribly sour taste. Hunters do themselves no favours. However, the arguments here should not revolve around individuals’ emotions – and many scientists and environmentalists, who are not hunters, oppose the Bill.
No doubt there is malfeasance in the hunting industry as there is in many commercial operations across Africa. Bribes are paid, animals are lured into hunting blocks from protected areas (which is how the famous case of
Cecil the lion, hunted outside Hwange, happened), and money is misappropriated. There is also the ghastly business of South Africa’s canned lion-hunting industry, where lions are bred purely to be shot, but that practice is so universally reviled that the government is under pressure to end it.
However, controlled, well-regulated trophy hunting of signature species such as lion, elephant and buffalo has been a well-documented success in many African countries, and their pro-use lobby says that much of that land could well be turned over to agriculture or development. According to Dr Chris Brown, CEO of the Namibian Chamber of Environment, African countries that pursue a ‘rights-based, sustainable use approach to wildlife management that includes hunting have a higher density of animals than those that have adopted a protectionist’s approach. The protectionist, anti-hunting countries, with no exception I am aware of, have declining populations.’
The Hunting Trophies Bill is advertised as a conservation measure with the aim of protecting the world’s threatened species. Yet it has caused an uproar in the southern African conservation community. These are people on the ground trying to deal with the issues of marauding elephant herds destroying maize crops, and lions preying on precious cattle, who accuse British parliamentarians of condescending colonial finger-wagging. To Professor Patience Gandiwa, Zimbabwe Parks & Wildlife Management Authority’s director of international conservation affairs, it ‘exhibits a master-slave attitude’.
‘It is baffling that they can plan legislation without understanding the issues,’ she adds.
In June, while the Bill was trundling through the House of Lords, Gandiwa was part of a group of British scientists and African high commissioners and community leaders who attended a meeting in Parliament hosted by Lord Mancroft to put their case to a small group of peers, in the hope of amending, even torpedoing, the Bill. At the end of the meeting she presented Lord Mancroft with a folder that carefully, scientifically, laid out Zimbabwe’s conservation programmes, the benefits to rural communities, and the significant role that trophy hunting is playing in their successes.
One of the programmes cited in the folder focused on the Bubye Valley Conservancy, regarded by many African conservationists as a role model for the continent. Situated in Zimbabwe’s arid south-eastern lowveld, this was once colonial Rhodesia’s most successful cattle ranch. With the arrival of the white colonials around the turn of the 20th century, the wild animals that had long occupied the landscape were driven out, buffalo and wildebeest because of the risk of transmitting diseases to the cattle herds, and predators such as lions because they hunted and ate cows.
A trophy hunter and his guide target a lion, Northern Cape CREDIT: David Chancellor
A series of devastating droughts towards the end of the 20th century ended the viability of cattle ranching. The Bubye Valley Conservancy was founded in 1994 by conservationists who understood that wild animals were better adapted to cope with local conditions.
The conversion from cattle ranching to wildlife was complicated and expensive. Today, however, Bubye boasts the world’s third-largest black rhino population, Zimbabwe’s largest lion population – more than 500 – plus elephants and other game. Key to the financial upkeep is the sale of 16 lion-hunting licences every year, which give the community an annual income of £1.2 million, much of it used to protect the rhino population from poachers. (
Rhino poaching is rife across the continent, largely because of a market for rhino horn in Vietnam and China, where it is used in traditional medicine. Illegal African rhino horn sells for £16,000 a kilo.)
According to Professor Gandiwa, Bubye ‘is a source of great pride for us. It has proved that the private sector, communities and government can work together and grow the wildlife cake.’ She says if the Hunting Trophies Bill were to go through, and thus income from hunting licences were hit, the knock-on environmental effect would be catastrophic. In short, Bubye would lose its rhinos.
African conservationists fear a domino effect if the Bill passes. Although the British trophy-hunting community is relatively small, the fear is that European countries will follow suit. It is understood that the French, who have already banned the import of lion trophies, are looking at introducing similar legislation, and the Germans may not be far behind (the Netherlands has already banned trophies from about 200 species).
It seems unlikely that any of the MPs who have been voting through the Bill will have found time to examine the
Bubye story. Scientists who oppose the Bill have found that many MPs’ decision-making appears to have been based on misinformation or complete ignorance of the subject. Dr Dilys Roe, chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group, says, ‘We looked at all the statements made by MPs for and against the Bill and found that 75 per cent of the statements were incorrect. For a third of those MPs speaking in favour of the Bill, every statement they made was misleading.’ Among the incorrect statements were:
‘
British trophy hunters are among the world’s most active killers of endangered species.’
The UK does not even rank in the top 20 for countries importing trophies from endangered species.
‘
Kenya, which banned trophy hunting in the 1970s, is today an African conservation success story.’
Kenya’s wildlife numbers have declined by around two-thirds since the ban. It is regarded by many African conservationists as a great failure.
‘
The UK is a world leader in nature conservation.’
In truth, the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. By contrast, the top countries for large-mammal conservation are South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana; all would be affected negatively by the ban.
‘
The trophy fee for shooting a lion is around £20,000, but the same lion can instead generate £1.5 million in revenues from photo safaris.’
The scientists could find no evidence for this. If this were true, lions would generate many billions per year. In fact, protected areas with lions generate less than £315 million annually.
‘
On average, local communities receive only three per cent of revenue from trophy hunting.’
According to the scientists, such an average has never been calculated. This figure appears to be based on a study conducted in Tanzania in 2008 and is no longer relevant even to that country. In fact, some local communities in key southern African countries receive between 20 per cent and 100 per cent of hunting concession fees.
‘
In countries where trophy hunting is now permitted, a blind eye is effectively turned to poaching.’
This is blatantly untrue. In many trophy-hunting concessions the operators fund anti-poaching patrols. Their incentives are clearly to protect their assets, but that is the key point here.
These are but a handful of the inaccurate statements made. It has also previously been claimed that the proposed legislation will protect nearly 7,000 threatened or near-threatened species. But, among the species covered, there are 2,000 corals, 1,500 bird species, more than 300 species of frogs and toads, 96 molluscs, 69 bats, 58 insects and two species of medicinal leeches. Dr Roe remarks rather sarcastically: ‘This will be the toughest act in the world of conservation as no other government is currently tackling the trophy hunting of medicinal leeches.’
Added to which, the stated intention of a Bill to banish hunting in the name of conservation rather overlooks the UK’s own hunting industry. Every autumn our hunters go in search of stags with big antlers, and those antlers are invariably kept as trophies. ‘Here we don’t call it hunting,’ says Roe. ‘We call it deer stalking.’
Many of the Africans I speak to
see it as sheer hypocrisy that we are entitled to hunt deer in the UK and yet legislate against trophy hunting in Africa. Equally the British stalking industry is often defended because the meat from hunted animals is eaten – consumptive use. However, as every MP should know, meat from hunted elephants and buffalo may also be eaten, not by the hunters but by local communities. Dr Chris Brown of the Namibian Chamber of Environment says, ‘Such paternalistic, arrogant and misinformed approaches will only encourage our countries to look eastwards to grow alliances and markets for our natural resources.’
It is not widely known in the West that more than half of Africa’s wild animals live outside protected parks, in remote areas among rural communities. Thus living with wild elephants and lions produces a clear and present danger – to family, friends and to their crops. In this rural African scenario, if these animals do not have economic value, and the beleaguered local people are not the beneficiaries, then they would quite happily be rid of the animals. There is no room for sentimentality in this landscape.
One scientist who has extensive experience of human-wildlife conflict on the ground is Professor Amy Dickman, director of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford. Dickman spent many years studying lion populations in Tanzania and saw for herself ‘levels of retaliatory killings that were 50 to 100 times higher than would be allowed in trophy-hunting areas. This is because they have no economic value to these people.’
The killing of Cecil ignited public fury CREDIT: Mark Kreusch/Splash News
She remembers on one occasion, her team being called out because villagers had apparently killed a lion that had been attacking their cattle. ‘[The team] responded and when they arrived they found that not only were there actually six dead lions but also the bodies of 75 critically endangered vultures scattered across the bush.’ The lions had been poisoned with a potent insecticide and the vultures had fed off the carcasses. And this was not an uncommon event. It’s happening across rural Africa.
One can understand why so many in the African wildlife industry want to be financially self-sufficient, neither dependent on Western do-gooders nor on aid packages from the old colonial masters. It is a criticism Professor Gandiwa levels at Kenya. ‘The Kenya model is not sustainable because it is anchored on donor funding,’ she says. ‘We do not want to be dependent on donor aid. We want trade, not aid.’
Equally, they argue that the photographic-tourism business is not the magic solution many in the anti-hunting lobby may suggest. Although the luxury-safari industry makes a significant contribution to the upkeep of national parks, provides employment in rural communities and acts as an anti-poaching deterrent, these camps are found in relatively small ecosystems in and around national parks. Thus there are clusters of camps in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, Kenya’s Maasai Mara, Zimbabwe’s Hwange, South Africa’s Kruger and so on. It is in more remote, harsh areas, where most of Africa’s wild animals live, that you tend to find hunting concessions, particularly where photo tourism is not viable.
So, as the Hunting Trophies Bill continues to make its way through Parliament, the debate rages on in the conservation community. Many of the people with African connections I have spoken to in researching this article – heads of wildlife NGOs, executives of travel companies – are united in the belief that if enacted, the legislation will significantly damage the conservation of African wildlife. Yet many implored me not to name them because their organisations depend on public support and funding, and currently public sentiment, driven by emotion and amplified by social media, is with the animal-rights lobby. As a senior executive said, ‘Cecil has inadvertently done more damage to African wildlife conservation than any other single animal.’
And if evidence were needed that emotion will almost certainly triumph over scientific judgment, it was provided by a meeting Professor Dickman and Dr Roe had with Zac Goldsmith, one of the main protagonists of the Tory anti-trophy-hunting movement, several years ago. They, like Professor Gandiwa at the House of Lords, had brought a sheaf of documents that offered the scientific justification for supporting a regulated and closely monitored big-game hunting industry in Africa. They led Lord Goldsmith through their documentation, and say he was attentive to their presentation. ‘We cannot expect the poorest people in the world to maintain something that is largely valued by the richest people in the world. That is not a sustainable model,’ Dickman told him.
Lord Goldsmith listened, absorbed the information and then said: ‘I hear what you’re saying. But hunting. I just hate it. I hate it.’
