New minister, old thinking: Willie Aucamp’s first conservation signal points in the wrong direction

South Africa’s new minister of forestry, fisheries and the environment, Willie Aucamp, has provided his first substantive indication of how he understands wildlife conservation. It does not appear in a policy address or strategic rethink, but in a February 2026 Government Gazette proposing export quotas for elephant, black rhinoceros and leopard hunting trophies for the 2026 and 2027 calendar years.

The signal is unmistakable – and concerning.

At a time of accelerating biodiversity loss, intensifying climate pressures and evolving constitutional obligations around animal wellbeing, the minister’s approach reflects not a reassessment of conservation policy, but a recommitment to a familiar and increasingly contested paradigm: that lethal, market-driven use of wildlife remains an appropriate and defensible conservation tool.

This is not simply a technical matter of quotas. It is an expression of an outdated conservation ideology.

Wildlife as administrable surplus

The Gazette is detailed, structured and numerically precise. Three hundred elephant tusks annually, equivalent to 150 elephants. Twelve black rhinos. Eleven leopards, distributed across designated hunting zones. The language is clinical, managerial and procedural.

What emerges from this framing is a conception of wildlife as administrable surplus: animals to be counted, allocated, “off-taken” and exported within a regulated system. The underlying assumption is that populations can be reduced to numbers without loss of meaning – that individuals are interchangeable units within a biological ledger.

This approach reflects a long-standing tradition in utilitarian wildlife management. What it fails to engage with is a substantial body of ecological and behavioural research demonstrating that, for socially complex and long-lived species, the selective removal of particular individuals can have consequences far beyond what population-level metrics capture.

Elephants are a case in point. The Gazette frames them primarily as a population management challenge, citing growth rates and overall abundance. What is absent is any engagement with the well-documented role of older bulls in maintaining social order, transmitting ecological knowledge, and moderating behaviour among younger males. Their selective removal – precisely because they carry the most desirable tusks – is not ecologically beneficial or even neutral.

Conservation policy that focuses narrowly on population size while ignoring social structure risks undermining the very resilience it claims to protect.

Rhino quotas and the limits of market logic

The same analytical limitations are evident in the treatment of black rhinoceros quotas. Although population data on a critically endangered listed species would justify a zero figure, the minister exercises his discretion to increase the quota beyond the most conservative baseline. The rationale offered is familiar: the removal of so-called “surplus” males, coupled with the incentive effects of trophy hunting revenue, is assumed to promote long-term conservation.

This assumption – that attaching high market value to individual animals necessarily produces positive conservation outcomes – has long been debated. For slow-breeding, socially structured species under intense external pressure, the evidence remains equivocal at best.

Black rhinos do not reproduce quickly, do not disperse easily and do not function as isolated individuals within a population. Removing breeding-capable males can disrupt social dynamics and reduce reproductive success, particularly in smaller or fragmented populations. These risks are not theoretical; they are documented within conservation science.

What is notably absent from the Gazette is a transparent engagement with these uncertainties, or a clear explanation of why the precautionary principle – central to environmental governance – does not apply.

Leopards and the performance of adaptive management

Leopards receive the most elaborate justification. Monitoring data, modelling and zonal management frameworks are invoked to support continued off-take. On paper, this resembles adaptive management. In practice, it functions as a prior commitment to hunting, with science used to regulate scale rather than to interrogate necessity.

The SANBI-Panthera strategy (which has not yet been made public but cited by the Gazette) makes it clear that South Africa does not have reliable national population data for leopards.

Published estimates range wildly from 2,185 to 23,400 animals, a spread that reflects deep uncertainty rather than confidence in population size or trends. Existing monitoring is limited to selected sites and provinces and is explicitly acknowledged as not representative of the national population, with some regions showing possible declines and others lacking data altogether. Even the reported average growth rate masks strong regional variation and extremely low densities in parts of the country.

In these circumstances, setting national export quotas for a species listed as “vulnerable” is not evidence-led conservation, but decision-making in the absence of reliable baseline data. There ought to be a serious consideration of whether leopard trophy hunting should continue at all. Adaptive management requires a genuine willingness to stop or reverse activities when evidence (or lack thereof) warrants it. That willingness is not evident here.

Conservation law has moved on – policy has not

Perhaps the most consequential omission in the minister’s approach relates to the legal framework under which these decisions are taken.

Since 2023, South African biodiversity law has explicitly required the consideration of animal wellbeing in conservation and sustainable use decisions. This shift has been reinforced by Constitutional Court jurisprudence recognising that conservation and welfare are not competing values, but interconnected ones.

Yet animal wellbeing is functionally absent from the Gazette’s reasoning.

There is no engagement with the physiological stress, social disruption or trauma associated with trophy hunting. No acknowledgement of the cognitive complexity of the species involved. No indication that the killing of animals for recreation raises ethical or legal questions beyond population sustainability.

This is not a minor procedural oversight. It represents a narrowing of the decision-making lens at precisely the moment when the law demands its expansion.

Sustainable use and its unresolved contradictions

For decades, “sustainable use” has been the dominant policy paradigm in South African wildlife governance. Its central claim – that limited lethal use produces net conservation benefits – has always been contested. Today, that claim is increasingly difficult to sustain.

Most trophy hunting in South Africa takes place on private land. Economic benefits accrue unevenly, often bypassing local communities altogether. Claims of widespread rural upliftment remain poorly evidenced and weakly audited.

Yet the policy response remains unchanged. Wildlife is still expected to justify its existence through commodification and extraction.

In the context of a biodiversity and climate emergency, this is a profoundly limited vision. It assumes that conservation can be achieved through the administration of violence, rather than through systemic change in how human societies coexist with non-human life.

A signal worth taking seriously

Defenders of the status quo will argue that the minister is merely following established frameworks, respecting international processes and deferring to scientific authorities. But leadership is not defined by the mechanical application of inherited systems. It is defined by the willingness to interrogate their assumptions.

Aucamp’s first major conservation intervention shows little evidence of such interrogation. There is no indication that alternative, non-lethal conservation models were seriously considered. No engagement with emerging conservation approaches centred on coexistence, longevity protection or ecological restoration. No acknowledgement that the policy tools of the past may be ill-suited to the crises of the present.

Instead, the Gazette signals comfort with a worldview in which wildlife remains a consumable asset, governed primarily through quotas and markets.

If this document is an accurate reflection of Willie Aucamp’s conservation thinking, then the direction of travel is clear. South Africa is not moving towards a more precautionary, ethically grounded or forward-looking conservation paradigm. It is entrenching an old one – at precisely the moment when the cost of error has never been higher.

That should concern anyone who understands environmental governance as a public trust owed to the future, not a mechanism for preserving outdated policy assumptions. DM

Dr Adam Cruise is an investigative environmental journalist, travel writer and academic. He has contributed to a number of international publications, including National Geographic and The Guardian, covering diverse topics from the plight of elephants, rhinos and lions in Africa to coral reef rejuvenation in Indonesia. Cruise is a doctor of philosophy, specialising in animal and environmental ethics, and is the editor of the online Journal of African Elephants.