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Leopard tags in Namibia
The issue of Leopard tags in Namibia is done by the Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) who distributes the CITES "quota" of 250 Leopards for every year, taking in consideration the communal conservancies, state land as well as single private farms (here only MET and NTB registered hunting operators may apply for a tag and no more than two tags have been allocated to the hunting operators disregarding the number of hunting farms he/she has stated in his application). In case of a Leopard hunt on private farm land, the hunting operator must deliver proof to MET that he has the sole hunting right on the farms he applied for.
The quota setting process in the communal conservancies works as follows. In the communal conservancy there is an annual game count and based on these game counts the respective NGO (e.g. WWF) sits together with the community conservancy council to decide on the total annual off take, be it meat hunting, game capture, own traditional usage, trophy hunting etc... When these two parties have arrived on a joint decision regarding utilization of the different species and the numbers thereof, this utilization proposal is made to MET. Only MET will grant these quota proposals, however MET has the power to reduce the numbers that were applied for.
This means that MET takes into consideration during the division process of the 250 CITES Leopards the amount of Leopards sold by the state during that specific year on the state concession auctions, the applications by hunting operators on private farms and the allocation of Leopards to the communal conservancies. In practice this means that the one conservancy might be allocated only one Leopard per year and another conservancy might be allocated 4 Leopards for the same year, whereas the hunting operators on private land only receive a maximum of 2 tags.
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Jerome that's very interesting I've never really thought to the quota on leopard. One looks through the many sites for pricing on leopard hunts but doesn't think much on the quota at less I didn't. Reading this it gives one thought 250 leopard a year really isn't that many so one going on such a leopard hunt is really lucky.
