Is Trophy Hunting Helping Save African Elephants?

African elephants are in trouble. Their
numbers have fallen from as many as ten
million a hundred years ago to as few as
400,000 today. Recent losses are largely
from poaching for the illegal ivory trade
(some 30,000 elephants a year), but also
because of the shrinking habitat for
elephants, as people open up land for
farming and development.
Killing more elephants to help save the
species is one counterintuitive strategy for preserving them. Here’s the thinking: Invite hunters from rich countries to pay generous fees to shoot specified numbers of elephants, and use that money for conservation and to help give local communities a boost. Do that, the theory goes, and poor villagers won’t need to poach elephants to feed their families.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature, an internationally recognized
organization that sets the conservation
statuses for species, supports this idea.
“Well-managed trophy hunting can provide both revenue and incentives for people to conserve and restore wild populations, maintain areas of land for conservation and protect wildlife from poaching,” its guiding principles say.
But a closer look at trophy hunting in Africa shows that the industry employs few people and that the money from hunt fees that trickles down to needy villagers is minimal.
Government corruption can be a factor. In
Zimbabwe, for instance, individuals associated with President Robert Mugabe have seized lands in lucrative hunting areas. Trophy hunting isn’t stopping poaching, especially in countries that have a poor record of protecting their wildlife.
Six countries—South Africa, Zimbabwe,
Zambia, Mozambique, Namibia, and
Tanzania—have many of the remaining
savanna elephants. Along with Cameroon
and Gabon, these nations allow sport
hunting regardless of the level of decline in their elephant populations. (Botswana,
which has more than 130,000 elephants by one recent estimate, has banned trophy hunting.)
According to the latest figures, Tanzania’s elephant population has fallen from nearly 110,000 in 2009 to just over 43,000 at the end of 2014—a 60 percent drop. Mozambique’s elephants declined from an estimated 20,000 to 10,300 during the same period. In Zimbabwe, a recent survey shows massive losses in some parks.

Here’s how many tusks that the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES) allows hunters to export from the big six countries in 2015:
Zimbabwe: 1,000 tusks
Namibia: 180 tusks
Zambia: 160 tusks
Tanzania: 200 tusks
Mozambique: 200 tusks
South Africa: 300 tusks
Trophy hunting in Zimbabwe made the
news in October when an unidentified
German hunter shot what may have been
one of the continent’s largest bull elephants.
From 2003 to 2013, trophy hunters exported more than 28 tons of tusks from Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe and Namibia’s sport hunting programs provide contrasting examples of the benefits of this form of conservation.