If the irate masses on the internet value African conservation efforts and the survival of wild species like lion, they need to sign a petition calling for Ricky Gervais to be shot, stuffed and mounted on a trophy room wall.
Although it sounds extreme, it is the only reasonable call to make based on the internet’s need to publicly flagellate anyone deemed to be hurting animals, and the actual economic facts of how trophy hunting works in Africa.
Let us start with the first: US dentist Walter Palmer has become the least favourite person in the world recently after paying $US50,000 to hunt and kill a lion in Zimbabwe. That lion happened to be Cecil, a mature male who had featured in various wildlife studies.
This raised the terrible ire of the outrage-high/fact-low commentariat such that Dr Palmer has gone into hiding. He is not the only hunter to be hounded by the net. GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons faced a similar onslaught of digital disapproval for shooting an elephant.
The only problem with this rage is that trophy hunters have probably done more for conservation and the protection of threatened macro-fauna in Africa than the collective contribution of those calling for their death. That is because it comes down to economics and land use, something the commentariat have failed to consider.
Like anywhere in the world, land in Africa will tend to be put to its most profitable use, and that generally means cattle. By the 1980s only 10% of savannah pastures in Africa were used by wildlife, according to academic Brian Child.
Only in areas where the returns from game farming exceed returns from cattle farming will the land be used for that purpose, and that is where hunting and tourism come in. Tourism is, of course, a major source of revenue for game operators. But trophy hunting has allowed many more firms to enter the sector that would otherwise have occurred without it.
The high-value/low-volume nature of the activity means it is less capital intensive (you do not need to build a pool and restaurant for tired tourists). Plus you also need fewer animals to get started because hunters are only interested in the quality of the animals, rather than the high quantity that tourists seek. Many operators, in fact, cater to both markets. This is probably a wise decision in a region plagued by political instability. Research by Mr Child shows that trophy markets are more resilient than tourism markets. For example, gross value of trophy hunting dropped by only 10% during Zimbabwe’s civil strife in 2000 compared with a 75% decline for more traditional tourism markets. Something to do with risk-tolerant thrillseekers or some such.
The upshot is that there is a profit motive incentivising conservation. Kill rates average at around 2% of the game population, typically of male animals, compared with a population growth rate of around 10%.
Wildlife academic Peter Lindsey notes that hunting on private land in South Africa has helped the populations of bontebok, black wildebeest and cape mountain zebra recover to the point where they were reintroduced into the wild. Trophy hunting has also facilitated the recovery of southern white rhino populations.
In theory, the greater the profit motive, the more land is likely to be put to use farming game, thus conserving land that would otherwise be grazed by cattle (which has contributed to desertification in many parts of Africa). Luckily it is a theory that bears out in real life. In South Africa, arguably the most developed wildlife market, private game farms account for 13% of total land use. Research by Ivan Bond shows that trophy hunting was a key reason why 27,000km2 of marginal Zimbabwean farmland was converted to game use before the redistributions of the late-1990s. Similar research in Namibia showed wildlife populations increased 80% in the 20 years to 1992 due to land use changes.
Trophy hunting can also be used to eliminate problem animals, killing two birds with one stone. Lions could be classed as one of these species. In a recent newspaper piece it was noted that lions were sneaking out of reserves to hunt domestic animals and were more likely to be killed by farmers than hunters. In fact, lions have a ferocious reputation on the continent for killing humans.
This is not to suggest that all is rosy with trophy hunting industry. Clearly, freeriding on conservation, and the high level of corruption in Africa, means government officials often profit more from the sector than the locals do. Canned hunting, the practice of drugging animals so it is easier to track and shoot them, is another ethical can of worms in its own right. But these issues can be fixed.
Even to those with a rudimentary understanding of economics it should be clear that the state of Africa’s wildlife would be in a far more precarious and threatened position had trophy hunting not been part of the equation.
The discussion so far should have also gone some way to convince you that legitimate hunters are not the bad guys. Equally, well-intentioned but poorly-informed commentators like Ricky Gervais, who lampoon hunting without an awareness of the sector’s wider economic contribution, are not necessarily the good guys.
By the hang-‘em-high rules of the internet, and the self-described animals lovers who populate it, Mr Gervais should be shot, stuffed and hung on a wall somewhere. I am not that bloodthirsty, and luckily neither are the internet trolls once they leave the anonymity of their keyboards. I would urge them, and Mr Gervais, to be more mindful of the economic reality surrounding trophy shooting and wildlife tourism. Wading into a tricky issue like this, pushed along by nothing but the tailwind of ignorance and moral outrage, might result in an action that feels good but produces a net harm. To quote Peter Lindsey: “Social pressure may, in the long term, reduce the demand for international trophy hunting, notwithstanding the powerful links between hunting and the maintenance and conservation of wildlife and wildlife habitat.”