Loaded for Bear: Animal rights activists and climate change deniers have a few things in common

In the UK, about 350,000 deer are hunted or legally culled each year. These include red deer stag hunted for sport in the Scottish highlands at places like the Royal Family’s rural estate in Balmoral.

Yet the hunting of charismatic African species such as elephants and lions has elements of the British chattering classes in a froth, despite the overwhelming evidence that regulated trophy hunting is an important conservation tool in remote and rural areas on the world’s poorest continent. 

Animal welfare campaigners and British MPs are once again trying to ban the import of trophies taken from such hunts – typically a mounted head or pelt – on the false grounds that trophy hunting is a threat to endangered species.

It simply is not; an inconvenient truth that animal rights activists ignore or distort. Like climate change denialism, this is a rejection of science to advance an agenda that will have a detrimental effect on conservation and the environment.

Facts matter, and conservation scientists such as Amy Dickman of Oxford University and others – experts who don’t hunt and have no skin in the game – have been the public face of reason in these “debates” in the UK.

And the facts speak for themselves. The biggest threats to African megafauna such as lions, elephants and rhinos are poaching, habitat loss and fragmentation, and human/wildlife conflict, with climate change an emerging threat.

Properly regulated trophy hunting is not a threat to any African species, including the ones that really trigger emotions up North.

There is evidence that trophy hunting of lions can have an adverse effect on local populations if relatively young breeding males are taken. 

But overall, trophy hunting and sport hunting more generally in recent decades has been a plus for African wildlife, as counter-intuitive as that sounds.

As Dickman and other conservation scientists such as Craig Packer have noted, much of the remote habitat in countries such as Tanzania is ill-suited for other kinds of wildlife revenue such as photographic tourism. 

Hunting bans in such areas provide no incentive to conserve either habitat or wildlife.

The comparatively rich wildlife in Tanzania, where hunting is allowed – compared with Kenya where it was banned in 1977 – is one of many examples. Yet while Kenya’s wildlife population has since plunged, its policymakers remain in the embrace of animal welfare NGOs and their denial of science and history.

South Africa’s private game farms – many of which are dedicated solely to hunting – have seen wildlife populations climb and flourish.

Trophy hunting – which generally targets old, non-breeding males – is no more a threat to wildlife in Botswana, Tanzania or South Africa than it is in Scotland.

But there is no comparable legislative initiative to ban deer hunting in the UK or prevent foreign hunters from exporting their trophies from the highland landscape.

I wrote about this issue roughly a year ago when MPs first voted in favour of the ban, pointing out that some animals are more equal than others. 

Read more in Daily Maverick: UK trophy hunting import ban: Some animals more equal than others

That effort eventually withered and died in the House of Lords, but the emotions stirred by the issue remain red-hot. So here we go again, with a second reading of the new bill debated in the House of Commons last Friday. 

One of the points often lost in the debate is that UK residents represent only a fraction of the foreign hunters who come to Africa each year. The big numbers hail from places like Texas.

So even if trophy hunting was an extinction-level threat to elephants or Cape buffalo – which it isn’t – banning such imports to a country that accounts for only about 5% or less of the total is hardly going to move the needle.

African government officials and communities are increasingly annoyed by this legislative circus, which is a legacy of the fallout over the killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe by American dentist Walter Palmer in 2015. The furore over that incident also pointedly annoyed and mystified Africans.

Read more in Daily Maverick: A Tale of Two Cats, Cecil and Sylvester

Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi told Sky News last week that the proposed ban was “condescending” and a “resurgence of a colonial conquest”.

Botswana also threatened to send 10,000 elephants to Hyde Park so “... Britons can try living with them.”

The barbed point of that “threat” was that the British public does not have to contend with wild animals that are huge and dangerous. Foxes raiding garbage bins hardly compare.

Opposition to trophy hunting, it must be said, is perfectly legitimate and people in the free world are free to speak their minds. Some people – mostly drawn from the urban middle classes in affluent, developed economies – simply abhor hunting. And trophy hunting touches a raw nerve in ways that hunting for meat consumption does not. 

But you lose the moral high ground when – like the climate change denialists of the US far right – you dismiss empirical research and the advice of scientists to push your agenda or gin up public opinion.

This also puts such animal welfare activists in the same league as “Creationists” who deny the overwhelming scientific facts of evolution. 

You also lose the moral high ground when a former colonial power closes its ears to the voices of people from affected countries in Africa.

As Botswana’s president said, it is “condescending”. Not to mention hypocritical, when you think of those 350,000 deer mowed down in the UK each year – an average of about 1,000 a week.

The UK, through its democratically elected parliament and government, is of course entitled to ban the import of anything it wants.

But wrapping this initiative in the blanket of “conservation” is disingenuous.

A more honest approach would be to say that we realise this may have some adverse impacts on conservation and there is opposition to the bill – and virtually no support – from the countries targeted. But we simply find the trophy hunting of African wildlife more barbaric than the hunting of domestic stags.

The trouble, of course, is that such honesty would not translate into policy or law because it would wither on the vine of its transparent shortcomings. DM