Trophy hunting quotas without accountability: How different courts are exposing the same broken state

South Africa’s Constitution in section 24 is unambiguous: the environment must be protected for the benefit of present and future generations. That obligation falls on the state as trustee of the country’s biodiversity, not as its owner, and not as a broker for private interests. When the state sets trophy hunting quotas for leopard, elephant and black rhino, it does so not as a discretionary act of policy, but as a legal act of stewardship and as trustee of the populace. It must be rational. It must be transparent. It must be grounded in science, and constitutionally viable. On all three counts, South Africa’s quota regime has persistently failed.

To understand why that failure persists, it helps to look not just at the quotas themselves, but at the pattern of litigation accumulating around South Africa’s wildlife governance by the state. These distinct legal proceedings in different courts, brought by different parties, for different and divergent reasons, are each, in their own way, forcing the same question: does the state make decisions about publicly owned biodiversity lawfully, transparently, and with proper scientific foundation? The answer that emerges across all three is troublingly consistent.

Three cases, one failure

The Lion Bone Case: SAPA v Minister (Case Number 146251/2024, Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, filed December 2024)

In 2024, the South African Predator Association and 10 individual lion breeders filed an application in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, seeking to compel the minister of forestry, fisheries and the environment to establish and declare an annual CITES export quota for lion bones and derivatives for 2024 and 2025. No lion bone quota has been set since 2019, when Judge Jody Kollapen of the same court declared the 2017 and 2018 quotas unlawful and constitutionally invalid, finding that the department had disregarded the welfare of captive lions in setting them. The department has confirmed it will oppose the current application and amicus applications were also submitted. The case is at an early stage, with no judgment reported.

This case is specifically about lion bones from captive breeding operations, a commercially driven, captive-species trade that is distinct from wild trophy hunting quotas for leopard, elephant and rhino. This is a welfare matter and less to do with conservation but falls under biodiversity legislation. The applicants are captive-lion breeders with stockpiles of lion bones from dead and hunted animals that they cannot sell. Their grievance is economic. But what their case exposes is a structural problem in governance: a state that set quotas for years without lawful process, that was found by a court to have done so unlawfully, and that has since responded not with reformed methodology but with inaction, until a different political leadership arrived and the pressure to issue new quotas resumed.

The wellbeing challenge: SA Hunters v Parliament (Constitutional Court, CCT 270/24, filed July 2024 set down for argument at the Constitutional Court on 26 May 2026)

In July 2024, the South African Hunters and Game Conservation Association filed an application in the Constitutional Court under case number CCT 270/24, challenging the constitutionality of specific provisions of the National Environmental Management Laws Amendment Act of 2022. Their argument is procedural: that Parliament introduced material amendments to the Biodiversity Act, including a new definition of animal “wellbeing” and expanded ministerial powers to prohibit activities that may negatively impact animal wellbeing, without adequate public involvement, in breach of the Constitution. They seek those provisions declared invalid and struck from the Act since their impact on trophy and general hunting will be prohibitive.

The hunting sector’s concern here runs in the opposite direction from the lion bone case: they are not seeking to reopen a closed quota; they are seeking to remove legal provisions that could constrain their practices, and the quotas on charismatic species were at the time suspended due to yet another matter in the Western Cape High Court. But their constitutional argument is structurally identical to that of the lion breeders: the state made consequential changes to biodiversity law without the proper public participation that the Constitution requires. In both cases, the complaint is that decisions affecting the “wildlife economy” were taken behind closed doors, without the deliberation that the law demands.

The quota accountability question: Wild trophy species (pending and unresolved)

The third strand relates to wild species of leopard, black rhino and elephant. In 2022, the Humane Society International – Africa Trust and Others v Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment case (Western Cape High Court, Case No. 6939/2022) was granted an interim interdict to suspend the quotas that were set, but the final interdict was not granted principally on mootness as the matter had been delayed to run out the allocation period of the set quotas. This effectively was engineered by the state to avoid an adverse outcome in court.

The current advertised quotas have not yet resulted in a case with a case number, but has been broadly challenged since publication. It is the broader, unresolved legal question that sits beneath Minister Willie Aucamp’s February 2026 publication of fresh draft quotas for wild leopard, elephant and black rhino: on what scientific basis, under what decision-making process and against what legal standard are these quotas set? That question was crystallised but never definitively answered during earlier litigation around the lion bone process and the 2022 attempt to set quotas. Civil society organisations entered those proceedings precisely to press it. It has never been put to a court in relation to wild trophy species specifically, and it remains unanswered.

The publication of fresh quotas for leopard, elephant and rhino does not resolve this question. It intensifies it. By issuing new quotas before the legal standard for doing so has been judicially clarified, the department perpetuates a cycle: act first, defend if challenged and delay court matters to avoid scrutiny, and allow the weight of established practice to substitute for legal rigour. In the meantime, government officials driving this process have taken to the media to justify and promote their practice despite these disputes and concerns.

What the three cases share

Set out individually, these three legal strands appear to be about different things: lion bones, animal wellbeing definitions and wild trophy hunting quotas. They involve different applicants; captive breeders, the hunting sector and conservation civil society, who hold sharply different views on wildlife use. They arise from different statutory provisions and proceed in different courts, repeatedly.

Yet all three converge on the same institutional failure. In each case, the state made decisions of significant consequence to South Africa’s biodiversity; setting export quotas, amending foundational legislation and issuing fresh hunting allocations, without meeting the standards the Constitution and environmental law require. The decisions were made without adequate scientific transparency, without meaningful public participation and without the kind of reasoned, documented process that would survive legal scrutiny. And in each case, when that failure was challenged or questioned, the response was not to reform the process but to press on: issue new quotas, promulgate the amendments, move forward as though the questions had been answered.

This is not a coincidence. It is a governance pattern. The state has normalised making extractive decisions about public trust assets, biodiversity that belongs to all South Africans, through opaque, unaccountable processes. And it has learnt that the path of least resistance is institutional inertia: keep the system running, protecting privilege and patronage, and the burden of challenge falls on those who must stop it.

Why the convergence matters

The political significance of this convergence should not be lost. The hunting sector and conservation civil society are not natural allies. The captive lion breeders and the leopard conservation community occupy opposite ends of the wildlife use debate. Yet both are, from entirely different directions, being driven to court to demand from the state what it should provide as a matter of course: transparent, lawful and accountable decision-making.

That breadth of challenge cannot be dismissed as ideological opposition to any particular wildlife use. When an industry’s own primary stakeholders – hunters, breeders and ranchers – are litigating because the state cannot administer its own regulatory system lawfully, the problem is not the critics. The problem is the state.

There is also a specific irony in the CCT 270/24 matter that deserves attention. The South African Hunters and Game Conservation Association is arguing in the Constitutional Court that Parliament introduced new animal wellbeing provisions into the Biodiversity Act without adequate public participation. At the same time, the same state whose legislative process they are challenging is issuing wild trophy hunting quotas for leopard, elephant and rhino without adequate scientific accountability or public transparency. Both the legislation and the quotas suffer from the same deficit: decisions of profound consequence made without the deliberation and accountability the Constitution demands. The hunting sector is right to demand one and wrong to resist the other. But the underlying constitutional argument is the same in both.

What the law actually requires

South Africa’s environmental governance framework is not vague. Section 24 of the Constitution guarantees the right to an environment protected for present and future generations. The National Environmental Management Act (Nema) embeds the precautionary principle: where there is uncertainty, decision-makers must err on the side of caution. The Biodiversity Act and its TOPS regulations require scientific rigour, transparency and genuine sustainability assessment for the listed species. These are not aspirational standards. They are binding legal obligations.

The courts have been consistent. The Supreme Court of Appeal held in 2014 that the Constitution demands a more considerate attitude towards animals and the environment. The Constitutional Court confirmed in 2016 that recognising the intrinsic value of animals as individuals is integral to the protection of human dignity itself. Kollapen’s 2019 high court judgment established that welfare considerations cannot be excluded from quota-setting decisions. These are not marginal findings. Animal welfare consideration in advocacy for wildlife was again affirmed in 2024 in the Constitutional Court in Botha v Smuts and Another (40/2022). These are jurisprudential anchors that should be shaping every wildlife management and quota decision, and manifestly are not.

Against these standards, the current quota regime for wild trophy species fails on three distinct grounds.

On rationality: the scientific basis for quotas, particularly for leopard, is deeply contested. Population estimates are patchy. Methodologies are inconsistent. Regional dynamics are poorly understood. Mortality from illegal killing, road accidents, livestock depredation and cultural harvest is not meaningfully incorporated, nor are ethical and social impacts of harvests on the species. Under these conditions, setting numerical harvest quotas is not evidence-based management. It is administrative guesswork wearing the language of science.

On legality: decisions taken without adequate data, without transparency and without genuine precautionary analysis may fail the rationality review required under administrative law. More fundamentally, they may breach the precautionary obligations imposed by Nema, and court edicts for welfare considerations, rendering them not merely poor policy, but unconstitutional.

On equity: the beneficiaries of these quotas are a narrow subset of private landowners and international clients with the means to participate in a high-end extractive industry. The broader South African public, in whose name, and on whose constitutional behalf, these decisions are made, has limited visibility, limited input and limited benefit. The proceeds are largely exported. The ecological risk is borne collectively.

The public trust doctrine and its betrayal

Underlying all three legal strands is a constitutional principle that is clearly established yet persistently violated in practice: South Africa’s biodiversity is a public trust asset. The state does not own wildlife. It holds it in trust for all South Africans, present and future. Its role is not to allocate this resource at will, in response to lobbying by well-resourced industry groups (even through costly and well-funded litigation), or through processes shielded from public scrutiny. Its role is to steward it responsibly, lawfully and in the genuine public interest.

Each of the three proceedings described above represents a different way in which that fiduciary obligation has been breached. The lion bone case: quotas set without welfare consideration, found unlawful, yet the pressure to set new ones without reformed methodology persists. The CCT 270/24 case: legislation amending the Biodiversity Act enacted without the public participation that democratic trusteeship demands. The wild quota question: harvest allocations for iconic, imperilled species issued without a publicly defensible scientific record, year after year, as though practice alone confers legitimacy.

The historical resonance here cannot be ignored. South Africa has lived through resource allocation systems in which natural assets were extracted for the benefit of elites and foreign interests, often under a veneer of legality, but without meaningful public accountability. The question that now arises is whether we are witnessing a modern iteration of that model: one in which biodiversity, despite its constitutional status as a public trust asset, is being parcelled out to those with access, influence and capital, while the legal architecture meant to prevent exactly this is quietly circumvented.

What accountability actually looks like

This is not an argument against all forms of sustainable wildlife use. It is an argument for a system that means what it says. Across the captive lion trade, the biodiversity legislation process and wild trophy hunting quota-setting, the same minimum standards apply. Decisions must be scientifically defensible, publicly transparent, legally founded, ethically considered and open to genuine participation. These are not extraordinary demands. They are what the Constitution already requires.

If South Africa is to maintain a quota regime for iconic and protected wild species, it must be able to answer four questions clearly, publicly, and before quotas are issued, not after legal challenge forces the matter:

What level of scientific certainty is required before a quota can lawfully be set, and is that threshold currently being met?

• How is the precautionary principle being applied in practice, and where is the evidence that uncertainty triggers caution rather than business as usual?;
• What does it mean, concretely, for the state to act as trustee of biodiversity and who is holding it to that obligation?; and
• How are ethical and welfare considerations, which the courts have explicitly recognised as constitutionally relevant since at least 2016, and which Judge Kollapen confirmed cannot be excluded from quota decisions, incorporated into the process?

Until these questions are answered transparently and defended in public, the legitimacy of the quota system will remain in doubt, and the litigation will continue to come, from all directions.

The cost of institutional inertia

South Africa does not lack the legal tools to govern this space properly. The Constitution, Nema, the Biodiversity Act, a body of jurisprudence from its highest courts and an accumulating record of litigation that has consistently found state wildlife decisions wanting. What is absent is the political will to apply it; to hold the system to its own standards even when doing so constrains powerful and entrenched interests, and to treat a court’s finding of unlawfulness as a mandate for genuine reform rather than a temporary obstacle to route around.

The publication of fresh leopard, elephant and rhino quotas by Aucamp in the absence of resolved legal questions does not settle those questions. It adds another layer to the same pattern. Each new quota issued without meeting the constitutional standard is not simply a policy choice, it is a decision that treats a public trust asset as a private commodity, and bets that the cost of challenge will fall on those who raise it rather than those who make it.

The accumulation of litigation from opposing stakeholders – captive breeders, hunters and conservation organisations alike – is not a sign that the system is working as intended. It is a sign that the system has substituted the threat of legal challenge for the practice of lawful governance. Courts are not an adequate replacement for accountability. They are its last resort.

Is it not time that the courts apply personal cost orders against officials and politicians who continue to abuse governance in this manner?

South Africa’s natural heritage, and the generations who will inherit it, deserve the first resort: a state that governs its biodiversity as the Constitution requires, not one that waits to be sued into compliance. DM

Dr Bool Smuts is the founder and general manager of the Landmark Foundation, a conservation NGO specialising in human-wildlife coexistence and conflict, and focused on leopard conservation. He is a leopard researcher and is a research affiliate at the University of the Western Cape. He specialises in policy, administrative and governance advocacy of leopard populations.