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.
The rights and needs of local people and the impacts on conservation matter far more than the needs of researchers or campaigners.
Furthermore, the tusklessness in that study appeared strongly female-linked, again showing that tusk size is about population-level genetics, not just a small number of males.
I and other scientists speak out on trophy hunting because it is complicated, and facts matter. Speaking out does not mean we are “defenders” of trophy hunting, as Harvey falsely implies: I for one (an animal-loving vegetarian) have spoken publicly and repeatedly about how much I dislike it.
But – critically, and seemingly unlike Harvey – I realise that it is not my personal views which count, but the rights and needs of local people and the impacts on conservation, which matter far more than the needs of researchers or campaigners.
There are some facts that we should all agree on: trophy hunting can harm individuals and populations, just as it can benefit wildlife populations and species. It occurs across the world, including extensively in North America and Europe, and is not mentioned as a key threat to a single species on the IUCN Red List. It can both harm and benefit local people.
Equally as importantly, bans and restrictions have also led to harms for people and wildlife, including increasing human-wildlife conflict.
Yet not all trophy hunting is the same, and some cause more concern than others. That is the case with these cross-border elephants, which belong to Kenya when there, and to Tanzania when there.
I can see compelling arguments for a particularly nuanced approach here: this elephant population spans countries with different laws on trophy hunting (although both are ranked highly for conservation success), the elephants carry genes for incredible tusks, and the “super-tuskers” generate highly significant income in Kenya.
But I believe simply demanding bans is not the way forward, as it ignores other, equally important realities: that trophy hunting apparently generates
three times more money in Enduimet, northern Tanzania, than photographic tourism does, that Tanzania uses hunting revenue to help support its internationally important protected area network, and that this revenue