Think of Cecil the lion’s death in 2015. Were you horrified? Why?
For many, the outrage over Walter Palmer’s decision to hunt the lion and then pose with his dead ‘trophy’ simply stemmed from the idea that this majestic creature had been needlessly killed when it may be soon facing extinction.
But what if Palmer’s actions were actually part of an incredibly successful conservation business that in fact helped to stop the extinction of animals, and bought an economy to a struggling region?
That’s the question new documentary Trophy aims to pose. Originally planned as an expose on the hunting community and those that save for years to fly to Africa and shoot an animal, it quickly became apparent to directors Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz that it was actually a more complicated and morally grey ideology.
As Schwarz says, no one wants to hear about money and wildlife together, but as they began researching for the documentary, one ideal kept popping up: ‘If it pays it stays’.
This ideology places a value on an animal; it says some animals are worth more alive than dead, and for that reason it is economically smarter to breed particular animals and to turn the desire of some to shoot these creatures dead into a business.
‘Yes, they are rhinos which are endangered and in a perfect world they would be in the wild,’ says Schwarz.
‘But if we keep them in the wild – to use the Born Free logo, “keep the wild wild” – they won’t be there, and we have to come to terms with the fact that we may lose some of these animals.’
Trophy explores these tensions between conservation and hunting, and the multi-million dollar industry in America that underpins it all, as well as poaching, which has increased in South Africa in the past decade.
The trade of rhino horn in South Africa has been illegal since 2009 when the government put a moratorium on the selling of the horn in order to appease the Western world when it was given the 2010 World Cup.
In 2007 there were 13 rhinos poached for their horns – by 2016, 1,054 rhinos were reported killed in South Africa.
John Hume, however, is convinced he has the recipe to solve the growing conservation crisis surrounding extinction.
A 75-year-old farmer from South Africa, Hume believes that he can ‘breed rhinos better than anyone else and protect them better than anyone else’ but that he is preaching to a world that ‘does not want to listen’ – and it’s because while he breeds his rhino, he is also cutting off their horns to sell on.
He has a stock pile of horns that he believes is worth a couple of million dollars, but he cannot sell it because it remains illegal. In April 2017, after a long court battle South Africa’s high court overturned the ban, but the government have now refused to give her a permit to sell.
‘I have a huge problem, my rhinos – and I have as of today, 1538 of them – are going to be dead, all dead, in ten years time if I cannot get common sense through to the world,’ he says.
‘And that is the reason I have been trying to argue for them for the last few years in terms of hundreds of interviews including Trophy, to try and get across to the world that we are doing the wrong thing for rhinos.’
In Trophy, Hume is seen speeding across his 20,000-acre Buffalo Dream Ranch as he is given word that some of his rhinos have been slaughtered; he spends over £250,000 a month on security but he still loses rhinos regularly to poachers who kill the rhino before sawing off the horn, and selling it illegally.
In the film he claims the deaths of his rhinos are an inside job involving the head of his security team.
The animal rights activists will tell you public education and changing attitudes in consumer nations will work in helping these animals to become extinct.
But the hunters, such as Safari Club International and Hume – who admits he has asked for permission to allow hunters on to his farm to shoot his rhino with tranquilizer before cutting off the horn for a trophy – will suggest that their model is working, and offers both a safety for the animals and a business plan for the country.
‘The NGOs run me down,’ adds Hume, ‘but with them I can understand it as if you go to their website you’ll see a red button saying “donate now”, so I can see that logic as they don’t want their income stream affected.
‘But what about the British government, the American government? The EU?
‘Why does the world insist on giving all the rhino horn business to illegals and poachers and killers? Bans don’t work – America proved it with booze – and we are losing the war in South Africa.
‘We lose three rhinos a day.’
The CEO of Save The Rhino, Cathy Dean, says it’s ‘completely incorrect’ to link moratorium to the increasing numbers in poaching.
‘He’s drawing conclusions from one thing and it’s not exactly cause and effect,’ she says. ‘If you look at the poaching stats, it began in 2007/8 in Zimbabwe, long before the moratorium came into effect. I don’t believe the two are related.’
The death of Cecil the Lion came midway through filming for Clusiau and Schwarz and they admit that it led to many hunters who had agreed to appear in the film to back out – ‘there was a world before Cecil and a world after, the world shifted,’ says Clusiau – but it didn’t stop Philip Glass.
A Texan hunter, Glass is followed on camera as he teaches his young son to hunt in America, before he flies to South Africa to hunt the Big Five – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo.
His story shows exactly how hunting is a sport for many, as they pay anywhere from $50,000 (£38,000) for a single elephant to $350,000 (£265,000) for a rhino, but may in fact end their time in Africa with nothing as they have to track, and hunt; the animals are not just handed to them on a platter.
At one point, you see Glass ready his shot at an elephant before being told to stop – the elephant is too young.
But when they do find a suitable elephant, Clusiau and Schwarz don’t stop filming.
‘The elephant hunt was devastating, and it pulls at our heart strings,’ says Clusiau, ‘we just decided to show the pain and the suffering because it was the right thing to do.
‘And then an hour later, the village comes out and they are so happy and they harvest the meat, and they are happy to have the protein… and then I realised that my relationship to these animals is so different to theirs.’
Imagine a lion wandering around a suburb in London, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow.
The panic would be widespread and understandably the concerns for the population would more than likely lead to the animal’s death. Why do we expect Africans to live with a wild lion as well?
‘We grow up with this idea of lions being magical creatures – and they are – but [our idea is] a lion being Simba, cute and cuddly and on my TV,’ says Clusiau.
‘Yet we sit on our couches and think in Africa they should have the same perspective, and no, we’re asking them to live with lions, and lions eat children, and take away livelihoods.
‘Elephants are bulldozers, and they run over crops. So it comes down to perspective and relationships being very different things.’
Do we want to save animals for extinction?
The general consensus will always be yes however as Schwarz concludes: ‘If we are to solve these problems it will take all of us.’
These breeders and ranches are successful, creating as Schwarz puts it ‘a model where people want to breed more and more’.
‘Tourism is important as it brings money to Africa… it will take all of us working together, but the sides are so at each others throats that they won’t work together.
‘If we want to all see the animals on this planet we have to work together.’
‘Forty years ago it was estimated there were half a million wild animals on private land,’ adds Hume.
‘Now there are 23 million because the farmers make money out of trophies, and if you allow them to do that I promise you those animals will never go extinct.’
https://metro.co.uk/video/trophy-official-trailer-1574350/?ito=vjs-link
Source: http://metro.co.uk/2017/11/16/what-...f-a-successful-conservation-business-7081777/
