Trophy Hunting: Should We Kill Animals to Save Them?

Trophy hunting fees help fund conservation. Critics say the benefits are
exaggerated and that killing big game animals is wrong.
ByMichael Paterniti
Photographs byDavid Chancellor
40 min read
This story was originally published in the October 2017 issue of National
Geographic magazine. The people in this story agreed to be photographed on
condition that their names be withheld.
Elephants kept appearing in wrinkled herds, loitering near the dusty
pans, in search of water. With the September temperature pushing a hundred
degrees at midday, the pachyderms were moving at the edge of the Kalahari
Desert in Namibia in a community-run wildlife reserve, or conservancy, called
Nyae Nyae, where roughly 2,800 San people live today in unyielding conditions.
The elephants left snapped branches and warm scat in their wake. When they
caught our scent, our sweat mixing with the sun-scorched grasses, they broke
into a trumpeting jog and were gone.
Later, more materialized on the horizon, in the shade of the camel thorn trees,
shades themselves. For such enormous creatures, they were nearly invisible
but to the sharpest eyes. And those eyes belonged now to Dam, a short,
compact man, a tracker from the local San people who stood in the back of the
Land Cruiser.
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“Oliphant!” he cried, leaning hard over the right side of the vehicle, picking out
tracks in the sand. He tapped on the door, and we came to a whiplashing halt.
Dam jumped down, checking a footprint, its edges corrugated and etched
inside with smaller bubbles. He motioned, and Felix Marnewecke, the
professional hunter and guide on this expedition, popped out of the driver’s
side door. Strapping, ruddy, and blond, in his 40s, he seemed straight from
central casting, wearing a cloth hat and shorts. He stood over the impression
for a moment, a quizzical expression on his face, and nodded his head in
agreement. If Nyae Nyae’s desert scrub is home to San families, it is also home
to some of the last, biggest wild elephants in the world. This footprint was
proof.
The rest of us unloaded, followed by the tracker they only ever called the Old
Man, another tracker in training, and one more San, who was acting as a
“game guard” to make sure the hunt was conducted in accordance with the
conservancy’s rules and quotas. Last to emerge in that swelter was the client
himself, an American businessman, who opened the passenger door and
reached up to the rack for his gun, a 12-pound, bespoke .470 Nitro Express
double rifle. These guns, costing up to $200,000, are favored for big-game
trophy hunting because of their stopping power, and this is what he was here
for, of course—a trophy. Two of them, actually. An avid hunter whose
adventures had led him to Central Asia to shoot Marco Polo sheep at 15,000
feet and to Africa to shoot a leopard, he was now back in Africa for elephants.
According to Marnewecke, the going rate for a 14-day, single elephant hunt is
about $80,000. The trophy hunt limit of five elephants a year in Nyae Nyae
represents real money to the San. A portion of the fee is paid directly to
community members and to a fund for conservation projects to protect the
area’s wildlife. As for the elephant trophies themselves, the client would take
the tusks home, while the meat would all go to the San.
Marnewecke and his client—anonymous at his request, given the controversial
nature of elephant hunts—hoisted their rifles over their shoulders and fell in
behind Dam, who took off at the speed of a jackrabbit. Marnewecke turned to
me and said, as I stumbled to keep up, “I swear, there’s no better tracker in
Africa. If it takes 30 miles, he never gives up.”
From Charles Darwin and John James Audubon to Theodore Roosevelt and
Ernest Hemingway, the most enlightened hunters have long viewed themselves
as naturalists and conservationists, committed to sustainability among animal
populations and the preservation of wild places where they stalk game. The
linkage has become inextricable. Revenues of hundreds of millions in federal
excise taxes levied on hunters go directly to wildlife management and related
activities each year in the U.S. alone. And anyone who keeps a freezer full of
venison is likely to tell you that the act of killing your own dinner in the wild is
more humane than buying the plastic-wrapped meat of industrially raised
livestock.
But trophy hunting today, especially of the so-called big five in Africa (elephant,
lion, leopard, rhino, and Cape buffalo), brings with it a larger set of moral and
financial questions. The sport killing of animals beleaguered in the wild can
arouse fierce opposition, even more so if the animal—Cecil the Lion, for
example—is named. Biologists estimated total losses of large mammals in
protected areas on the continent at up to 60 percent between 1970 and 2005.
As big game populations dwindle further under pressure from human
encroachment, shifting climate norms, and widespread criminal poaching, there
are hunters—the American client in Nyae Nyae, for one—who argue that a
thoughtfully regulated and expensive hunt for bull elephants in their waning
days makes a sustainable way to protect both species and habitat.
On we went, following the footprints. Every so often Dam would retrace his
steps, circling in the dust, until we slowed to a more careful crawl. Coming over
a knoll, we saw them at last, Loxodonta africana—what seemed to be three
bulls, munching on leaves and grass. Marnewecke reached for his binoculars,
the American client took his rifle in hand. Everything narrowed to a nervous
point. African elephants live to be 60 or 70, and the biggest tuskers usually are
older than 45. Tusks are measured by weight, and anything estimated to be
over 50 pounds is considered a “shooter” by hunters. The client was looking for
something in the 70-plus-pound range, but in the end these elephants’ tusks
were too small. Marnewecke made his determination, turned on his heel, and
began walking back to the Land Cruiser. No one seemed disappointed exactly:
It was almost enough to have stood in the suburbs of such magnificent
creatures.
“The shooting is the last 5 percent of an elephant hunt,” Marnewecke said. “I
feel quite shitty when an elephant dies, but those elephants pay for the
conservation of the other 2,500 that move through here. Trophy hunting is the
best economic model we have in Africa right now.” It was an argument I’d soon
hear other hunters make and a host of activists and biologists tear apart. “In
the end it may save this place—and the elephants too.”
Standing in the heat and dust of the Kalahari that bright day, elephants at our
back, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is that really how this works? Can you really
kill five elephants to save 2,500? Or start from the other side: Why kill one at
all?
Seen from the air Africa can appear as an illusion, rich velds and dramatic
rifts, wide deserts and thundering rivers, these seemingly vast stretches of
unfettered, unpopulated wild ostensibly forgotten by time and people. At a
glance it could be a repository for all our ideas about wilderness at its wildest.
And yet today no patch here goes unclaimed, whether it’s marked, monetized,
or fought over. The animals that roam the land have become commodified, part
of a new consumerism, marketed and sold, their brands pitted against each
other, their continued existence now a question of human demand, whim, and
calculation. Wild game is the continent’s version of crude oil—and it too will run
out someday.
Trophy hunting—the killing of big game for a set of horns or tusks, a skin, or a
taxidermied body—has burgeoned into a billion-dollar, profit-driven industry,
overseen in some cases by corrupt governments. Many countries in sub-
Saharan Africa allow trophy hunting, with varying degrees of transparency and
control, establishing yearly quotas meant to reflect the status of species and
creating exclusions for highly vulnerable populations. South Africa, for instance,
no longer allows hunting of leopards. Kenya has banned trophy hunting outright
since 1977, and in Botswana, a comparatively wildlife-rich country, a
temporary ban in government-controlled hunting areas went into effect in
2014.
Africa once seemed to have “an inexhaustible supply of nature,” says American
lion biologist Craig Packer, who has lived and worked on the continent for more
than 40 years. But, he says, from 30,000 feet you would see that the habitats
are shrinking. “Lions really are becoming more of an endangered species, and
hunters should really not shoot these animals for sport unless they can provide
positive evidence that they’re having a salutary effect on lion conservation.”
Biologists make the same argument against the hunting of other big game,
including elephants, whose numbers across the continent have fallen sharply in
recent years. Demand for rhino horn, elephant ivory, and lion bones, especially
in Asia, has ignited a scourge of poaching. But the issue remains complicated,
with some place-specific animal populations, such as the elephants of Nyae
Nyae, thriving where there’s trophy hunting.
“If you get rid of those conservancies in Namibia,” Packer says, “you’d probably
get rid of all the wildlife and be left with cattle.” He says he and other biologists
“are concerned with populations, and that’s an abstraction. That’s where the
real conflict with the animal-rights organizations comes, because in their mind,
Fifi must never die. That’s where the biologists can sound pretty heartless and
cold.” For Packer, saving an individual animal misses the point; what’s crucial is
protecting genetically viable populations as a whole. “I’m not against hunting.
There’s got to be a middle ground,” he says. In his estimation, though, that
middle ground isn’t exactly in the middle: He believes that trophy hunting is of
marginal value as a large-scale conservation tool in Africa.
On the other hand, hunters and government officials often cite a hotly
contested estimate by the Safari Club International Foundation, a pro-hunting
group with the stated goal of promoting conservation and education, that the
roughly 18,000 trophy hunters who come to southern and eastern Africa each
year contribute $436 million to the region’s GDP. The Humane Society
International says the amount for that region is at most $132 million, or .03
percent of GDP.

The Price on Their HeadsThe cost of trophy hunts in Africa varies widely by
country and animal. In addition to an outfitter’s daily rate...Read More
Monica Serrano, NGM Staff; Meg Roosevelt-Peter A. Lindsey, Vernon Booth, and
others, PLOS ONE, 2012
In a 2013 op-ed in the New York Times countering the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service’s proposal to list lions as a threatened species, making it more difficult
for Americans to hunt them, the Tanzanian wildlife director, Alexander
Songorwa, stated that hunters on 21-day lion safaris paid government fees of
up to $10,000 and pumped $75 million into the economy from 2008 to 2011.
Packer says the 120,000 square miles of hunting areas in Tanzania need $600
million in investment every year, “and you’re not going to get that shooting
lions for $10,000.”
For some, the hunting-antihunting debate boils down to Western
environmentalists trying to dictate their agenda to Africa—a form of
neocolonialism, as Marnewecke puts it. “Who gives anybody the right, sitting in
another continent, to preach to us how we should manage our wildlife?”
Hunters make the point that with all the outfitters paying to operate in
conservancies and with trophy hunters paying fees for the game they shoot,
hunting indeed has made significant financial contributions to the continent,
and to habitat protection, while all that antihunting forces have done is make
noise.
As for what happens to the hunters’ fees, that is notoriously hard to pin down—
and impossible in kleptocracies. And anyway, Packer says, when it comes to
funding lion conservation, “it’s such an underwhelming amount generated by
sport hunting, it’s no wonder that despite years of lion hunting being allowed in
these countries, the lion population has plummeted.” The International Union
for Conservation of Nature, which monitors animal populations, reports that the
number of lions in five populations in Tanzania fell by two-thirds from 1993 to
2014.
Yet hunters say they’ve helped fund everything from health clinics to schools to
water wells to boots-on-the-ground assistance against poachers, all while
leaving a lighter footprint on the land than the often cited alternative to killing
game: wildlife-watching in the form of photographic safaris. The UN World
Tourism Organization estimated that 35.4 million international tourists visited
sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 and spent $24.5 billion. Operations designed to
attract a higher-end clientele that craves a warm shower, big meal, and cool
drink at the end of the day require infrastructure and equipment, maybe
including a fleet of vehicles.
There’s a danger, some hunters argue, that too many tourists will spoil the very
experience they’re seeking. “The Serengeti is amazing,” says Natasha Illum-
Berg, a Swedish-born professional buffalo hunter based in Tanzania, who, like
Marnewecke, leads clients into the bush for “hunting experiences” and
trophies. “The Ngorongoro Crater is a miracle. All these national parks that are
filled with minibus after minibus of photographic tourists—it’s fantastic,” she
says, noting that the minibuses also put pressure on those iconic wildlands.
“But what about the other areas?” she says. “How many people have been to
the area I work in, that’s 500 square miles? This year maybe 20 people.”
Without trophy hunting, Illum-Berg argues, there would be no antipoaching
there, no management. “I keep on saying: Give me a better idea than hunting
as long as it’s sustainable.” She adds, “The big question in the end is, ‘Who’s
going to pay for the party?’ ”
The earliest evidence of an elephant having been killed by human hands
dates back to a blue-mud swamp in Siberia nearly 14,000 years ago. The spine
of a woolly mammoth found at the confluence of the Ob and Irtysh Rivers
seems to have been penetrated by a man-made weapon that left flake traces
of stone inside one of the vertebrae. The tusks, we might imagine, weren’t
displayed in a trophy room back at the hunter’s cave.
But hunting is more than a quid pro quo for sustenance. At some moment in
our dawning consciousness, hunting became equated with status, virility, and
power. Assyrian carvings from 650 B.C. depict lions being released from cages
for slaughter by a chariot-riding king. The Maasai have long killed lions as a rite
of passage.
With the advent of better weaponry, hunting also evolved as a sport, one with
class stratifications, micro-cultures, and occasional egregious examples of
waste. In records from 1760 for Snyder County, Pennsylvania, two hunters shot
more than a thousand animals, including black bears, mountain lions, bobcats,
wolves, foxes, bison, elk, deer, wolverines, and thousands more smaller
creatures, dressing some of the animals and throwing most of the carcasses
into a bonfire.
Another American hired a cameraman to record his 2016 leopard hunt in
Namibia.
Theologians were among the first to criticize such wasteful butchery. By the
late 1700s an anonymous British hunter had penned The Sportsman’s
Companion, or An Essay on Shooting, advocating fair chase and setting forth
“directions to gentlemen” in the field and forest, including limiting the number
of game animals killed. Those rules were expanded and refined during the next
century. In 1887 Teddy Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club, a
group of influential American hunters who were worried about preserving
swaths of their country’s wilderness and became instrumental in building the
U.S. National Park System.
In 1934 at the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, some white hunters established
the East African Professional Hunters’ Association. It promulgated a kind of
honor code and pushed for laws and regulations, including a ban on shooting
nearly all female animals and on shooting animals at water holes or near
vehicles. While the members worked to conserve hunting grounds, they also
eliminated huge amounts of game from the continent. Today technology has
taken a quantum leap forward, with drones, video of the hunt, and high-
powered rifles equipped with laser range finders.
Meanwhile “kill shots”—images of hunters posed with their dead quarry—have
created viral sensations and stirred animal-rights activists and the general
public to fulsome disgust. People were inflamed when Minneapolis dentist
Walter Palmer hunted and killed Cecil, the popular lion from Zimbabwe, in June
2015. Controversy resurfaced in July 2017 when Cecil’s son Xanda was shot on
a legal trophy hunt.
With more than half the planet’s population living in cities, our relationship with
the wild has become increasingly divorced from our everyday reality. We’re now
less a part of that wild world from rain forest to veld than consumers of it. Yet if
we eat meat or wear and use leather products, we too are hunters of a sort.
Within the hunting community our hurry-up, have-it-all mentality—our
ceaseless consumptive entitlement—has begun to manifest itself in troubling
ways. Eschewing the time and cost of an African trophy hunt involving fair
chase, some hunters have turned to canned hunting—the killing of often
habituated animals in confined areas—baited hunting, herding animals with
helicopters, or the shooting of their prey from the back of Land Cruisers. In
Tanzania there have been reports of foreign hunters gunning down animals,
including pregnant females, with AK-47s. In a hunting area called Loliondo that
the government has leased long term to officials from the United Arab
Emirates, local Maasai have reported transport jets leaving with game of all
variety, dead and alive. Social scientists writing recently in the journal Biology
Letters describe a kill-and-tell generation of hunters exhibiting “show-off
behavior” by propagating their own kill shots on social media, sometimes in
poses that undermine the dignity of the animal whose life they’ve just taken.
A hunter carries the pelt of a mountain lion he shot this year in southern Utah.
Winter is prime hunting season because the cats are easier to track on snowy
ground. Each season the state sets a hunt quota, a number determined in part
by how many livestock lions killed the year before. In 2016 they...Read More
Radio-collared dogs tracked this mountain lion and chased it up a tree. Using
dogs allows the hunter to get a clean shot, but opponents say it’s unethical
because a treed cat has no means of escape. Several states have banned
hound hunting...Read More
A state conservation office will inspect and tag this mountain lion before the
hunter takes home the head and skin. Hunters consider stalking a mountain
lion one of North America’s great challenges—it can entail hiking miles in bitter
cold up st...Read More
In South Africa, which has some 2,000 wild lions, canned lion hunting has
grown into a more than $100 million industry, with in excess of 200 facilities
raising about 6,000 of the big cats for easy killing. According to Ian Michler, a
South African safari operator and photographer who investigated the canned
lion industry for the 2015 documentary Blood Lions, the animals are caged and
bred sometimes under terrible conditions. The young are taken from their
mothers and brought to petting zoos. When male lions grow into adulthood,
many are shot and killed for “hunting” fees that are much lower than the cost
for a wild lion on a standard 21-day hunt ($5,000 to $15,000, versus $50,000
and up). And the trophy is virtually guaranteed. “It’s appalling,” Michler says.
“It’s perverse behavior.”
Canned hunting has another deleterious effect. While hunters happily take the
pelt and head, and the claws and teeth once were sold in the tourist shops of
Nairobi and Zanzibar, today the bones are most in demand—shipped to Asia
either to produce traditional medicines or to be repackaged as “tiger bone
wine,” made from crushed bones and Chinese herbs and marketed to the upper
class as a health tonic and aphrodisiac. This year South Africa authorized the
export of up to 800 lion skeletons, and the worry among biologists,
conservation groups, and animal-rights activists is that by legitimizing and
allowing the trade, the country is spurring more demand for lion bones and
more killing of the continent’s remaining 20,000 or so wild lions.
As it turns out, some of the most vocal critics of these hunting practices are
hunters themselves.
“If we are not able to convince the majority of people that hunting is morally in
order,” says Kai-Uwe Denker, a renowned professional hunter in Namibia,
“there is no future for us.” In the face of bad publicity and bad behavior, some
hunters have fallen back on an economic argument—that their presence in
Africa provides jobs, that it’s a viable strategy for poverty alleviation. But
Denker disagrees. “I see a very big danger in promoting only the financial side.
Livelihoods, income generation, job creation—this is an additional thing. You
cannot justify immoral things with money.”
When I met Denker in a valley in the Erongo Mountains, where he lives 25 miles
off the grid in a house he built, he lamented the intrusion of humans on the
African landscape. According to him, hunting, when done properly, brings you
into “a conversation with your own death.” As we spoke in the shaded portico,
the sun flashed off a blanched elephant skull set nearby, and the wind stirred
the acacia, blowing away a certain noon deadness that often grips the desert.
Time seemed to bend to the prehistoric. Tall and slender, wearing a torn shirt
and short shorts, Denker is legendary for walking up to 40 miles in a day of
hunting. He also abides by a strict set of principles that includes hunting game,
such as elephant and kudu, that have unfenced free range in historic habitat
and shooting only older nonreproductive animals without fixating on large
trophies.
“Many of the antihunters, they criticize hunting as perverted,” Denker said.
“Hunting as such is not perverted. It’s in our genes. If hunting is immoral,” he
continued, “I will stop immediately. But it will be the end of nature.”
Game ranches in the U.S. feature dozens of exotic species, from zebras and
yaks to scimitar-horned oryx, which are extinct in the wild. A 15-year-old novice
gets field training at FTW Ranch, in Barksdale, Texas, in 2016. The boy later
shot an aoudad, or Barbary sheep, which he skinned, cleaned, and prep...Read
More
If it pays, it stays. It was a phrase I heard over and over again, in myriad
discussions about African conservation, in part to describe how money has
changed the mind-set of rural populations regarding the value of big game. Too
often people have seen an elephant destroy their annual crop, and some have
known the pain of a lurking lion taking a child for food. Here there’s no
mythologizing or fetishizing, no fund-raising around a fuzzy face: The leopard is
a killer, the rhino is a ruiner. To protect themselves against the enemy, villagers
often shoot and poison these intruders, without an iota of sentimentality. And
yet, the argument goes, if those animals are worth money to a local
community, that community will work hard to conserve and protect its assets.
This is something I witnessed firsthand. My time in the Kalahari coincided with
Nyae Nyae’s annual game count, in which 50 or so San camped for three nights
at various water holes, trying to account for the number of animals within
3,500 square miles of sand, bush, and baobab trees.
As fragile as it is, Nyae Nyae might be called a conditional success story, in
part because the hunt quotas have been methodically monitored and increased
over the years. On occasion cattle have threatened to overrun the
conservancy, but the big game have returned, and the menu of animals offered
to hunters includes leopard, kudu, and wildebeest, with prices set by a
management committee of five members of the conservancy. Profits are shared
communally: Last year each adult over 18 in Nyae Nyae was issued about $70.
“We have enough,” the chief, Bobo Tsamkxao, told me as he sat in his yard in
front of a disintegrating house, his wives sitting in a row among children and
litter. The arrangement also requires that the professional hunter employ and
train local people and contribute toward development projects such as schools
and health clinics.
Nyae Nyae became Namibia’s first conservancy, locally owned and run, in
1998. Every five years the conservancy is put up for tender, with professional
hunters offering bids to the San for the right to establish an on-site operation.
Last year the winning bid was more than $400,000, a rich number in large part
because the elephants have become so big and valuable. The professionals sell
hunting packages to clients to recoup the tender offer, cover expenses, and
make a profit. Many operate on more than one conservancy; some string
together enough to build their own little fiefdoms.
When I was there, in September 2016, Marnewecke had just learned that he’d
been outbid and would lose his Nyae Nyae operation by season’s end. “I’ll miss
the San,” he said, but he had another conservancy to the north that would
keep him busy. What worried him most was the Jenga-like fragility of Nyae
Nyae, and that irresponsible people might come with their own selfish designs
—crisscrossing the conservancy with new roads and upsetting the equilibrium.

A pair of hunters weigh a black bear shot in Maine in 2016. The bear had been
baited, a practice that involves placing caches of food to draw the animals to a
particular spot in the forest before the hunting season begins. In Maine the
numbers of bears, which are not endangered, have been rising...Read More

This black bear, shot by a hunter in Maine, is at a state fisheries and wildlife
station, where one of its teeth will be collected. The tooth allows wildlife
authorities to determine the animal’s age and reconstruct bear numbers to
better ma...Read More

The hunter removed the bear’s heart, which is shot through with a bullet. Many
hunters pride themselves on “nose to tail” eating—consuming not just the
meat but sometimes the kidneys, liver, and heart too. The heart can be pickled,
fr...Read More
While Namibia has turned wildlife management over to the local population,
governments in places such as Tanzania have taken an opposite tack, directly
owning and leasing hunting grounds. Critics say that no country should be in
the business of selling and profiting from dead animals. When coffers run low
and funds are needed, they say, hunting quotas get raised without regard for
the animals’ population numbers. And in those hunting areas where funds
aren’t reinvested, there’s no wildlife left to hunt. That could explain how 40
percent of Tanzania’s designated hunting areas have been emptied of game
animals during recent decades. A promotional video that surfaced in 2014
shows a hunting company, Green Mile Safari, guiding hunters from the United
Arab Emirates on a disturbing shooting party. The minister of tourism and
natural resources said the party violated a host of laws by, among other things,
firing automatic weapons, hunting female and young animals, and allowing a
minor to hunt. The government banned Green Mile from conducting hunts in
Tanzania in 2014 but reissued the company’s license last year, leading to
accusations of corruption. No arrests were made, and Green Mile claims that
the guide was at fault.
In the Selous Game Reserve ecosystem, a prized trophy hunting destination,
aerial surveys estimate the elephant population at some 15,000, down from
perhaps 50,000 as recently as 2009. “Why has the Selous been such a killing
field?” says Katarzyna Nowak, a conservation scientist associated with the
University of the Free State, Qwaqwa, in South Africa. “If hunters are coming in
from all around the world, and you’re really pumping money earned from
trophies back into the Selous for conservation and antipoaching, where have all
the elephants gone?”
Craig Packer sees the conservation of African wildlife in practical terms: If
hunters were shooting lions “for a million dollars and returning a million per lion
directly into management, they would be on solid ground. But lions are shot for
tens of thousands of dollars, and very little of that money goes back to
conservation.” With two billion dollars a year we could save and protect the
wildlife in Africa’s national parks, Packer says. But that would have to come
from international partners such as the World Bank, eco-philanthropists, and
nongovernmental organizations.
Rise of the White RhinosNearly extinct in South Africa a century ago, southern
white rhinos rebounded thanks to conservation e...Read More
Monica Serrano, NGM Staff; Meg Roosevelt-Michael Knight and Richard Emslie,
IUCN SSC African Rhino Specialist Group
Some trophy hunters say it’s not fair to blame them. Make of their sport what
you will, they don’t set the fees or determine the quotas. And they can’t control
endemic corruption in some countries, even if they indirectly feed it. Some
claim to share the concerns of environmentalists who see collapsing habitats
and dwindling populations. Kevin Reid, a big-game ranch owner in Texas, says
he raises endangered African species not only for the sport of trophy hunters
but also to create “a seed vault of animals,” including oryx and white rhinos, to
help rewild Africa once its problems have been sorted. “We’re trying to reverse
extinction,” Reid says. In the never ending ironies of the issue, though, the near
extinction of African elephants, rhinos, and lions comes today courtesy of the
barrel of a gun.
Perhaps, then, it boils down to another set of questions: In light of who we’ve
become as a species, what new form has nature taken, and what new rules
might be practiced there? Might we owe it to the natural world, after bunging it
up so badly, to act differently—less acquisitively, more generously—toward it?
Might it now be time to stop killing the dwindling herds for sport and display?
Or, perhaps more difficult to ponder: Will these trophies be all we have left
someday, tokens of a wild nature we once knew?
Hunters bring the first whitetailed deer of the regular firearms hunting season
to a market in Jerome, Michigan. Before the deer are butchered, some will be
hung along a “buck pole” to see who bagged the largest animal. Unlike trophy
hunting in Africa, where big game expeditions cost tens of th...Read More
On the 12th day of the elephant hunt in Nyae Nyae, in the rising heat of the
day, Dam, the tracker, picked up the marks of three bulls moving together.
Once Marnewecke and his client saw the elephants from a mile away, they
knew they were big and approached them from downwind so as not to be
detected. Two of the bulls were in front of them, but the largest and oldest
stood apart and behind. So they maneuvered out around the others and came
up on the third as he began to walk toward a clump of brush. The client
crouched low on one side as the old bull—sagging and on his sixth molars, half
ground down already, which means he was well on in the last season of his life
—unwittingly ate on the other side.
Would killing an old bull like this one help save all those other elephants in
Nyae Nyae?
Old bulls, says Caitlin O’Connell, a biologist and elephant researcher focused on
how the animals communicate, are a font of wisdom, deciding when and where
the herd will move in search of water, imposing an order on pachyderm society.
“Contrary to myth, elephant bulls are very social creatures,” she says. “They
move in groups of up to 15, and they maintain a strict hierarchy. The older bulls
exert a very important regulatory impact on the herd and an emotional-social
influence on the younger bulls.” Younger bulls in musth, a heightened state of
aggression during which testosterone levels can be 10 times as high as normal,
will be more likely to fight each other when an older bull is absent.
At 15 yards, the client could see every wrinkle draping the elephant. He aimed
his 12-pound double rifle with its hand-engraved silver stock and fired directly
at the heart. The bull turned and began to run, 30 yards before it fell. The client
put one more shot in the brain, and it was done. The tusks weighed out at more
than 70 pounds each. Within six hours the carcass had been stripped by the
San, who took roughly three tons of meat for their families.
Two days later the hunting party found another big bull. The client fired a shot,
bringing it down—but then, as another bull gave chase, he and Marnewecke
ran for at least half a mile before the elephant lost interest in them. Eventually
the process repeated: the flensing of the skin, the stripping of the bone, the
feeding of families. With that elephant, Marnewecke’s quota for the year was
filled. His client flew home; the tusks of the two elephants would follow,
destined for his trophy room back in America.
I thought about those tusks in the weeks that followed, possessions now,
totems of a fraught accomplishment. They were all that was left of two 15,000-
pound sentient beings. Which brought me to Bobo Tsamkxao, the San chief,
and his wives and children, and how they and others in the community would
eat from those animals. And how they would receive money, at least indirectly,
from those animals as well. But something still seemed askew: a paying client
killing a vulnerable animal to feed the San or conserve Nyae Nyae’s land. Even
if hunting is in our genes, as Denker said, the essential question remained: Was
it moral to kill such an imperiled creature at this moment in our history?
After the hunters had packed up, the herds—sometimes called a “parade” of
elephants, or even a “memory” of elephants—searched for water in temporary
peace, unaware that another season would bring another group of hunters. We
must imagine: Memories of elephants wandering all that contested space,
some already with price tags on their head, there for us as things of wonder.