It’s been nearly a year since a Minnesota dentist bled out and killed Zimbabwe’s Cecil the lion. In the wake of it, there was a bright spotlight shined on trophy hunting. More than ever, the world is seeing trophy hunting in its true light: as a senseless hobby of the 0.1 percent who spend their fortunes traveling the world in head-hunting exercises.
Photo by Vanessa Mignon
They are not hunting animals for meat or for wildlife management, but to amass the biggest and rarest collections of some of the world’s most majestic species. Many of these trophy-mad hunters are competing for awards from Safari Club International and other membership organizations like the Dallas Safari Club. To win SCI’s coveted “Africa Big Five” award for example, a trophy hunter must kill an African lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros, and Cape buffalo.
The trophy hunters make the Orwellian argument that they must kill animals in order to save them, that they are sprinkling dollars on local economies with their “pay-to-slay” activities and that these funds also pay for conservation efforts. But a new report published by the House Natural Resources Committee Democratic staff, titled “Missing the Mark: African trophy hunting fails to show consistent conservation benefits,” challenges these false claims. The analysis illustrates there is little evidence that the money spent by trophy hunters is actually being used for conservation, mostly due to government corruption, lax enforcement, a lack of transparency, and poorly managed wildlife programs.
The report shows that most trophy hunts “cannot be considered good for a species’ survival,” said Committee Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva. “Taking that claim at face value is no longer a serious option. Anyone who wants to see these animals survive needs to look at the evidence in front of us and make some major behavior and policy changes. Endangered and threatened species are not an inexhaustible resource to be killed whenever the mood strikes us.”
The committee’s analysis focused on five species (African lion, African elephant, black rhinoceros, southern white rhinoceros, and leopard) and four African countries (Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe). The report also looked at imports of these species by American trophy hunters—responsible for by far the largest share of the carnage than hunters from any other country. Indeed, our devastating footprint on the world’s most iconic species is enormous. The U.S. imports on average an estimated 126,000 trophies every year and between 2005 and 2014, our country has imported approximately 5,600 African lions, 4,600 African elephants, 4,500 African leopards, 330 southern white rhinos, and 17,200 African buffalo, among many other species.
Despite this, the report found that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has rarely used its authority to restrict trophy imports that do not actually enhance the survival of the species, as required under the Endangered Species Act. As reported by Jada F. Smith in today’s The New York Times, “For the species covered in the House report, the Fish and Wildlife Service required only one import permit from 2010 to 2014, though more than 2,700 trophies eligible for permitting were imported during that time. For the 1,469 leopard trophies that could have required an import permit, the agency required none.” As the report also reveals, trophy import fees paid by trophy hunters to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are so low that it is the taxpayers who are covering 92 percent of the cost of the permitting program, thus “subsidizing the hobby of people wealthy enough to afford the other trophy hunting-related expenses...”
The data provides support for what most people is just common sense. Cecil was a famous lion in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park where he lived with his family—a pride of female lions and their cubs. His magnificent, awe-inspiring presence was enjoyed by thousands of visitors. His death was enjoyed by only one person. But what is the value of living Cecils—whether they are lions, elephants, rhinos, leopards, or any of the other animals sought by big-game hunters—as compared to the value of dead specimens? An American dentist paid $55,000 to shoot Cecil, but it’s estimated that a living Cecil would have generated nearly $1 million in tourism over his lifetime.
Wildlife-based eco-tourism, in fact, is a big industry in Africa and dwarfs trophy hunting in its economic impact. In Zimbabwe, tourism provides 6.4 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the country. Trophy hunting provides only 0.2 percent of Zimbabwe’s GDP, or 32 orders of magnitude less than tourism. A 2013 study of nine countries that offer trophy hunting found that tourism contributed 2.4 percent of the GDP, while trophy hunting only contributed 0.09 percent.
In South Africa, tourism contributed R103.6 billion (or $6.7 billion) in 2014, which is approximately 2 percent of South Africa’s 2014 GDP ($341 billion). In 2013, it is estimated that the hunting contribution was a mere R1.2 billion (or $79.9 million). Kenya, which banned trophy hunting in the 1970s, has an eco-tourism economy that brings in far more money than trophy hunting to Southern Africa as a whole.
Trophy hunting of lions, elephants, and rhinos rob parks, reserves, and other natural areas of the keystone animals that are the real draw for tourists and essential to these ecosystems, making it a net revenue loser for African economies. The impact is exacerbated when the trophy hunters remove named, popular animals like Cecil from the population, ending the opportunity for visitors to enjoy them. Trophy hunting has also been closely tied with poaching, corruption, and other illegal practices. That’s why forward-thinking governments, like those in Kenya and Botswana, have banned trophy hunting, and governments like Australia and France prohibited imports of the African lion trophies, or in the case of the Netherlands imports of trophies from more than 200 species.
Trophy hunting also employs far fewer people than eco-tourism. The 56 million people who traveled to Africa to watch wildlife during 2013 were catered to by millions of Africans who work in the tourism sector. This pales in comparison to the handful of people who accompanied the few thousand trophy hunters who also traveled to Africa that year.
The new report makes several recommendations for actions the U.S. government can take because of its “responsibility to ensure that Americans are not contributing to the decline of already imperiled wildlife.” These recommendations include requiring more frequent and robust review of range state hunting programs for ESA listed species, closing loopholes that allow some trophies to be imported without a permit, collecting additional data, and increasing permit application fees. Tourists can do their part, too. By visiting countries like Kenya and Botswana that have shunned trophy hunting and supporting eco-safaris and wildlife watching ventures, tourists can show that they value Africa’s wildlife—alive.
