I always try to be as balanced as possible when I’m looking into topics to write about, but sometimes my own personal viewpoint might come across. I’m afraid this article is probably not going to be as unbiassed as I’d like it to be. Two people I follow on twitter, and have massive respect for, recently defended trophy hunting as helping the conservation of wild animals. I found this really hard to swallow and I’m still not convinced, but I am willing to look into trophy hunting and the conservation argument in a bit more depth. Primarily because I want to fully understand why some people defend trophy hunting when I feel it’s completely indefensible.
Over the years I’ve heard many groups defend trophy hunting. Generally the people who defend it are the ones taking part or the companies that charge a small fortune to do it. But Alex Morss defended trophy hunting in The Guardian.
Alex Morss describes herself as follows “an independent ecologist, journalist, author and educator. My work involves defending and promoting the conservation of protected species, their habitats and wider environment and helping to create opportunities for others to make exciting discoveries about the natural world.” When I saw she’d written an article essentially defending trophy hunting I was understandably surprised, but I respect her so I wanted to know more. The article begins…
“Leading scientists have warned that global conservation is being undermined by celebrity power after they suffered death threats and abuse in a hostile dispute over trophy hunting.”
So if it’s scientists now defending trophy hunting I’m definitely open to hear the argument. Let’s first look into the arguments for trophy hunting.
The Arguments For Trophy Hunting
It’s fun
One of the arguments for trophy hunting is that it’s fun, and that to me is just bizarre. Hunting the animal is bad enough. Wanting to display the stuffed carcass to basically boast about killing the animal is in some ways worse in my opinion. It’s known that most serial killers used to be children that tortured or killed animals for fun, so what does that say about adults who enjoy killing animals? (The link between serial killers and animal cruelty).
Wildlife Population Control
“hunting may help to maintain control of the local wildlife population in any given region.” Deer, for example “can cause a lot of damage in a short period” and are “opportunist animals that can safely eat more than 700 different plant species.” – Trophy Hunting: The Arguments For and Against
This argument seems to make sense, but where are the natural predators of deer? If the animals were left to their own devices wouldn’t the populations of each kind of animal naturally balance themselves out? With more lions around for example, there would be less deer, wouldn’t there? Also, it’s the male deer that are often targeted by hunters as they have impressive antlers to display on the wall. This leaves the female deer population free to carry on having babies.
Helps to Prevent Poaching
Another argument in favour of trophy hunting is that the income helps to fund anti-poaching efforts.
“The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) states “that well-managed trophy hunting can provide both revenue and incentives for people to conserve and restore wild populations, maintain areas of land for conservation, and protect wildlife from poaching”.” – Trophy Hunting: The Arguments For and Against
However…
“For a while in South Africa, where the controlled hunting of the white rhinoceros on private reserves is permitted, the species increased spectacularly. But the positive results of that regime have withered in recent years due to a dramatic escalation of poaching, which has gutted the gains of well-managed licensed hunting.” – Hard Truths about Conservation and Trophy Hunting
It Conserves The Land and Biodiversity
The main argument is that the income from hunting safaris conserves the land and biodiversity. (You could say there is an incentive to protect breeding grounds so that there will still be animals to kill in the future, but maybe that’s me being obtuse).
Dr Amy Dickman, a lion conservationist from Oxford University said…
“The campaigners’ narrative – suggesting trophy hunting is driving species to extinction and banning it will make things better – is false. I am unaware of any species where current trophy hunting is the primary threat to their persistence. The major threats are overwhelmingly habitat loss, poaching, prey loss and conflict with humans – all of which will be worsened if land used for trophy hunting is converted to agriculture or settlement.
She added: “I can completely sympathise with how those images of grinning hunters turn peoples’ stomachs – they do the same to me – but the kinds of killings we see in areas where wildlife has no economic value are even worse.”
It has to be said that this argument does make sense. And this argument is echoed in many other articles on this topic…
Trophy Hunting in The News
Hunting protects the land from human development
“The major argument is that the money made from hunting goes right back in to conservation efforts by allowing the large amounts of land to remain free of human development.” – Trophy Hunting Pros and Cons
Hunting safaris have less of an environmental impact than photographic safaris
“They also argue that more income is made from hunting safaris than photographic safaris, making hunting of lesser environmental impact.” – Trophy Hunting Pros and Cons
Banning hunting would ‘imperil’ biodiversity
“In 2019, 133 leading scientists and community representatives warned in a letter to the journal Science that banning hunting without implementing viable alternatives to protect habitat and generate revenue for local communities would imperil biodiversity.” – Celebrity power undermining global conservation efforts, scientists warn
The Arguments Against Trophy Hunting
I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail here. I’ve addressed some of the issues above, however there are plenty of arguments against trophy hunting.
It Encourages More Hunting
If hunters truly believe that they are aiding conservation efforts, there is no shame or guilt attached to killing. It could encourage more hunting as it’s legal and apparently a ‘good thing to do’.
Legal Hunting Encourages Illegal Hunting
When unscrupulous people see how much money is being made by legal hunting, illegal hunting will necessarily increase. Illegal hunting can result in protected animals being killed. This is what happened in the case of Cecil the Lion killed by an American dentist. Cecil was collared for an Oxford University research project and he was also a major tourist attraction. The dentist paid a staggering $54,000 for the license which was actually fake.
“It is never legal to hunt a collared lion. And worse yet, the lion had been illegally lured out of its protected reserve for the hunt.” – Hard Truths about Conservation and Trophy Hunting
It’s Cruel and Inhumane
Not every hunter is very good at hunting. This means that some animals really suffer after being badly injured and not killed outright. Cecil the lion was “first shot with an arrow and after 40 hours of agony was finally shot dead with a gun.” – League Against Cruel Sports
So what’s the answer?
Alternatives to Trophy Hunting
The problem with talking about alternatives to trophy hunting is that the people who take part have a lot of disposable income to play with and therefore probably have a fair bit of influence on lawmakers too. Talking about alternatives with the hunters is pointless in my mind. They’re proud of killing animals. That’s why they stuff them and transport them halfway around the world to display the carcasses at their homes. We need to be talking about alternative forms of income in order to protect and conserve the land and animals.
Photo safaris don’t make enough money. To make the same amount of income an awful lot more people would need to go on photo safaris. More people = more development for accommodation and more pollution. It’s just not a good alternative.
There is an answer, but I can’t see it happening. I believe the only alternative is to convince people with money to make very substantial donations every year. That way the income from trophy hunting will no longer be required to conserve the land. There are enough billionaires in the world who could do this, but how can they be convinced?
Conclusion
I do understand why trophy hunting is defended… money makes the world go round, as they say. Without the substantial income from this ‘sport’ it’s unlikely that wanting to save wild animals or rare environments is enough. It’s an extremely sad conclusion to come to. I will never understand why people want to kill such amazing wildlife. They think it makes them look brave and skilled. It doesn’t, it just makes them look cruel.
I know I haven’t been particularly unbiassed in this article. It’s just such a difficult topic to write about. I don’t really agree with zoos, but when I wrote about whether zoos should still exist I found it a lot easier to talk about the arguments for and against them. Probably because it doesn’t involve as much animal cruelty and death!
If anyone can think of any good alternative forms of income that could help conservation, please let me know. We need to find a solution.
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Additional Sources
https://www.treehugger.com/is-hunting-ever-defensible-127868
https://www.theweek.co.uk/101090/trophy-hunting-the-arguments-for-and-against
https://wilderness-society.org/the-negative-effect-of-trophy-hunting/
Kate, you are clearly informed by anti-hunting literature.
Cruelty. Trophy hunting has nothing to do with cruelty. Millions of non-hunters are cruel to animals and people, in fact, research in the USA ( University of Nebraska-Omaha criminologist Chris Eskridge) shows that hunting licence issues and street violence are INVERSELY proportional. The reason is clear – the whole point of trophy hunting is the stalk – to creep up unseen to within a close range to shoot effectively, to AVOID cruelty. A quick, unexpected death is the intention of the trophy hunter. Animal cruelty involves prolonging suffering intentionally – the opposite of hunting.
In South Africa, there are about 6000 visiting trophy hunters and 300,000 local meat hunters. The trophy hunters are better skilled shooters because they generally have the whole Rider Haggard hunting ethos. Amateur hunters (who all hunt for meat) include the less able shooters that your report refers to, but they are not trophy hunters.
All major Southern African reserves are surrounded by hunting grounds as buffer zones. to prevent dangerous and infected animals spreading out to farms and villages. Lion males disperse naturally, and hundreds are killed when they leave the reserves, a few by trophy hunters. The rest are shot, snared or poisoned. Cecil was one of those leavers hunted, who included more than twenty collared lions killed. The collar research is to find out what happens to them. Cecil was unfortunately wounded late at night and was killed at first light the next morning when safe to resume hunting.
What you miss is that hunting, and particularly high value trophy hunting, supports game farms, and there are forty million acres of game farms (mainly natural habitat) in SA alone. They contain between six and twenty million animals, providing 50,000 tons of meat a year. More than a million are shot, but more than three million are born, so the numbers are going up, not down. That’s why its called conservation farming. They are not the animals in the reserves and they are not endangered. Without hunting, farmers need an income, so the land would be cleared for cattle or crops, like the Amazon. Hunting is good for conservation.
Hunting is not bad. More than 70 million people live by hunting their food in Africa, so it is not bad in itself. Animals shot for trophies are always eaten, too. You can’t get a hunting permit for an endangered animal, so all animals hunted in Southern Africa are NOT endangered animals. It is a huge industry that employs 100,000 people.
I can’t understand your ‘joy’ in stalking an animal to kill it. I can’t comprehend the need to kill for fun. You can try to justify hunting by saying it supports farms and the local community, and I understand that aspect of hunting any banning trophy hunting is not the simple answer it appears to be, but your true viewpoint has come across by saying “the whole point of trophy hunting is the stalk – to creep up unseen to within a close range to shoot effectively”. You enjoy it, and as someone who actually likes animals I can never understand why you would want to kill one.
Hello Kate. I understand your horror, but that is because you are not a hunter. Hunting is an ancient part of human life. It is built into (particularly male) hormones and mind-set, part of the oldest bits of the human brain. It is statistically linked to the male gaze – that evolutionary part of men that can objectify prey when required in order to provide and defend the family.
Imagine civilisation as a cave in which we nurture our human kind. Some, more male than female, went out of the cave to hunt and defend it. They brought resources back that other people, more female than male, used to nurture us and reproduce. It was like that for hundreds of thousands of years. Both functions were equally important to survival, like two halves of a wheel – one providing the resources and the other nurturing us to breed and try again.
These days, we have too much of everything, so the male function is redundant when viewed from the Western “indoor” view. But it didn’t go away. Hunters still “go out” of civilisation into nature and become part of nature, uncivilised. Nature doesn’t have civilised rules. Hunters become civilised again when they return. Hunting is more like falling in love than cruelty (although many people might say their love-life IS cruelty!!!)
When a true hunter hunts, he (usually he) experiences a huge emotional high because he is fulfilling his evolutionary purpose. It is so much more than “fun” – its what men (mainly men) evolved to do.
Today’s subsistence hunters hunt in unbelievably “cruel” ways, with snares, spears, poisoned arrows and other contraptions that can take days to kill. Modern trophy hunters, by contrast, are steeped in animal welfare and try to drop an animal onto its own shadow, a matter of pride. When a hunter sees an animal, it is beautiful, but when it becomes his chosen quarry, it becomes a “thing” and is harvested. At that moment, precision is everything. All else disappears. Afterwards, many hunters thank their quarry or cry as their minds return to civilisation and nurture kicks back in.
The hunting grounds, like battlefields, are another world, the world of evolutionary nature. Real nature, not Disney. It is a place where there are no rules, where killing is an everyday event, and it is the very opposite of human civilisation. That is why hunters and soldiers don’t talk about it when they come home.
It is a huge and fascinating subject, but it has been highjacked by political activists with their cheap, simple messages. The provision of hunting grounds is a huge, successful conservation story.
But none of this is ever told, a great pity, and I have to congratulate Green Eco-friend for allowing me to reply.
You are clearly a civilised person, Kate. Great. I’m happy for you. I really am. You don’t HAVE to go hunting. But everything you own and consume has cost lots of animals their lives – its just that other people have done all the uncivilised stuff for you.
These animals deserve better đź’–
BOO John Nash just why
you go kate
john personally i disagree with you but i wouldn’t stumble on this site if it wasn’t for school i’m a carnivore but hunting for trophies is like being a serial killer compared to a baby witch is hunting for food
i agree Completely john hater
so john hater please do not do this also thank you kate for these awesome arguments my friends thought i was insane to use it’s fun post more awesome stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
John Nash have a heart
its noah
The only difference between hunting for meat and hunting for a trophy is that in trophy hunting, a trophy is kept. The animal is still eaten or used. The animals would still be shot for meat if no trophy hunter turned up. In Africa, nothing goes to waste, especially valuable meat.
Wild Animals are raised on privately owned farms for live sales, hunting and meat. If they were not hunted or sold for meat, farmers would raise something else. If they raised farm animals, all the wildlife would be shot as competitors. If they raised crops (and its difficult on marginal land), they would clear all the wildlife and the plants and trees, too, in order to plough the land. Like the Amazon. Is that what you want? This is all private farm land. There are no great unclaimed expanses of Africa any more – it is all owned by someone.
In reality, without hunting income, a lot of the land is dry and would be abandoned by farmers. It would soon be settled by poor landless rural people in informal settlements. Being poor, they would use the trees to cook the wildlife. Bye bye both.
The numbers of wild animals on private game farms is rising all the time, because farmers can raise as many as needed and venison marketing and food safety are improving. None of the trophy hunted animals on farms are endangered. That”s why hunting, and trophy hunting in particular is good for wildlife in Southern Africa.
There are forty million acres of privately owned hunting farms in South Africa, They are EXTRA to the national reserves like the Kruger Park where there is no hunting. National reserves have to be supported by the government, but private hunting farms have produced millions of wild animals and it didn’t cost the government anything – in fact they pay millions in fees and taxes, helping the economy.
And it is all low-carbon and fully sustainable, guaranteeing protein supplies. Win, win, win…..
i do not agree get a life internet troll
i do not agree get a life dude i’m 11 and i’m slamming you iv’e told you my name so refer to me as it i’m at school right now in Australia i’m worried about my dad having to go to war and your arguing with a kid
and P.S you it is extremely sexist to say hunting is particully in the male “hormones” goat lover is vego and non-binary hes 11 to so hes smarter the you
im bob i agree with john
my last message was deleted
It’s? a non-binary 11 year old vego…..and you expect me to engage in an intelligent exchange of comments????? I spent years trading in remote parts of Africa and my interest is in the economics and conservation of rural Africa, not childhood psychological problems.
Many of you seem confused, so back to basics. We all live in a human cave called civilisation. We send people out, called primary industries to pillage nature outdoors. They act in an uncivilised, outdoor, way. They bring the spoils back to our caves so that other people, we call secondary industries, make the stuff into things we can use. The profits of the primary and secondary industries are used by still more people call the tertiary economy to make our lives comfortable and enjoyable.
It means that everything we use and enjoy involved killing things, if you follow the economic footprints back to the dirty deed. So you civilised people can deny it all you like, but every one of you is responsible for killing animals, even if other people did it on your behalf. I am not the troll here.
Have you any idea how many animals are killed to clear land, plough, plant, protect, transport and pack vegetable crops? Vegetables drip with blood, just like everything else.
Remember – when you point a finger, three point back at you.
I think the biggest thing to look into this debate is actually pointing to the negatives, the *real* negatives, the actual logically and scientifically-proven negatives in something and that’s the way with any proper debate: sure, you can point at the positives of something ad nauseam, but at the same time there’s always a catch, there’s always something *negative*, especially with trophy hunting.
As I told you before, Craig Packer, who studied lions in Tanzania for *over thirty years*, was banned in the country, entirely, for exposing legitimate corruption in the way lion hunts were handled there, which were, indeed, causing lion populations to decline, and that’s not dribble from animal-right’s activists, that’s just pure, 100% *factual* evidence:
https://cbs.umn.edu/blogs/cbs-connect/lion-size-controversy
And to add insult to injury this is the same Tanzanian government that’s *forcefully evicting thousands of indigenous Maasai from their ancestral lands, as we speak, for hunting rights*:
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/06/10/tanzanian-authorities-seen-opening-fire-on-maasai-people-in-game-reserve-dispute/
Also, I highly question the fact that you’ve been to Southern Africa, countless times, apparently, and yet never once have you mentioned the scheme in which prostitutes, hired by gangs in Asia, were sent directly to South Africa, shoot up some rhinos over there but then sent the horns *directly back* to the black market trade over there going back to apparently 2003:
https://www.todayonline.com/world/how-stop-poaching-and-protect-endangered-species-forget-kingpins
You can argue the utilitarianism-aspect of this all you want, but you simply cannot ignore the fact that there’s always the great risk of government corruption and even infiltration from criminal activities that can lead to even more biodiversity loss than there already is with trophy hunting.
Morals and ethics “shouldn’t be a part in conservation or nature”, but then again neither should the concepts of “legal” or “illegal” be, either.
Hello Mark.
Sorry about the delay in answering. We could bat individual examples to and fro forever. In Tanzania, they have set aside 2500 sq. kms of the 4000 available for the local community and the rest to hunting and eco-tourism. The fact that the local community want to use all of it is not an eviction. While Dr. Packer deserves attention, I also advise you to read up on Prof. Amy Dickman who helped establish the Ruaha Project. She hates trophy hunting but acknowledges its importance in helping conservation.
The crafty criminal use of ladies of the night to pose as rhino hunters in South Africa is not a reason to criticise an industry that has raised the majority of the world’s rhinos and established forty million acres of wild animals extra to the reserves, produces 50,000 tons of venison annually and employs 100,000 people. The organisers of the rhino scam quite rightly ended up in jail. The reality is that there are crooks and corrupt officials in every branch of African tourism. They steal from everyone.
There is no scientific proof that trophy hunting has contributed to the overall extinction of any species in Africa, although I grant you that poorly regulated trophy hunting in some places has resulted in a few declines. However, that’s are not the general pattern. Expanding human population is the reason for extinction – the wildlife is running out of room outside the reserves and private hunting grounds.
As for my “been” to South Africa, I was a bush trader and prospector across the southern part of the continent. Believe me, I speak from years of experience and my interest is not so much in trophy hunting as its vital importance for remote rural areas.
I take issue with you over legality – the difference between legal and illegal hunting is the difference between shopping and shoplifting. If you can’t tell the difference, it is not much use our discussing it. If a supermarket chain has 10,000 sacks of turnips and a crook steal 100, it is not a reason to close the supermarket.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence that modern regulated trophy hunting has has caused any decline in biodiversity anywhere in Africa, and a lot of good evidence that hunting supports over a million sq kms, and it has resulted in a huge increase in animal numbers across the southern range states.