Big Game Hunting
By Tyler Palicia ‘23,
African trophy hunting isn’t so awful.
Disgusting, right?
In many African countries, trophy hunting is being employed to prevent widespread endangerment and extinction of many exotic species. This idea may appear counterintuitive, but traditional big game hunting beats out of the alternative, widespread poaching.
We all have seen the images of the corpulent white man with a high-powered rifle in hand proudly standing over the corpse of a majestic creature, perhaps a lion or a cheetah. The caption to all these images might as well read: Wealthy American douchebag has once again gunned down a rare creature in a third world country that he probably can’t point to on a map. You might even taste the residual bitterness of imperialism after gazing upon one of these cursed images. The perceived exploitative nature of these types of hunters naturally insults the more conscionable sensibilities of the masses, which explains why images of big game hunters conjure online hysteria - i.e., Cecil the lion controversy in 2015 or the countless lambasted images of Don Jr. posing with a menagerie of exotic game.
According to National Geographic, hundreds of thousands of trophy imports arrive in the United States each year. Many of these imports come from African countries where big game hunting is legal: Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Trophy hunters often travel abroad with fantasies of shooting one or more of the prized “Big Five” species: the African Lion, the African Elephant, the African Leopard, the Southern White Rhino, and the African Buffalo. These creatures are sought after not only because of their beauty and prominence in the animal kingdom but for the bragging rights associated with taking down such dangerous game.
Many African trophy hunting advocacy groups claim funds from these hunts supports the impoverished communities near the hunting grounds. But it is highly questionable whether funds from these hunts ever reach the locals. The International Council for Game and Wildlife Conservation has reported that only 3 percent of the revenue from trophy hunts reaches the communities affected.
So, if you can get past the inherent ugliness of this questionable system, the fact remains that big game hunting establishes an incentive among the shareholders in big game ranches to preserve a viable supply of animals to match the demand provided by hunters. Monetizing the lives of rare species is a grim practice, but it does protect the animals from poachers. Poachers are worse for the animals than hunters because they tend to slaughter game populations rather than uphold sustainable hunting practices indiscriminately.
A popular case against big game hunting suggests non-hunting tourism provides the same incentives to preserve animal populations. However, according to Mukulu African Hunting Safaris, it can cost between $13,500 and $28,500 to shoot a lion, which is far more than it costs to look at one. The question is: does the low environmental impact of safari tourism offset the environmentally impactful but highly lucrative business of hunting tourism? There is no clear answer, so would it be wise to dismiss trophy hunting altogether without considering the possible downfalls to its prohibition?
Anti-trophy hunting activist groups would argue that cheap tourism attracts more people, and therefore more revenue, to African countries than the relative minority of people who participate in hunting tourism. That might be the case, but whenever big game ranch owners face a shortage of animals due to exhaustive trophy hunting, they increase the price of the hunts is and issue fewer hunting permits and tags. Therefore, if rare species face massive decline, then it certainly won’t be the fault of the legal trophy hunters. The free market will make sure of that.
If American trophy hunting were to be prohibited in Africa, then guides might have no choice but to poach the species they had once been hired to hunt in moderation. By what other means would an out of work hunting guide find such lucrative employment?
According to the Washington Post, in South Africa - where big game hunting is legal - anti-poaching security firms, such as Nkwe Wildlife and Security Services, have been employed and armed to the teeth to protect the roughly 1,600 rhinos from poachers. It is impossible for most Americans to put the poaching epidemic in context when most of us have zero knowledge that South Africa has gone to such great lengths as contracting private armies to product their exotic species. Such protective measures would likely diminish in the absence of funding from hunter tourism. Only a scurrilous fool or someone who lacks education on the issue would attempt to conflate controlled hunting practices with rampant poaching. And between the two, only the latter option has threatened animal populations in Africa.
I believe it is prudent to hand over the responsibility of hunting practices to the nations themselves. If the government of Mozambique, for example, believes big game hunting is permissible, then the decision should be outside of U.S. influence. As sickening as those pictures of dopey rich guys standing over their kills are to some people, isn’t it just as off-putting to suggest that we, the entirely detached people of the West, should be so bold as to propose how economically depressed nations handle their own conservation issues? One reasonable improvement that could be made to the practice of big game hunting would be to incentivize ecological research to determine to what degree the killing of the largest and strongest members of each breed impacts each population’s gene pool.
While it is dubious whether money from trophy hunts ever reaches the impoverished communities surrounding the hunting grounds, an argument can be made that animal population sizes experience a net benefit from the practice. If a business can structure itself around a renewable resource, then it is within the best interests of all concerned parties to maintain the supply of that resource. Safari adventures, which do not involve any hunting, boast this same point, so why wouldn’t proponents of trophy hunting be allowed to operate under the same logic?
Poachers, unlike licensed hunters, do not bother to preserve the threatened populations for continuous harvest. Instead, their modus operandi is to hunt areas to absolute depletion and then move on before they are caught. Another pressing issue is that poachers often funnel profits from illegal ivory (the material harvested from elephant tusks) into terror organizations. One such group is the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an active militant group in the Congo.
I don’t like what big game hunters do because I find it overly self-indulgent and depressing to kill lions and elephants, even if the meat goes to impoverished locals. However, I am a hunter, so I can relate to what they do. In reality, trophy hunters provide pseudo virtuous groups like PETA with an easy excuse to paint all hunters with the same broad brush, not unlike the caricatured beer-guzzling “rednecks” on the opposite end of the spectrum. I would consider both groups to be minorities among the fairly respectable and conscientious community of hunters.
The act of hunting acknowledges that all humans are inextricably connected to the natural world. That world is a dispassionate system that allows some creatures to live at the expense of others. Humans happen to be the self-aware, apex predator in that system. Therefore, if elephants and people exist on the earth together, people will kill elephants. Even if you object to the people who participate in big game hunting, there is no denying that their involvement in the natural world can produce a net positive outcome - if done responsibly
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