Trophy hunting: We need alternative plans, not bans
Rather than pushing a false binary of people having to be ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ trophy hunting, there needs to be more recognition of the nuance and complexity of the topic, and critically, more suggestions for plans instead of just knee-jerk demands for bans.
Recently, Ross Harvey wrote in Daily Maverick that he was confused that I and other scientists have pushed back against calls to ban elephant hunting in northern Tanzania. Harvey seemed to think the number of “super-tuskers” is fixed, while of course new “super-tuskers” emerge even as others die.
He solely focused on the “genetic heritage” of bull elephants, while ignoring the fact that “super-tusker” genes will be carried across the population, including by females and younger males.
Indeed, because older males are more likely to have bred – even before peak breeding – genes are more likely to be lost from a population if younger animals die who have had less chance to breed.
He also seems to feel that trophy hunting precludes photo-tourism revenue, which is nonsensical: if you have a reasonable wildlife population, then photo-tourism can work alongside trophy hunting. That combined model is successfully used across the world, including for critically endangered species, and using both approaches has been key to community-based conservation models.
From Harvey’s piece, readers could be forgiven for thinking trophy hunting was a leading cause of death for Amboseli elephants: yet in 2022-23, Amboseli Trust for Elephants recorded 112 deaths, far outstripping the five killed in Tanzania.
It is also baffling to see him berating hunters for abandoning land, when it has increased international restrictions of exactly the kind that Harvey pushes for which precipitated such abandonment, reducing management and increasing conservation threats.
He also suggests it is unethical to hunt elephants using “high-calibre rifles”, yet I am hard pressed to think of a weapon that would be preferable if the aim is a quick kill.
More alarmingly, there are areas where I think Harvey’s piece moves from possible misunderstanding into misinformation. For example, he mentions trophy hunting when citing a study about increasing tusklessness, yet trophy hunting is not mentioned once in the source article.
As Harvey must know, the paper was about growing tusklessness in a population devastated by 15 years of civil war, with intense ivory poaching and more than 90% decline in large herbivores: a world away from five elephants killed in northern Tanzania, from a large, generally growing population.
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