Safari hunting has Superpowers
Trophy hunting is the most sustainable tool we have for conserving Africa’s wildlife
The acrimonious debate over the rights and wrongs of trophy hunting deflects huge amounts of energy and sheds almost no light on the real challenge of enabling wildlife to compete economically with domestic species on working lands where much wildlife still lives, and upgrading the livelihoods and traditions of wildlife peoples and communities.
The wildlife economy
As a lifelong conservationist, I have gradually learned that the conservation norms that I grew up with are economically and socially disastrous, with unsavory origins in conquest and exclusion. Our mistakes started with William the Conqueror in 1066, and the criminalization of Robin Hood’s foraging livelihood. While praising Theodore Roosevelt for establishing parks and protecting wildlife, we need to be realistic about the critical policy mistakes that he made and which we now unthinkingly perpetuate. He blamed market hunting for the demise of the bison and many other species and established the global precedent of elites taking the ownership of wildlife away from local people and banning commercial use. What Roosevelt he failed to appreciate, was that the healthy wildlife populations encountered by the arriving white men came from somewhere – the common-sense local systems of ownership that the conquerors destroyed to get at this harvest without having to pay for it.
Exclusionary, non-market wildlife conservation became the norm. It spread across the planet on the wavefront of the Industrial Revolution. Amazingly, it remains the norm, despite repeated failures. We should not be surprised that wildlife policies that have their origins in conquest and exclusion are associated with the loss of 60-82% of global wildlife since 1970.
The plethora of articles that unthinkingly or maliciously criticize wildlife trade and trophy hunting perpetuate failure. As an African, I may be over-sensitive to the condescending simplicity and imperialistic imposition of external ideologies, such as contesting our rights to trade or sell or hunt the wildlife we husband so carefully without our consent. Lacking the decency to listen to inconvenient facts, these so-called champions of conservation are destroying what they claim to care about.
In a fact free world, we will try to deal in facts. Western imposed conservation is failing. African generated approaches are not, even if affluent urban critics find the reality of land use economics and food production uncomfortable.
I have interviewed hundreds of cattle farmers who have been saved from financial and ecological bankruptcy by trophy hunting. Through hunting, some 12,000 ranches in southern Africa, ranging up to tens of thousands of hectares, now make much of all their livelihood from 10-20 million wild animals. The counterfactual to hunting and trading wildlife is not pristine Africa but livestock farming, which had reduced wildlife numbers to less than a million animals by the 1970s. Hunting less than 100,000 wildlife trophies annually now incentivizes private landholders to set aside land for at least ten million wild animals, and probably twenty million.
The wildlife economy is also becoming more and more important to rural villagers. This has not always been the case. As with Robin Hood, wildlife conservation policy became a symbol of colonial oppression, and so-called poachers were often local heroes. Denied the right to own their own wildlife or to use wildlife commercially, rural Africans did what farmers all over the world have done – they replaced it with domestic animals and crops.
This has changed. As a young conservationist leading the CAMPFIRE programme in Zimbabwe, I helped communities set hunting quotas, and used open, competitive marketing to make as much money from their wildlife as possible. At the end of the hunting season in Mahenye community, the community came together under the meeting trees for several days. The hunter arrived in his landcruiser and put piles of $10,000 on the table explaining each elephant he had shot, or lesser amounts for animals like buffalo or impala. With much excitement, each household came up to the table to get the equal share of cash to which they were entitled. But rural communities have enormous common senses, and they taxed themselves to build clinics or schools, counting back their individual shares into buckets put on the table for this purpose. They now owned their wildlife. They had the rights to manage it, set their own quotas, sell it, and reap the rewards. This was the beginning of the massive regional movement we now call community based natural resource management, or CBNRM.
Rural Africans are far more tolerant of dangerous animals like elephants, lions, hippos and crocodiles, while are their western counterparts of wolves. How would farmers in Berkshire or the Scottish moors react if we told them to conserve our elephants and lions on their farms? Rural Africans, like most rural people, love wildlife – except where it gives outsiders the authority to tell them what to do. Every week on my WhatsApp, rural villagers from Zimbabwe share stories of gruesome injuries and deaths to people they know. What is most remarkable is not the quantity of suffering, but the maturity of the responses. Villagers do not want to get rid of wildlife. Rather, they demand the right to proactively kill dangerous animals, and plan wildlife corridors and even move their dwellings to align their livelihoods with the needs of wild animals. Without the cash provided by hunting to households, to build schools and clinics and, perhaps more than anything, to bring the community together for self-governance, this would not be happening.
In Zimbabwe, we invested in trying to get tourism working in rural communities, but over 95% of the income generated for white farmers or rural communities by wildlife came from hunting (because ivory sales were banned). These ideas were co-developed by our brothers and sisters across the region. Namibia returned 100% of wildlife income to communities, and wildlife populations recovered rapidly.
Let us not pretend that this is a perfect story. Undoing the mistakes of history is extremely challenging, especially for the poorest of the poor. In some countries, wildlife recovery is slow, especially where elites take advantage of ineffective hunting governance and refuse to give wildlife producer communities their rightful share of wildlife revenues. Very occasionally, a few species might be overhunted, where tenure to wildlife areas is too short.
The worst-case scenario is where hunting in banned. I saw this personally in Botswana, in the pioneering Sankuyo community on the eastern edge of the Okavango delta. When we surveyed the livelihoods of these households in 2012 and 2013, this was a wildlife community with people making 56% of their livelihoods from wildlife, of which more than two thirds was cash payments for trophies like elephants or jobs in the hunting camp. The rest of the income came from jobs in town, or poverty grants. To the delight of anti-hunting advocates, the then President Ian Khama banned hunting in 2014. But the costs of this were measured in a 40% decline in the livelihoods of the people of Sankuyo, and village households which had climbed out of food insecurity through hunting being thrown back into destitution. As Amy Dickman also shows in Tanzania, banning hunting is not good for wildlife either. Without hunting in the vast, remote areas, who cares for the wildlife? And when hunting is banned, people still need to live. They revert to domestic animals and crops, which can replace wildlife permanently.
Hunting funds two-thirds of wildlife in remote lands where tourists seldom go. I recently took a class of community wildlife managers and officials from ten African countries to interview Namibian farmers. Cattle ranchers were struggling economically, earning about $15/hectare and employing six unskilled herders. The best hunting farms earned $40-50/hectare with 40 to 60 people in higher-skilled jobs. This was an eye opener; my students came from communities that only earned $1-3/hectare from their wildlife, due mainly to external trade barriers or the slow uptake of new approaches to the wildlife economy. If we fix these problems, many rural people will be better off, and we will have ten times as much wildlife.
We can thank African wildlife policy makers from the 1960s and 1970s for this transformation in the fortunes of wildlife. They recognised that the hope that public money and public management would cause farmers to forgo private livestock in favour of public wildlife on vast areas of working farms was futile. Instead, they turned wildlife into an economic asset through two actions: they devolved the rights to use, manage, sell, and protect wildlife to farmers and producer communities, and is seeking to make wildlife the most valuable and competitive land use possible, they encouraged multiple uses and also global trade – because trade turns low value local goods into high value products.
Hunting emerged as the primary mechanism for funding vast areas of wildlife. Public funding has never materialized in sufficient quantities to manage national parks, never mind wildlife on thousands of communities and farms outside parks. Ecotourism is big business, earning $2 billion a year in southern Africa. However, it is highly focused of remarkably few prime areas like Kruger, the Okavango, and Etosha, and only 4-5% of what the tourist pays is captured to manage wildlife (i.e. $100 million). Ironically, non-consumptive tourism consumes far more carbon or garbage or concrete or water per dollar of conservation payment than hunting. We are learning that ecological impacts do not stop there. The huge, unmanaged elephant herds that tourists demand place massive stress on fragile habitats and other species. Well known tourist areas are restocking hundreds of wildebeest because prides of lions have eaten most of the other animals.
We have been fighting CITES trade bans on rhino horn and ivory for decades. The opportunity cost of these bans exceeds a billion dollars of desperately needed conservation money annually and, like the alcohol prohibition and the war on drugs, bans promote corruption and criminality while barely helping wildlife.
Wild-caught game meat has an upbeat future as we learn its ethical and health benefits, and remove administrative barriers imposed by the agricultural juggernaut, but is not yet competitive with beef or mutton production.
Much as we need to maximse the competitive value of wildlife by combining as many uses as possible (provided they are humane, and sustainable), this leads to the empirical fact that the rapid expansion of wildlife is heavily dependent on trophy hunting.
Trophy hunting has superpowers; it is a powerful economic conservation tool because it is twice as profitable as conventional meat production from ten times fewer animals. Beef ranchers harvest 20-30% of herds, which are often overstocked. By contrast, wildlife managers sell an outdoor adventure that includes adult male animals with big horns (not a commodity). They are severely punished in the marketplace if they do not maintain high quality trophy animals, limiting the offtake of buffalo and antelope to 2-3% of herds expanding at 20-30%. This economic power is seldom recognised by outsiders; wildlife managers make twice or four times as much money from wildlife herds that are lightly harvested and growing rapidly. Earning more (money) from fewer animals has saved many southern African cattle ranchers from financial and ecological bankruptcy, which is why we take the wildlife economy so seriously and see the relationship between profit and nature so differently. In a global first, we encourage ‘development’ by turning domesticated landscapes back to wildlife, or by keeping them wild; we become richer by rewilding our savannas. This is because we have unlocked the potential for hunting and the sustainable use of wildlife to become a most desirable land use than conventional farming alone in many drylands and savannas.
Do I share your disgust that rich, entitled, white men kill beautiful animals for fun and then pose alongside the biggest horns they can find? Emotionally, in some ways, perhaps, until I looking at the issue from a completely different angle. To me, hunters are the rugged field men and farmers who fight to conserve wildlife in the bush and the communities they often work with. I admire these rural people a lot, and even envy them in a world that is losing its roots in nature. I would never call hunting fun. I personally hate killing animals, but hunting is nevertheless a profound and deeply rooted experience that combines camaraderie, skill, and an intense connectedness with the beauty, nature and danger of the wild that the modern world has lost.
What about the perverse desire to kill the animal with the biggest horns? Counter-intuitively, even this is a good thing. It creates more value from fewer animals because hunters spend a great deal of time (and money) searching for a ‘good’ animal instead of blowing away the first buck they see. It encourages landholders to manage the quality of their animals and environments. It provides a tool for tracking the health of the herds – trophy quality – that is far more precise and thousands of dollars cheaper than counting animals. T is not perfect, and I personally would tweak the scale. Hunting record books sometimes incentivise hunters to take prime breeding, 8-10 year-old animals with longer, thinner horns, when tweaking these criteria could reward hunters for taking older 12–15-year-old animals with thicker, shorter horns.
Finally, if you are an affluent, woke, liberal, cappuccino sipping, urban dweller, go hunting. Take your family and friends to a wildlife ranch or a community. Do your research, and select one that is well governed and sustainable. Watch the sun rise, learn to adventure in the bush, and spend your money in ways that genuinely support wildlife and rural people. Avoid the tourism machine, and its financial sucking sound. Get to know rural people, and find out where your food comes from. Learn to track and hunt, smell the air, and kick up dust in an intense awareness of the direction of the wind and the wildness and wilderness around you. Eat wild meat, killed, and prepared by you as your ancestors have done. Touch your deep past, to combat the disconnectedness of the modern technological world. And when you come home, spend your money on things that you know are wild, and that you knoew will get there.
Don’t trust me, but once you have experienced what I am arguing for yourself, even if you don’t ever take up a rifle (as I haven’t), I think you will find that legal regulated hunting is a legitimate pathway to a sustainable planet and abundant wildlife.
