Washington says need to kill elephants to help save them. The data says otherwise.
SUPPORTERS of trophy hunting say that permit fees from the practice, which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars in the case of large game like elephants, can be put toward conservation efforts that help bolster the populations of endangered animals.
In part, that was the logic behind the Trump administration’s reversal of an Obama-era ban on importing African elephant trophies from Zimbabwe.
“The US Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) has made a finding that the killing of African elephant trophy animals in Zimbabwe, on or after January 21, 2016, and on or before Dec 31, 2018, will enhance the survival of the African elephant,” according to a notice posted Friday in the federal register.
Late Friday evening, President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he would “put big game trophy decision on hold until such time as I review all conservation facts.” It’s unclear how the President’s tweet would affect the Fish and Wildlife service policy.
If the logic of killing elephants to save them strikes you as questionable, you’re not alone.
As of 2014 the African elephant population stood at an estimated 374,000, according to the Global Elephant Census, a massive and costly effort to measure the continent’s remaining savanna elephant population.
That’s down from an estimated 10 million elephants at the turn of the 20th century, and from 600,000 of the animals as recently as 1989.
The more detailed population trend data from the census showed that populations had been on a rebound from 1995 to about 2007. But since then, elephant populations have been declining by a rate of about eight per cent annually, or 30,000 elephants each year.
“These dramatic declines in elephant populations are almost certainly due to poaching for ivory,” according to the census. “Elephant poaching has increased substantially over the past five years to10 years, especially in eastern and western Africa.”
It’s theoretically possible, of course, that population declines would be even worse without the legally sanctioned killings of hundreds of elephants a year. But there are also a number of very good reasons to suspect that trophy hunting does not bring any great benefit to Africa’s elephant populations.
For starters, the hunting of elephants brings in very little revenue. A 2017 report by Economists at Large, an economic analysis firm based in Australia, found that in eight African countries, trophy hunting amounted to less than one per cent of total tourism revenue and 0.03 per cent of the countries’ total gross national product.
A 2015 National Geographic report found that only minimal amounts of revenue from game hunting actually trickled down to the communities managing elephant populations. Government corruption is a big factor in this, with authorities keeping hunting fees for themselves and seizing wildlife lands to profit from hunting and poaching.
Zimbabwe, in particular, has been rife with bad wild-life management practices, which is why the Obama administration banned elephant trophy imports from the country in the first place. — WP-Bloomberg