Business Maverick

BUSINESS MAVERICK 168

The killing game: In praise of hunting

The killing game: In praise of hunting
Adri Kitshoff-Botha, CEO of Wildlife Ranching South Africa. (Photo: Twitter/@JulianJansen)

South Africa’s alpha female hunter reflects on conservation as she retires from the wildlife industry.

First published in Daily Maverick 168

A few years ago Adri Kitshoff-Botha was buying men’s clothes, but it’s not because there was a lack of womenswear to her taste. Kitshoff-Botha was sporting men’s wear because she hunts and, in South Africa, hunting apparel for women is rare, though that is changing.

“I used to buy men’s clothes for hunting, but now ladies can find suitable clothes,” she said with a chuckle.

Last month, Kitshoff-Botha retired after almost two decades in the hunting and wildlife industries. Along the way she broke a few glass ceilings. In 2010, she became the first female CEO of the Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa (Phasa). In 2015, she left that role to become the CEO of Wildlife Ranching South Africa (WRSA).

Hunting has a decidedly male image and has been bound up in concepts of masculinity, for better or worse. In recent decades it has become a flashpoint of broader cultural conflict, the target of animal welfare activists offended on grounds of cruelty by the notion of hunting as a sport or legitimate outdoor activity.

Some activists are opposed to the “consumptive” use of wildlife for commercial purposes.

Recreational hunting in Africa seems especially emotive as it is home to the world’s last great populations of megafauna, which pulls on the heartstrings of affluent Westerners who don’t actually have to share living space with big, dangerous animals. Subsistence hunting is perhaps another matter, but also has its opponents.

For Kitshoff-Botha, her gender has meant much less than her message: that the hunting and private game farming industries are a force for good in conservation. In 2015, Bloomberg TV filmed her stalking and shooting a blesbok under a blue winter sky. The shot was a good one and the animal, struck in the neck, died instantly. The headline for the text story that accompanied the video, published in June that year, was: “South African Hunters Say Best Way to Save Animals is to Kill.”

The headline was clearly “clickbait”, perhaps appropriate for a hunting tale. Some airlines and governments had recently banned the transport of carcasses or trophies such as mounted animal heads, and the uproar over the hunting of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe would erupt just a few weeks later.

Many hunting groups are wary of the media. But Kitshoff-Botha sees no reason to hide, clad in camouflage, behind a blind. Taking her case to an international news service such as Bloomberg was a case in point. “Knowing how the conservation model in South Africa works, I know I have contributed to conservation,” she said at the time, as she stood over the blesbok carcass.

“There was a period when much more prominence, especially from the media, was devoted to the breeding side of wildlife ranching, which created a perception that breeding was the main focus of the wildlife industry, which isn’t correct,” Kitshoff-Botha told President Cyril Ramaphosa, who famously bid millions of rands for a buffalo bull.

The wildlife industry – at least the part that stems from game farms – has four subsectors: breeding and game sales, hunting, ecotourism/game viewing, and game products such as the kudu biltong you find in some shops. This is all business, but it is business in Kitshoff-Botha’s view that has had conservation spin-offs, such as the transition of marginal agricultural land into a wildlife habitat. Making wildlife economically valuable is a great incentive to conserve it. Some critics take issue with this “commercialisation”, or the fencing involved, but it has paid conservation dividends.

“The private ownership of wildlife, the role that it has played over the past few decades to prevent species from extinction has been absolutely crucial,” said Kitshoff-Botha. Examples of this “wildlife privatisation” include South Africa’s white rhino population, about half of which is now in private hands on privately owned game ranches.

“There is still an onslaught from people who do not understand the role that hunting plays in conservation,” she said.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns to contain it, the industry has been taking strain. In May, Daily Maverick reported the hunting industry was in serious trouble because three key sources of revenue – hunting, game viewing and live game sales – had been shut down under lockdown. Kitshoff-Botha has no new hard data on the issue but she said the industry was not out of the woods yet.

“More diversified operations will have a better chance of surviving this,” she said. Game sales were allowed after initially being banned under the hard lockdown, while game products such as meat carried on as these were regarded as part of the essential service agricultural sector. But Kitshoff-Botha said operations that mostly cater to hunters or game viewers could experience serious financial difficulty. A survey of wildlife ranchers earlier this year found that losses for 2020 in the industry were expected to top R9-billion.

Kitshoff-Botha may be retiring, but it seems more women are taking up hunting, even as the sport is in general decline. Much of the evidence for this is anecdotal, but surveys by the US Fish and Wildlife Service show that the percentage of hunters who are women in the US rose from 9% in 2006 to 10% in 2016.

This has relevance for South Africa, as many of the foreign hunters who come here are American. And in 2016, US hunters spent more than $26.2-billion on their activity. If 10% of that was spent by women, it helps to explain why female hunters no longer need to buy men’s clothing. 

For Kitshoff-Botha, her gender has meant much less than her message: that the hunting and private game farming industries are a force for good in conservation. BM/DM

Gallery

Comments - Please in order to comment.

  • Aslam Dasoo says:

    Business Maverick has a fairly broad view of business and the reportage generally reflects this. But journalism that is credulous and in thrall to a regressive, colonial enterprise such as hunting is surprising. The simplistic take on an enabling maven of this 18th century hangover, hunting as sport, is devoid of 21st century acculturation and moves into the mind-numbed terrain of celebrity reporting on an activity echoing with a supremacist mentality. The lynching of slaves in the American South oftentimes followed a hunt, with dogs and runners, of the terrified slave. It is no co-incidence that the biggest purveyors of this uncivilised pastime are located in the US, Europe and SA. Business is business, but when your business has its mercantile roots in the most awful and anguished colonial activity and which justifies the wilful killing of sentient beasts as an ‘ethical’ commercial enterprise, you disguise the primary reason for hunting today, viz. an abiding plutocratic pleasure in taking life. Those who provide the custom for these enterprises, rich Americans and Europeans mainly, are throwbacks to colonisers and conquistadors, unconcerned with the preservation of biodiversity and unrestrained in their arrogant claims to “Bwana-hood”. As for hunting being a pillar of ‘conservation’, which at first and last blush fails to convince that it is about anything other than maintaining a capitalist primitivism that fuels the impetus to shrinking the available space for wildlife, then one is taking intellectual liberties to which no entitlement exists and is but base sophistry that absolves the hunting clientele, by and large adherents of the Trumpian ethic of climate change denialism that has brought us to the brink of climate collapse. I don’t for a moment deny that wildlife management is simple or even likely to be successful sans recreational hunting, or that it doesn’t involve difficult trade-offs, nor do I wish to deny Ms Botha and her cohort the right to their views and their legal endeavours. But, when it comes to promoting the absurdity that hunting is a necessary adjunct to conservation, pardon me for not displaying the cognitive dissonance that says one can maintain one’s virginity through fornication.

  • Keith Scott says:

    While not condoning or siding with the hunting industry it is worth pointing out that neither hunting for pleasure nor slavery originated in the West.

  • Aslam Dasoo says:

    @keithscott, you’re correct, of course, that these practices did not originate in the West, for the simple reason that the ‘West’ is a fairly recent phenomenon, when compared with other civilisations stretching into antiquity.
    My comment confined itself to the modern iteration of these practices, which are fuelled by the technology and economic power that render them hugely efficient.
    In a time when human activity has manifested as the grim Anthropocene epoch, maintaining practices such as recreational hunting during a simultaneous precipitous decline in planetary biodiversity, which, despite the obvious correlation, is easier to mitigate than global warming, what excuse is there for sustaining such a practice?
    Leaving aside the distasteful notion of hunting as sport, the economic spin-offs for local communities and commercial operators pales into insignificance when compared to the ecological disaster that will and already is wreaking havoc on those same communities.
    Our fauna and flora are not an inexhaustible ‘resource’ and accelerated extinction reduces their abundance permanently. In an otherwise highly efficient system of market capital allocation, this primitive pastime is astonishingly wasteful. The ROI is so poor that wealthy hunters, often highly market literate, give the lie to the idea that they can apply such basic concepts beyond trading floors and corporate enterprises. Looking at the shuddering crisis in modern political economy, it’s not surprising that many of them are both at the helm and the root cause of that crisis, as well.

    • Johann Olivier says:

      I take many of your points, Dr Dasooc, in particular your amusing reference to maintaining virginity. However, pray, please give an alternative. Finding fault with a brutal industry on a desperate continent is fairly easy. What is indubitably clear is that hunting is a serious source of revenue, currently unmatched by any other ‘conservation’ (I do see the irony…) endeavour. Solutions?

      • Aslam Dasoo says:

        @johannolivier
        “ Finding fault with a brutal industry on a desperate continent is fairly easy.”

        Eloquent point, Mr Olivier, with which I have no quibble. Nor do I disagree that hunting brings in significant revenue or that there are no easy answers.
        I’m reminded of the similar conundrum that faced the global community when it was accepted, however reluctantly by some, that burning fossil fuel was a proximate cause of global warming. Eventually, mechanisms of various utility were proposed and some, like carbon taxes and incentives for renewable energy generation, were accepted. None are perfect, nor can one say with certainty that these measures will have the desired effect, but they represent a collective will to do the right thing by the planet for our children and their offspring.
        To conserve biodiversity we are going to need similar innovations, without indulging a ‘brutal industry’.
        There is a rich body of research that shows how we might transform hunting and it’s attendant revenue generation (photo safaris generate serious money from the same countries that produce the hunting cohort). It doesn’t help that SA also has the dubious distinction of breeding ‘canned lions’ and the like, promoting hunting on an industrial scale. This generates the bulk of hunting revenues, however the purveyors attempt to camouflage this horrific enterprise. Moreover, you will find that the bulk of revenues don’t go to conservation before they are first dissipated on various profits, filtered through various intermediaries and stolen by corrupt officials, functionaries and politicians. If this were not the case, the well-being of our wildlife and the communities in their proximity would be pre-eminent and self-evident. As it is, wildlife keeps dwindling and the surrounding communities remain mired in the grinding poverty that hunting revenues were meant to mitigate. There’s no getting around this for the industry, I’m afraid.
        Conservation is a contested space on our ‘desperate continent’ and should be navigated with science and wisdom. Transitioning to a new, ethical and sustainable revenue model for conservation is in all our interests, not just financially but in our appreciation of what makes us human, what reason affords us and whether we can live in harmony with and as part of the planet’s natural endowment.
        The C19 pandemic is a mighty reminder of our failings in these arenas of existence. And to allow some among us to satisfy whatever drives their yearnings to snuff out our wildlife is our failure more than theirs.

Please peer review 3 community comments before your comment can be posted

X

This article is free to read.

Sign up for free or sign in to continue reading.

Unlike our competitors, we don’t force you to pay to read the news but we do need your email address to make your experience better.


Nearly there! Create a password to finish signing up with us:

Please enter your password or get a sign in link if you’ve forgotten

Open Sesame! Thanks for signing up.

We would like our readers to start paying for Daily Maverick...

…but we are not going to force you to. Over 10 million users come to us each month for the news. We have not put it behind a paywall because the truth should not be a luxury.

Instead we ask our readers who can afford to contribute, even a small amount each month, to do so.

If you appreciate it and want to see us keep going then please consider contributing whatever you can.

Support Daily Maverick→
Payment options

Become a Maverick Insider

This could have been a paywall

On another site this would have been a paywall. Maverick Insider keeps our content free for all.

Become an Insider

Every seed of hope will one day sprout.

South African citizens throughout the country are standing up for our human rights. Stay informed, connected and inspired by our weekly FREE Maverick Citizen newsletter.