Since 2009, Amy Dickman has come across some horrific sights on the edge of Ruaha National Park in Central Tanzania where she studies, and tries to resolve, conflict between people and predators. They included lion cubs that had been speared and dumped in the bush and the carcasses of six lions, and 70 rare vultures, poisoned and left to endure long and painful deaths.
She’s wept in her tent over countless nights. She’s posted photos of her grisly discoveries online, if you have the stomach for them.
Dickman, director of WildCRU, a top conservation research unit based at the University of Oxford, says these killings were mainly carried out by local people trying to protect their cattle and goats. Lions threaten both their livelihoods – and their lives.
As a scientist who’s had a lifelong passion for wildlife, you might assume that Dickman would also oppose trophy hunting, where large charismatic mammals are shot by wealthy tourists at vast expense – killed so that the hunter can return home with a tale of derring-do and a head or set of horns to adorn a living-room wall with a malingering, eerie presence.
What is trophy hunting?
Hunters pay a fee to track and kill animals in order to claim a part of the body as a souvenir that they can take away with them – whether it be a set of horns or antlers or even a whole head. It is important to realise that, by its very definition, trophy hunting is legal – it is not poaching. Nor is it canned hunting, where captive animals are are hunted in small enclosures
Can trophy hunting help conservation?
But she doesn’t. Instead, Dickman has become increasingly vocal about the probable impacts of blanket bans on trophy hunting that could lead to more animals being killed. If lions and other species generate revenue through trophy hunting, she argues, they and their habitat are more likely to be conserved.
The maths is hard to ignore. Around three villages outside of Ruaha, Dickman and her colleagues documented the killing of 35 large carnivores in one 18-month period. “This included 25 lions killed in one year in an area of much less than 500km²,” she says. In contrast, in areas managed for trophy hunting, the recommended quota is 0.5 lions per 1,000km².
In short, the level of killing where lions have no economic value was at least 100 times higher than is – or should be – permitted under trophy hunting.
On a personal level, I can’t imagine trophy hunting. I’m an animal lover, I’m a vegetarian, I don’t understand it. But understanding it personally is very different from understanding the evidence around it.
Amy Dickman
On a broader scale, the area of land managed for trophy hunting in Africa is greater than all of its national parks combined – 1.4 million km², roughly equivalent to France, Germany and the UK combined. “On a personal level, I can’t imagine trophy hunting,” says Dickman. “I’m an animal lover, I’m a vegetarian, I don’t understand it. But understanding it personally is very different from understanding the evidence around it.”
According to Tim Davenport, Africa director for the conservation group Re:wild, in Tanzania alone between 1,000 and 2,000 lions – or 4-8 per cent of the entire global population – are dependent on land managed for trophy hunting. “By stopping trophy hunting [in Tanzania] without alternative financing in place, game reserves will be turned into maize fields and cattle ranches within a few months or years,” he says. “I’ve seen it happen dozens of times.”
Not all scientists agree with Dickman and Davenport, though. Hans Bauer, who also works at WildCRU, says that trophy hunting doesn’t deliver for either people or wildlife in the way that it’s claimed. Hunting ‘blocks’ in many African countries are being abandoned because they don’t make money. “Across Africa, in the vast majority of cases, trophy hunting has not delivered more lions – whether because of financial imbalances, increased terrorism, land mismanagement or increased livestock mobility (or a combination of these factors),” he wrote in an article forThe Conservation.
Does trophy hunting just take place in Africa?
Many countries, including UK, around the world permit trophy hunting. Visit the website Book Your Hunt, and you’ll see there are numerous hunting opportunities in North America, Eastern Europe, Southern Africa and Central Asia, far fewer in South America and South-East Asia. Neither India nor Kenya permit it.
According to Adam Hart, professor of science communication at the University of Gloucester, who has co-written a comprehensive book about trophy hunting (simply called Trophy Hunting), eight out of the top ten countries ranked for their record in conserving large mammals permit trophy hunting. They include Botswana (1st), Tanzania (3rd) and Canada (8th).
Few people paid trophy hunting much attention until a lion nicknamed Cecil was killed by US dentist Walter Palmer just outside Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe in July 2015, but supporters and opponents have been debating its rights and wrongs, with increasing vehemency, ever since.
Some people have mocked up images of Amy Dickman killing animals and posted them online, and she has received threatening letters. Celebrities such as Ricky Gervais and Joanna Lumley have also joined in the conversation, voicing their objections to trophy hunting via social media.
This year, MPs tried to pass a law that would have banned British hunters from bringing back trophies from species protected under CITES. The bill passed easily through the House of Commons, but – controversially – fell foul of filibustering by peers in the Lords.
This wasn’t the only controversy stirred up by the bill. According to analysis by Hart, 75 per cent of statements made in support of the bill in the Commons were misleading or incorrect. They included the claim that lions could go extinct by 2050, something for which there is no evidence.
Tim Davenport says that many people who object to trophy hunting don’t understand the realities of conservation in Africa. “What you’ve got is people discussing what they think is conservation, but it isn’t – it’s animal welfare,” he says.
How much does trophy hunting cost?
How much do you want to pay? In southern England, you can hunt roe deer and muntjac
for as little as £150, while expect to pay at least $40-45,000 (£32-36,000) to bag an ele-
phant in Africa. In Zimbabwe, you won’t see any change out of £30,000 for the right to stalk and kill a leopard.
In Pakistan, the right to go after a single markhor can set you back more than $100,000 (£80,000), while a prices quoted for a single white rhino can be $140,000 (£110,000), and you can probably pay a lot more than that
The case against trophy hunting
But opposition to trophy hunting encompasses multiple strands. One complaint is that it perpetuates a colonial trope of rich white westerners exploiting the continent’s resources, which also keeps local people in poverty and prevents other ways of funding conservation taking root. Another is that permitted quotas can be too high, resulting in declining populations.
And it’s cruel – tourist hunters are unlikely to be as skilled as their professional guides and can choose to use bows and arrows instead of guns to kill their quarry. Cecil, it’s claimed, took 40 hours to die.
Mucha Mkono, a lecturer in sustainable tourism at the University of Queensland, has looked at attitudes among African social media users to trophy hunting. She examined responses to news stories about the Cecil killing and found frequent references to the neo-colonial nature of the activity.
Mkono – who is Zimbabwean – says many people in Africa are uneasy with the idea of rich, white people flying in to shoot their wildlife. “Black people are economically precluded from participation in trophy hunting,” she points out, “and if they try to hunt wildlife for themselves, they can be penalised for poaching.”
Many African leaders accuse those trying to bring an end to trophy hunting of being equally neo-colonial. It is not up to the UK or USA to tell Africans how to manage their environment, they argue – if they want to make money out of rich westerners hunting their wildlife, that’s up to them.
An equally contentious issue is what replaces trophy hunting were it to disappear. Even opponents concede that something has to.
A lobbying document supported by groups that included the Born Free Foundation argues that the benefits to local communities are “often greatly exaggerated” and that – as a funding model – it’s on the decline. But it adds that the UK government should “provide additional resources for those countries” whose wildlife management model relies on revenue from trophy hunting should a ban be implemented. No funding pledge was given.
More tourism is not the answer. A lot of trophy hunting takes place in areas that are either too remote, not sufficiently scenic, or plagued by tsetse flies, making them unviable for westerners who like their home comforts.
But there are other alternatives, if only we were able to implement them. Ecologist and conservationist Ian Redmond, who has worked in Africa throughout his career, is a co-founder of Rebalance Earth, a new initiative that aims to help developing nations monetise their biodiversity.
Animals such as elephants, Redmond says, have enormous value while alive in terms of the ecosystem services they provide. It’s calculated that a single forest elephant helps trees store an estimated 9,500 tonnes of CO2 per km² by weeding out smaller trees, allowing those that survive to grow larger.
“The carbon value of a single forest elephant is $1.75 million,” Ralph Chami, another co-founder of Rebalance Earth, told a conference organised by Born Free in December 2022. The forests of Gabon alone could be worth £950 million a year, he said.
But these are only notional figures. Who’s actually going to pay for these services? Chami suggested that global corporations such as Microsoft will want to showcase their eco-credentials to both their consumers and investors by buying into such a market.
But not everyone is convinced. Adam Hart says the problem is that this model is effectively wealthy countries giving money to poorer ones. “That means they can stop at any point,” he points out. “If they don’t like the government of Zambia or there’s a coup somewhere, suddenly it’s ‘What, we’re paying these people?’”
Can trophy hunting benefit local communities?
What about the argument that trophy hunting doesn’t really benefit local communities? This is perhaps the most disputed of all the claims and counter-claims. Namibia is often cited as the best example of community-run conservancies in which most of the income from the fees ends up in the hands of local people.
In fact, there is a better example – Pakistan. WildCRU researcher Bilal Mustafa has in-depth knowledge of trophy hunting in his home country – mainly species such as mountain goats called markhor (renowned for their huge, corkscrew horns), ibex and blue sheep. Hunters are willing to pay $100,000 and more for the right to shoot one of these animals, and annual incomes for a single province can be in the millions of dollars – and, crucially, 80 per cent of all income is returned to the local community.
This money is spent on schools, community centres and roads. Literacy rates in trophy hunting regions have increased from 10 to 70 per cent of the population, with girls especially benefitting. “The early marriage of girls has been reduced because of an increase in the literacy rate of girls up to 90 per cent, and most of them are also now going to university,” Mustafa says.
Wildlife populations have increased. Markhor numbers in the province Gilgit Baltistan rose more than five-fold to nearly 3,000 between 2000 and 2016, and money from trophy hunting is also used to compensate those farmers who lose livestock to predators such as snow leopards.
You might argue, as Adam Cruise – interim chief executive of the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting (CBTH) – does that one of the problems in Africa is the economic model in which often foreign- (and white-) owned businesses get the lion’s share of the profits. “Conservation and community uplift benefits are the two pillars to justify trophy hunting as a necessary evil,” he says. “It sounds really good, and if it were true, I’d back it.”
But by the time the hunting operators and governments have taken their share of the money, there’s only a few scraps left to divide up among local communities. In fact, it’s worse than that, Cruise argues – land in countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe is set aside for wildlife at the expense of local people.
What will the future hold?
What the future holds is unclear. Labour has committed to bringing back the trophy hunting bill should it form the next government, though it’s hard to imagine it will be a priority. The USA – which accounts for 70 per cent of the global trophy hunting market – requires hunters to demonstrate that the money they paid for their kill contributes towards species conservation if they want to come back with a trophy, something which many conservation scientists say we could do here in the UK.
It’s perhaps not surprising so many people find this issue grotesque. Photographs of gun-toting, khaki-clad sport hunters gurning at the camera beside the body of a lion or giraffe is far from a universally popular look. But whatever you think about it – and whether anything you have read here has changed your mind or not – here are two thoughts to take away.
First, there is no species that is at risk from going extinct because of trophy hunting. That’s just a fact.
And second, the amount of money raised by trophy hunting – whether it goes to local communities or not – is relatively small beer. For southern Africa, you see figures of anywhere between $200 to just over $400 million a year. In contrast, the USA alone provides around $6 billion – 15 times that figure – in aid to the continent a year. The global conservation group WWF brought in £888 million in 2022 through charitable giving, grants and other fundraising.
But then again, the cost of safeguarding lions in Africa’s protected areas alone is estimated to be between $1.2 to $2.4 billion a year, but they receive less than $400 million. Even with trophy hunting, there is a chasm between what’s needed and what comes in.
If we in the west want to see an end to trophy hunting of lions and leopards by banning imports, then you could argue we need to stump up the lost cash. The question is whether a consensus could be reached on where this money comes from and who it goes to. With trophy hunting, it’s easy to ask difficult questions – but much harder to find the answers.
