Having employed the services of various outfitters in North America and recently returned from my first African hunt, I can testify that unscrupulous outfitters operate everywhere not just in Africa.
I had one guide in Colorado pull me off a big bull elk I had just called down the canyon because it was getting late, whereupon he sent me on a wild goose chase the next morning and took 3 other hunters to the exact spot the next morning and killed the bull. Two days later the same guide and I, in an effort to "make things right", hoofed it up 2000 feet get a chance at another bull we spotted, informed me he had not brought any water or a flashlight, drank half of mine and abandoned me half-way down the mountain in the dark because he wanted crash through the blowdown at the incredibly thick bottom of the canyon rather than skirt it. I spent the night, and when I arrived at my vehicle I discovered he had drank the rest of the water in the truck and couldn't return my pet pair of 10x40 Zeiss binocs he borrowed because he "lost" them. Outfitter refused to do anything even after the DOW complaint was filed and he was officially admonished, the guide stripped of his credentials. It was all my fault you see, for daring to file a complaint against his highness and posting these exploits online.
Another Canadian outfitter once hijacked me at the Calgary airport for more money, since the "other hunter", his recruit not mine, failed to show. I discovered what you did, that although he was the "biggest outfitter in Alberta", he simply acted as a liaison between hunters and the fellows that actually offered the hunts. I was the only hunter that even saw a bull on that hunt, but I managed to cow-call it in and kill it after the "guide" was actually scaring it away with his bugle. Got lucky.
Point is that I would be loathe to abandon Africa hunting altogether because you were stung, but I do identify as I have never returned to Alberta after that debacle, have not hired another outfitter Colorado either.
For what it is worth, if you are still on this forum, I just hunted with Jacques Senekal of African Maximum Safaris in NW SA. I found he runs a very upstanding and professional operation with an abundance of game, every single animal I harvested made the SCI book with literally half of them Gold Medal. Never had a better hunt in my life, and I'm going to Zim with him in September. I'm sure many of the regulars here, being a new person to AH myself, are also cut from the same cloth.
opcorn::icecream:
