The Custodians of Professional Hunting and Conservation (CPHC), one of the two main organisations that represent the professional hunting industry in South Africa, pointedly has the word ‘conservation’ in its name. This speaks to what it sees as part of its agenda — the conservation of habitat and wildlife, and the role that hunting plays in this contested terrain.  

One of the themes of its annual conference, held last month near the riverside Free State town of Parys, was conservation and messaging. As I have noted before, debates around hunting are often misleadingly portrayed — usually by animal welfare activists — as pitting “hunters” against “conservationists”. 

This immediately frames wider conservation issues in a way that excludes hunting and is a misappropriation of the term ‘conservation’. The term ‘extinction’ — a very real threat to many species globally — is also often falsely linked to sport hunting, notably trophy hunting.  

The fact is that most conservation scientists acknowledge the conservation contributions made by hunting.  

This includes the widely accepted estimate that about two-thirds of Africa’s protected areas are designated for hunting, including about a quarter of Tanzania’s surface area. This is not least because much of the African landscape is ill-suited to photographic safaris as it is remote, dull and dusty.  

South Africa’s success in herding white rhinos back from the brink of extinction was also partly incentivised by trophy hunting.  

Then there are the economic benefits, including the money spent through the hunting value chain and jobs generated.  

A 2018 study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Ecology and Conservation, The economic impact of trophy hunting in the South African wildlife industry, found that “trophy hunting annually contributes more than $341-million to the South African economy and supports more than 17,000 employment opportunities”. 

‘Influenced by emotions’

“There is a lot of misinformation out there,” Adri Kitshoff-Botha, the CEO of CPHC, told Daily Maverick on the sidelines of the conference

“People who have never been exposed to hunting and people who don’t understand hunting are misinformed and influenced by emotions… People also don’t realise the value of hunting, and the various socioeconomic and conservation benefits that it brings.”  

One theme at the conference was countering misinformation, and the failed campaign to ban the import of hunting trophies into the UK was often highlighted — not least because the hunting industry and many conservation scientists see it as a victory of facts over fiction.  

To wit, the ban in September was blocked by the House of Lords after 11 peers held it up and in effect ran down the legislative clock on it.   

One thing that struck me was the irresponsible misuse of the terms ‘conservation’ and ‘extinction’ employed by animal welfare activists in the campaign, which had wide support among celebrities up north, but pretty much zero among African governments and communities. 

Much of the campaigning in support of the Bill, especially on social media, claimed that “trophy hunting was driving species to extinction”. This was a claim that ran counter to decades of scientific research and was rubbished by many prominent conservation scientists, including Amy Dickman of Oxford, Adam Hart and others.  

There is a mountain of research which shows the opposite, while acknowledging that badly regulated trophy hunting can, for example, have an adverse effect on local lion populations if breeding-age males are killed.  

There are plenty of forces driving species to extinction, including habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution and climate change. Overhunting — say, for bushmeat — is also clearly a threat to vulnerable populations. Commercial-driven hunting in the past, such as for ivory in Africa, and beaver and bison in North America, has also triggered population collapses.  

Indeed, the planet, according to many scientists, is currently undergoing its Sixth Mass Extinction event driven by human activities — a key reason this geological epoch has been dubbed the Anthropocene.  

The first wave of this extinction event was probably triggered by human hunters who eliminated most of the planet’s megafauna outside of Africa tens of thousands of years ago after Homo sapiens migrated from its African cradle. I have speculated before that this may have been rooted in human-wildlife conflict. 

Read more in Daily Maverick: Africa’s beastly burden: The case for shrinking the faunal poverty line 

The Sixth Extinction is real and needs to be addressed urgently — and responsibly. But the culprit here is not most sport hunting, and certainly not trophy hunting. To make such demonstrably false claims to advance an agenda is a disservice to science and the truth, and can make species more vulnerable if the economic incentives provided by hunting are removed.  

This undermines wider efforts at ‘conservation’, a term that, like ‘conservationist’, has also been appropriated in egregious ways by the anti-hunting wing of the animal welfare movement.  

A shared goal

Both hunters and animal welfare activists, in my view, are conservationists who happen to take different approaches to the shared goal of the preservation of wildlife and habitat, and there are many shades in between. This also reflects divisions over the consumptive use of wildlife.  

Animal rights activists have tapped into a legitimate vein of public opinion. Many people do not like — or absolutely despise — hunting, for whatever reason. The problem is when misinformation is employed for the cause, which makes it far less noble and even counterproductive.  

The hunting industry can also create a false spoor. Unscrupulous hunting outfitters in Africa have allowed clients to shoot underage lions, and the scourge of canned hunting has tainted the industry’s reputation. (The CPHC and the Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa both maintain they are opposed to the practice). Fake “hunts” in the past have been used as cover to obtain and smuggle rhino horn out of South Africa.  

The hunting industry has also been accused of making exaggerated claims about its economic and conservation benefits. These benefits are real, but there are legitimate questions about equity (think of South Africa’s still-glaring disparities in land ownership), how much revenue is channelled to poor rural communities, and concerns around the habitat fragmentation caused by game fencing. More research and scrutiny are still needed in these areas.  

Still, in the failed campaign to ban the import of animal parts obtained by trophy hunting into the UK, it was the anti-hunting side that resorted to outright distortions and fabrications. It must be said that this propaganda found a receptive audience with a gullible public. A few peers who listened to scientists shot down the Bill in the end.  

Conservationists across the spectrum do find common ground on issues such as climate change. Most accept the science on this front, including hunters and anglers who spend a lot of time outdoors. It is when animals and the issue of hunting get thrown into the mix that things become emotive and science gets cast to the wind. Ignoring science is not a good strategy for confronting the Sixth Extinction. DM