South Africa’s wildlife model works, and it’s even better with the charismatic megafauna quota

Conservation debates often are lost in translation between ideology and evidence. Nowhere is that more apparent than in discussions about wildlife ownership, sustainable use, what constitutes conservation, and what should drive conservation in South Africa. South Africa has one of the most successful wildlife management models in the world, yet we seem increasingly willing to weaken it through legal paralysis and political discomfort rather than ecological reality. There is no greater highlight to this conundrum than the newly released quota for elephant, black rhino and leopard, and certain voices in society’s disdain for even suggesting it.

The South African wildlife model: Private ownership

To understand why the South African wildlife model works, it helps to understand another successful wildlife conservation model: the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. In the US, wildlife is a public trust resource – that is, owned by the people and managed by the state.

This model has been extraordinarily successful in bolstering species like white-tailed deer, elk and wild turkey back from near extinction in the early 20th century. However, the model is also heavily centralised, highly dependent on public funding and constrained by the assumption that native wildlife cannot be privately owned. South Africa chose a different path, one where value is prioritised, and the results speak for themselves.

From the late 1970s, and solidified by legislation such as the Game Theft Act of 1991, South Africa fundamentally changed how wildlife was treated legally. Wildlife on private land was no longer considered res nullius (belonging to no one), but instead became a legally protectable asset.

This shift transformed animals from pests into property, from liabilities into investments. Private landowners suddenly had a reason to conserve and improve habitat, tolerate predators and replace cattle and their fences with game and game fencing. The outcome: wildlife and their habitats flourished.

Over the past 50 years South Africa’s wildlife numbers have exploded. Estimates show wildlife populations growing from fewer than a million animals in the mid-1970s to well more than 16-20 million today, with the majority now living outside state-owned national parks on private and communal land.

Entire landscapes that would otherwise have been ploughed, grazed and/or developed have been kept, and in some circumstances enhanced, into functioning ecosystems. Private landowners, recognising the need for space for wildlife, joined hands, formed cooperatives, dropped fences and allowed more wildlife to flourish. All of your iconic plains game species, buffalo, and even high-risk species such as rhinos, have all rebounded because landowners had both legal authority and economic incentive to protect them.

A value chain driving wildlife conservation

This wildlife model was built off value, essentially driven by economics and the incentive to commodify wildlife. Opponents of this will argue that one should never reduce wildlife to monetary value. But that is exactly what wildlife in South Africa is today, from selective hunting to high-end luxury ecotourism reserves, to the national park system.

They all exist because someone is willing to pay money to interact with wildlife. Today, South Africa’s wildlife economy contributes tens of billions of rands annually, supports close to 100,000 jobs and underpins community and rural livelihoods where few alternatives exist. Wildlife pays for itself, and in doing so, pays for conservation.

For decades, South Africa issued conservative export quotas (operated within the CITES framework) specifically for African elephants, black rhinos and leopards, generating significantly more revenue and value for these specific species. These quotas were not arbitrary; they were conservative allocations to the global scientific communities’ information on country-specific population densities, which has been recognised as evidence that export (trade) was legal and sustainable.

At a standstill for valuing charismatic megafauna

Since 2021, however, South Africa has failed to issue new export quotas for these species. This wasn’t because populations collapsed or sustainability thresholds were exceeded. Instead, quotas became entangled in legal and procedural disputes, including challenges over consultation processes, administrative steps and ministerial authority. As these cases got mired in the courts, the state adopted a position of inaction: no quotas until litigation is resolved.

The consequences of those decisions have been profound. Without CITES export quotas, the pool of individuals (private landowners) who value that animal shrinks. In practical terms, this collapses desire and strips these animals of their economic value and the incentive of private landowners to conserve. For example, one of the reasons an elephant has no value on the live auction market right now, is that most available elephants are available for free – that is, they have zero value. Within a wildlife conservation model that is built on incentives, this matters.

Consider the leopard. On many ranches a leopard is not a welcome, charismatic icon. It is a predator that kills valuable game or livestock. With a quota in place, that same animal becomes a high-value conservation asset capable of mitigating livestock and game losses, and delivering revenues that increase monitoring and supporting anti-poaching. A win-win. Remove the quota, and the leopard reverts to being a pure cost on the private landowner. The biology of the animal didn’t change, but its value did, and probably will result in more leopards being removed from the greater population.

The same logic applies to elephants and black rhinos. These species require large landscapes, active management and constant security investment. Their survival on private and communal land depends on landowners having a reason to tolerate risk, expense and complexity. Value is that reason.

The quotas for all three individuals require a scientific basis, and they have it. The gazette highlights it. However, science cannot be the new stumbling block for inaction, where the never-ending quest for more science stops the action of issuance of quotas. That hurdle has been thrown in front of the 11 leopards on quota, but even at the most conservative of South African leopard population estimates of 2,185 animals, the quota is 0.05% of the population, and an order of magnitude lower than that if the estimates were closer to 23,400.

Evidence and conservation

This raises a very clear question: Why would anyone believe that removing legal value from wildlife on private land improves conservation outcomes? That is, blocking export quotas, when every major success in South Africa’s wildlife conservation model proves the opposite?

Private landowners, the people owning elephants, rhinos and leopards, and the custodians of that wildlife, according to South African law, are excited by the release of the export quota. It means that the wildlife that they own, and are stewards of, finally again has more value – value that will incentivise other landowners to possibly engage in having those species on their properties, further amplifying conservation of those species.

Unlike other countries all around the world, South Africa has avoided catastrophic declines of wildlife outside parks by ensuring landowners benefit directly from conservation. South Africa’s model is not perfect; no model is. But it is functional, resilient and empirically successful.

Undermining it through legal pushback because an ideology doesn’t fit someone’s mindset of what conservation must constitute, does not protect wildlife. It actually erodes the very incentives that brought wildlife to what it is today in South Africa. DM

Robert Kröger is a restoration ecologist originally from South Africa but now based in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the executive director and founder of The Origins Foundation.