The following is an extract from our nature newsletter Wild Wild Life. Sign up to receive it for free in your inbox every month.
I would never kill an animal for fun. But although I can’t imagine I would enjoy fishing or hunting, I recognise that many people do. Among them is a smaller subset of people who engage in trophy hunting, one of conservation’s most divisive issues. It’s often claimed that trophy hunting does more good than harm, by ensuring land and animals are more protected than they otherwise would be, and by generating revenue that can be funnelled into conservation efforts, but critics argue it’s a cruel colonial relic that has no significant impact. So when a 2023 book on the subject was recently awarded a British Ecological Society prize for having the greatest influence on the science of ecology in recent years, I decided to set aside my distaste and dive in.
Trophy Hunting by Nikolaj Bichel at the University of Oxford and Adam Hart at the University of Gloucestershire, UK, attempts to look “at all the pieces of the puzzle”, and for such an extensive and detailed academic tome, I found it far more absorbing than I expected. What first jumped out at me was the way discussions of trophy hunting tend to focus on one large continent (Africa), with many common misconceptions about what really happens there.
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Firstly, of Africa’s 54 countries, trophy hunting takes place in around half of them, largely in southern Africa, and most of it on what the authors describe as a very small scale. Of the estimated 50 million international tourists that visit the continent annually, around 0.04 per cent are thought to be hunters. That still amounts to 20,000 hunters, but they’re not all bagging lions or elephants. “Most hunted mammals in Africa are various common antelopes, but they don’t grab headlines like lions do,” says Bichel. For example, 2016 data on trophy animals taken from Africa back to the US – a major destination for hunted trophies – shows that 12 species, including impalas, springboks, plains zebras and two species of warthog, were more commonly exported than any of the “Big Five” game animals (lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants and African buffalo).
Still, the numbers are large. More than 58,000 impala trophies were exported to the US that year, and there were between 4000 and 6000 registered US trophy imports of elephants, lions and leopards during the same time. A 2019 report from the international charity Born Free states that between 2008 and 2017, nearly 38,000 African elephants were exported as trophies.
How can that make conservation sense, especially when a 2014 report by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust calculated that a living elephant generates more than $1.6 million in tourism revenue over its lifetime? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s not that simple. “The idea it’s possible to calculate the economic value of a generic or standardised elephant, alive compared to dead, is ridiculous,” says Bichel. “Once you have enough elephants to reliably attract tourists who want to see elephants, each additional elephant is not going to bring in the same amount as the previous elephant. Tourists are not paying 10 times more to see 50 elephants than to see 5 elephants.”
This was one of the points I found most interesting in Bichel and Hart’s book – that, unfortunately, non-lethal tourism like photo-tourism cannot fully replace trophy hunting. Compared with other tourists, trophy hunters tend to travel further, stay for longer and spend more money. “The notion of replacing hunting with other forms of tourism is attractive, but anyone that has any experience on the ground in these areas quickly realises that such a solution is naïve at best,” says Hart. “Tourists want stability, wonderful views, dense wildlife sightings and good facilities, all within a few hours of an airport.” And even for places that meet these criteria, sufficient income isn’t guaranteed. Supply of these kinds of facilities already outstrips demand in most places, says Hart.
As disappointing as that may be, for me the most persuasive argument is land use and habitat loss. “Overall, the area protected by hunting is far greater than that given aside to national parks,” says Hart. “If hunting were universally banned, then land currently being maintained as habitat for wildlife would be under huge pressure.” In many areas, it is likely this land would be converted to agriculture, he says. “We would probably also see widespread logging and charcoal production, as well as unsustainable removal of wildlife for meat, depending on the area.”
It’s easy to tut at this from a distance, but the same logic applies all over the world. “In the end, land that isn’t paying its way with one use tends to be converted to other uses, just as in the UK,” says Hart.
Another aspect of the book that struck me is that it’s almost impossible to make generalisations about any aspect of trophy hunting. The balance of benefits versus harms is delicate, depending on many factors – the individual habitats and their animals, how well they’re managed and whether hunting grounds, hunters and their guides are well regulated and abide by legal restrictions. This varies both within the African countries that allow trophy hunting and in other countries worldwide.
Outside of Africa, trophy hunting in Europe and North America is largely focused on deer, a practice that many western people find more palatable. Bichel says this is because it’s broadly known that deer aren’t endangered and that their meat can be eaten – it’s less understood that most species hunted in Africa can be eaten too.
Ultimately, where does all this leave us? Hart and Bichel make it clear how complicated all the issues are around trophy hunting worldwide, but this won’t stop people on both sides of the argument looking for simple answers. I have much sympathy with people calling for an end to killing for fun. But were trophy hunting to end tomorrow, I have no answers for how to keep hunting grounds from being destroyed.
Lastly, while I’ve touched upon some of the most interesting aspects of Hart and Bichel’s book, I wanted to note that there are many other aspects of the trophy hunting question – including animal welfare and the impact on local economies and conservation financing – that I didn’t have the space to go into in this newsletter. Where you personally fall on the issue will depend on the weight of importance you give to each of these and other factors – but I hope that Hart and Bichel’s book will at least help to ensure the international debate becomes better informed.
