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Elephants in the Room: Trophy Hunting of Endangered Wildlife Species
Non-fiction
Hunting African Lions and Elephants — A human history
Ancient animists and pantheists believed in animal spirits.
Even earlier, cave paintings depict animals with qualities like love.
Till date, in totemic traditions elephants symbolize patience, strength and family.
Hunting game has been a morbid, elitist recreational activity since antiquity. During the earliest African civilizations, non-subsistence hunting was meant to invoke the divine and serve as a rite of passage, apart from fueling trade with distant lands.
Paradoxically, lions were venerated as deities even as they were hunted across the continent.
Ancient monarchies considered menageries a symbol of power and elephant collection a hobby for royalty. When captured from the wild, calves were separated from their mothers, broken for use through torture and deprivation, and subsequently chained/ caged away from their natural wide-ranging territories. Even elephants born in captivity were driven to early graves.
Early European explorers and settlers in Africa hunted uncontrollably, devastating wildlife populations throughout the continent. The blue buck (Hippotragus leucophaeus) and quagga (Equus quagga) went extinct, for example, and other species such as elephants (Loxodonta africana) were greatly reduced in number and distribution.
To preserve game stock, 20th century hunters participated in the establishing some of Africa’s famous parks.
Hunting and unscientific use of big mammals
Elephants, lions and many big mammals are threatened by hunting, poaching and unscientific exploitation of body parts like ivory, hide etc.
While many criticize unscientific medical use of wildlife, the rich and famous pay a hefty sum to hunt African animals, including endangered species.
Elephants and other animals are shot in large numbers by hunters not just because the many national legal systems let them, but because the industry actively encourages it.
Safari Club International (SCI), the largest American group dedicated to keep hunting free, offers 80 different awards for hunters who shoot the most animals, which are recorded as achievements in their books, and includes “African 29 Grand Slam” which refers to 29 different species, hunters who have shot more than 100 animals, and statues for hunters who’ve shot animals on all 6 continents. Members of the SCI participate in the World Hunting Award, which recognizes “exceptional levels of big-game success”.
Some individual hunters have shot thousands of animals.
Hunting is a major driver of biodiversity loss. Overexploitation impacts 1680 threatened species, according to IUCN that has considered the relevance of trophy hunting for conservation time and time again.
Trophy hunters ensure that animals in national parks are protected, but across the unfenced border in conservancies, the same animals are game for those who can pay.
Non-consumptive forms of wildlife tourism, such as photo safaris, lead to more significant economic gains, allow more people to appreciate individual animals for longer, and provide an ethical incentive for conserving wildlife.
On the other hand, some hunting concessions are close to national parks with protected wildlife that are easy target for hunters. The protected population, being exposed to harmless photo-tourists and are less wary of people. They may wander out of the unfenced park zone into hostile hunting territory.
Unscrupulous hunters lure animals from protected areas — as was the case with Cecil the Lion. A major attraction for tourists visiting Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, the healthy male adult was baited out of the protected zone by an American dentist and killed in 2015.
Americans import more than120,000 trophies , i.e. wildlife body parts per year according to Humane Society International.
Taxidermized for private collections, these vulnerable species aren’t hunted for science. In African trophy hunting safaris, hunting the “big five”, including elephants, fetches the highest sum.
Africa exported 81,572 hunting trophies from African Bush Elephants in 2001–2015 contributing to massive decline in populations according to African Wildlife Foundation.
Conservationists like Jane Goodall have criticized hunting and questioned its purported benefits and propose that meaningful efforts conserve wildlife and help impacted communities without unscientific exploitation.
Hunters, on the other hand, claim that they fund conservation for availability of game. Some conservation organizations support hunting as an alternative to poaching. In conflict zones, even protected areas are endangered. Hunters remain undeterred, exacerbating the hunting-conservation nexus.
Concerns with Canned Hunting
Trophy hunting does not include captive hunting operations like “canned” or “vanity” hunting — a deplorable practice where animals, including endangered wildlife, are raised and confined for the singular purpose of being killed in captivity. Canned hunting is popular in South Africa and in the United States of America where it is often practiced on ranches.
Canned hunting has no conservation benefits, increases the risk of disease transmission and has been condemned by conservationists and professional hunters, alike. Pro-hunting conservation groups such as the Boone and Crockett Club support only fair chase hunting, where animals are truly wild, i.e. they are naturally bred and live in nature, and free-ranging, i.e. unconfined by artificial barriers.
Illegal Wildlife Trade in Asia
In many Asian countries, elephant parts have been used in traditional medicinal systems since thousands of years. Elephants are poached and hunted to produce carved ivory decorations and blood red beads, a sign of prosperity in countries like China.
Today, these practices fuel a global criminal industry, according to the UNODC.
Apart from elephants — tigers, snow leopard and other big cats, one-horn rhino, pangolin, brown bear, deer, reptiles, seahorse, star tortoise, butterflies, peacocks, birds, red sander, orchids, shells, corals are some of the species that are seriously endangered or on the brink of extinction due to poaching and unscrupulous illegal trade of wildlife in South Asia.
Detangling the Hunting-Conservation Nexus
There is now a growing realization that conservation efforts impact both — those animals who live inside and people who live outside national parks. One obvious way to bolster success rates then, is to ensure that even as the largest mammals and smallest reptiles thrive within park boundaries, human communities prosper outside.
Supporters of trophy hunting claim that the dangerous sport generates millions of dollars for conservation. A portion of hunting fees may be redirected towards conservation of hunted and other species, which is claimed to fortify community support with every dollar earned.
It’s also claimed that hunting revenues can provide a stable economic incentive to preserve wildlife and their natural habitats even in the poorest communities and unstable countries that receive fewer tourists.
At the same time, every instance of purported gain is matched by other instances that lead to wildlife losses — often caused by weak/bad governance, excessive quotas, unsound games-count methodology, illegal hunting, poor monitoring and similar problems that are hard to monitor and control.
It is also believed that economic gains from trophy hunting have been hyped, as economic quotas for conservation are insignificant and government corruption cuts into contributions for local communities.
Hunting programs in Namibia have attracted criticism for exaggerating their success, leading to conservation losses and problems in the community, such as the Nyae Nyae conservancy. Similarly, problems plague trophy hunting in Zimbabwe.
Some forms of hunting focus on culling animals considered dangerous to communities or past their prime to reduce human-wildlife conflict, prevent poaching and manage populations.
Many hunters argue that the elephant was either past his breeding age or has passed on his genes enough times that he has made a sufficient contribution to the gene pool.
“That’s nonsense,” said Joyce Poole, a researcher who has studied elephants for decades, while regretting the loss of a big bull tusker killed in 2015. “That male they killed was in his prime, and not only was he incredibly important to the females, he was really important to other males as a leader in male society.”
“Old and experienced individuals are crucial,” said Vicki Fishlock, the resident scientist at Amboseli Trust for Elephants, a research and conservation organization in Kenya. “They are so much more than ‘a breeder’ — by the time these animals reach this size, they have been parts of social networks for five or six decades and have accumulated social and ecological experience that younger animals learn from.”
It has been found that older male elephants are central in social networks, and influence the cohesion of male social groups. Consequently, the elimination of older males from elephant populations by poachers or trophy hunters adversely impact male elephant groups and elephant herds.
It cannot be ignored that the role of individual animals in their herds is not well understood, and even older animals may play a critical role. Another major controversy revolves around the preference for rare individuals and hunting for specific features like extraordinarily large tusks.
We can support meaningful conservation in so many ways!
Nothing beats direct methods of support that don’t harm any animals, here are some ways to help —
1. Donating to or volunteering for anti-poaching and anti-hunting efforts by organizations like Born Free Foundation, The Thin Green Line Foundation, Elephant Voices, EVP Cambodia and Reteti Rescue and Elephant Sanctuary in Kenya.
2. Travel to countries where trophy hunting is banned like Costa Rica, Malawi, Kenya and India.
3. Opt for sustainable tourism with conservation benefits for communities like non-consumptive wildlife safaris as popular in many Asian and African countries.
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