The British government promised to ban the imports of trophies in to the UK, yet they have given up after “wealthy peers” lobbied against the move and so it was dropped.
I have written on this issue many times over the last few years, as it was raised as an issue over and over again.
Should wealthy individuals be allowed to go and shoot members of an endangered species? I would argue no, never. However, we do not live in a perfect world. There are places where few tourists will go. If these incredible places can be protected by sustainably harvesting a small number of endangered animals I would argue that this is the lesser of two evils.
Now, as I have written before, there are just a few places where lion hunting is completely sustainable. One such place is the Selous – an area of over 50,000 square miles, with a population of 5000 lions (or around 1 quarter of the remaining wild lions). Here when roughly 50 lions are killed each year – even with the assumption that dominant males are taken, and therefore there are more deaths when new males take over, the death is sustainable in the long run. Does this make it something that most people think should happen? No certainly not.
So what would my argument be? I believe that the government needs to set up an organisation whose sole job is to check where the hunt will occur and how it will impact the population. Now this will need the assistance of host countries and many will not give this as they will not be capable of meeting the standards.
Setting up a hunting reserve on the edge of a large reserve (as often happens in South Africa), and shooting trophies when they wander across some unmarked boundary between the reserve and the hunting zone is clearly cheating. If you are to hunt, you should have to support a large enough population of the animal in question for them to be able to cope with the losses that the hunting activity causes. This does not aid conservation in any way. In a similar way, canned lion hunts (lions raised in captivity and then released into small reserves to be hunted weeks later) are distasteful but more importantly, do not aid conservation in any way and so should be banned.
In this way, there would likely only be the Selous in Tanzania where lion hunting was allowed. We would not be able to stop hunting in South Africa, but if hunters could not bring in their trophies many would not see the point.
In a similar way, most polar bear hunts would end (though in this instance few go on anyway.
Indeed, if these rules were enforced, it would likely end hunting of predators. While I find hunting (not endangered) antelope no more tasteful, this is far more sustainable. A reserve of even just a few tens of square miles could have a healthy population of antelope, allowing a small take each year.
