Why Hunting Enables Poaching
The distinction between hunting and poaching is the blessing of a government. Usually, this permission is something that is bought, generally fetching higher fees to kill larger and rarer species. In theory, this transaction attributes value to the intangible benefits of wildlife and raises funds for conservation. In reality, it commodifies wildlife — forcing competing governments and licensing agencies to offer increasingly lower prices and higher yields. The funds it raises, as in so many other industries, are primarily funneled into executive profits. These profits incentivize financial beneficiaries to advocate for deregulation and stripping of protections from endangered species. Where they struggle to succeed, the black market rises to meet demand.
Hunting and poaching are simply two faces of one coin: a multi-billion dollar global wildlife trafficking industry.
First, there are logistical reasons why hunting enables poaching. When hunting is legalized, poachers no longer need to slip weapons and animals into and out of reserves without detection. They can simply pose as hunters. Rangers must allocate additional resources to inspect permits and kills. They must be sufficiently well-trained to identify counterfeit permits and mis- or under-reported kills (particularly difficult with marine species). For reserves tasked with regulating wildlife trade, this additional staffing, training, and facility maintenance comes at significant cost with insignificant return on investment. This is not the case for poachers. When governments compete to attract hunting tourism, license fees often become cheap enough to simply factor into black market budgets. Legal hunting concessions have repeatedly been demonstrated to correlate with higher poaching rates and many legal hunting operations have been exposed as cooperating with illegal wildlife trafficking and even human trafficking rings.
While logistical factors introduced by hunting make poaching easier, economic factors make poaching inevitable. When arguing the virtues of legal wildlife trafficking, hunting lobbyists and advocates rarely focus on species populations, instead pointing to impressive sums of aggregate licensing fees, using revenue as a proxy for conservation success. Perhaps unsurprisingly, very little of this revenue goes to those ends. Take Africa, the world’s biggest commercial hunting economy. Across the continent, trophy hunters pay an estimated 200 million USD/year for hunting permits. Less than 3% goes toward conservation funds. US taxpayers cover 92% of import fees. Hunting brings in approximately .78% of overall tourism spending. Among the 11 countries with the highest-grossing hunting economies, the industry occupies an average of 14.9% of total land area and contributes an average of .06% of GDP. By contrast, the top 11 ecotourism economies comprise an average of 50.7% GDP. The vast area occupied by this industry with negligible return to local communities creates the perfect socioeconomic conditions to incentivize poaching.
Not only is wildlife more valuable alive (an elephant is estimated to generate 76 times the monetary value throughout its life than its parts on the black market — for a shark, the ratio is more than 17,500), but the parties who reap benefits from legal wildlife trafficking are overwhelmingly non-local. Hunting economies in sub-Saharan Africa redistribute an average of 10 cents per hectare to local communities. Divided among the population, that’s 30 cents per person each year. The top sub-Saharan hunting economies generate an average of one job per 5,635 hectares, many of which are temporary. In Botswana, one of the only countries ever to ban trophy hunting, photo tourism generates 1 permanent job per 263 hectares. Per equivalent surface area, photo safaris in Botswana generate 39 times the job opportunities of hunting safaris. Despite the clear social and economic benefits, Botswana repealed its hunting ban in 2018 after electing a new pro-industry president. Within months of disarming its rangers, the nation witnessed the largest elephant poaching massacre in world history.
To veneer these colonial virtues, commercial hunting is also commonly advertised as a means of providing food to local people. These arguments typically do not mention that communities living on hunting concessions are generally forbidden from subsistence hunting and agricultural development or that using wild animals, especially endangered species, as a source of food is inherently unstable. After all, why should a starving villager be forbidden to kill an animal to feed their family, but a wealthy tourist be permitted to kill one simply for a wall decoration?
The central justification, of course, is that hunting tourism preserves wilderness and saves endangered species from extinction. In October 2017, National Geographic (under its brief ownership by Fox News architect and billionaire Rupert Murdoch) advocated trophy hunting under the headline Should We Kill Animals to Save Them? This premise seeks to frame the question ideologically, implicitly asserting its postulation and intentionally evading the data that demonstrate this not the outcome we observe in nature. The headline certainly poses an interesting philosophical question. However, before we debate this question, it would benefit us to ask, Will Killing Animals Save Them? In the context of hunting, there are virtually no data to support this claim. There are actually myriad case studies to support the opposite, less circuitous, logic.
Perhaps the most iconic case is the African elephant. In 1997, 8 years after the Convention for International Trade of Endangered Species instituted a ban, it approved a “one-off” sale of 50 tons of confiscated ivory to Japan- what they called an experiment in legal ivory trafficking. The proceeds went to elephant conservation. Five years later, officials told CITES that the sale had increased demand for ivory and they had seen an uptick in illegal ivory trade. Five years after that, China asked if it could be approved as a buyer for a “second one-off” sale. They got it in 2008. It was twice the size. Demand continued to increase. Elephant populations, climbing before CITES’ legal trafficking concessions, began to fall again. In 2013, China realized the dire situation and banned ivory trading, but today, African elephants are still sold for trophies in roughly 90% of the countries they inhabit. Populations continue to decrease, the rate of decline driven by poaching and correlating with the scale of commercial hunting in a given nation.
Elephants are not unique in this regard. A similar pattern has been observed in populations of African lion, of which approximately 2.4% of the global population are legally killed by hunters each year. Populations of leopard are also declining across Africa. Rhinoceros species experienced a short population recovery after South Africa incentivized landowners to relocate them to game reserves for trophy hunting. While the industry campaigned as conservationists, claiming that confining rhinos on farms was saving them from extinction, the growth trend ended and reversed. The northern white rhinoceros was pronounced functionally extinct in 2018 with the death of Sudan, its last male.
Stateside, the legalization of hunting permits in 2007 has caused a sharp decline in grey wolf populations after 15 years of biologists’ ground-breaking reintroduction efforts were beginning to reveal measurable benefits to the Yellowstone ecosystem. Areas in the United States with management strategies for cougars that incorporate hunting correlate with lower cougar populations and higher rates of human-cougar conflict. As wildlands disappear, hunts are increasingly becoming simulated and animals are increasingly bred to be hunted. The “canned hunting” industry now holds more lions, bison, and rhinoceros than exist in the wild. The fencing of these facilities fragments wild habitat and obstructs migration routes.
On the high seas, it’s a free-for-all. Marine wildlife trafficking is the largest and most lucrative sector of the entire industry. One in five fish is caught illegally — one in three in US markets. Intentional and systemic bycatch is estimated to comprise up to 40% of global marine catches. Entire ecosystems are dredged up on a daily basis in order to pull up nets containing 2% shrimp. Reef fish are captured with dynamite and cyanide. Whaling is resurging with military technology. Longlines 80 or more miles in length, carrying thousands of baited hooks, kill targeted species with seldom better than 50% accuracy. Driftnets, gillnets, and purse seines operate with comparable inaccuracy. Although a significant proportion of bycatch suffocates on the deck or drowns in the net, most fishery laws permit unlimited bycatch as long as it is discarded. However, fishing operations with massive hauls of untargeted and protected species have a financial incentive to scuttle animals or their parts to the black market. Even in marine protected areas, enforcement has logistically proven near impossible. Yet like we observe on land, poaching is easiest where wildlife extraction is legal.
At a time in history when rainforests and coral reefs are disappearing, rates of extinction are occurring at 100–1000 times historical averages, and 60% of wildlife has disappeared in less than 50 years, difficult choices will be necessary to preserve the remaining wild places and species on Earth. As this consensus forms, we must be wary as wealthy and powerful industries attempt to co-opt the language of conservation to promote self-interests. Commercial hunting is a mutually profitable nexus between wildlife trafficking, land privatization, and arms manufacturing. Its public relations strategies are formulated by lobbying groups like the Safari Club and the NRA. Its propaganda is relayed by media outlets and even conservation organizations with little skepticism. If we intend for future generations to inherit a world with the same wonders and wilderness that we have, we must challenge the astonishing social, economic, and political power of this industry. There was an age when humankind hunted to survive. In the modern age, it is more common that human beings starve on vast expanses of land conceded to hunting corporations. For too long, we have allowed these corporations to dictate the discourse and implementation of conservation strategy. We cannot afford to any longer.
