Amid the outrage over the killing of a collared Zimbabwean lion dubbed Cecil, one fact has escaped attention: the collar and the study of lions in Hwange National Park are being paid for by big-game hunters.
Over the last 20 years, eastern and southern African nations have grown more sophisticated in user-pay conservation, a counterintuitive model in which most of the funding for wildlife conservation comes from the hunters.
The University of Oxford study that followed Cecil and other collared lions was funded by hunting organizations to help quantify and prevent illegal hunts. Lucrative organized poaching for exotic animal parts is responsible for most of the illegal killing of animals.
A number of organizations oppose all hunting and reject the idea that hunting is an effective conservation tool.
“There’s a better way to fund conservation than killing animals,” said Randy Paynter of Care2, a social network supporting a lion-protection petition that has collected 1 million signatures.
But increasingly, African countries in which safari hunting was largely unregulated until recent decades have been developing their own versions of the “North American Conservation Model,” described by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service as a “radical idea that wildlife belongs to everyone, not just the rich and privileged.”
The “rich and privileged” referred to are wealthy landowners. In the late 1800s, American hunters bristled at the notion that landowners also owned the animals on their lands and should be allowed to manage them for their own benefit. The hunters organized against the habitat loss and overhunting that were reducing wildlife populations. They recognized that expanding human populations and elimination of predators often make it impossible for nature to balance itself.
The North American model tasks those who use the resource with providing for its stewardship. The hunter lobby pushed Congress to enact federal excise taxes on the sale of hunting gear, as well as far-reaching conservation laws that regulated which species could be hunted, including where, when and how animals could be pursued. It’s a conservation model widely credited for saving white-tailed deer, Eastern wild turkey and wood duck from the brink of extinction.
“They realized then that regulated hunting coupled with other wildlife management tools was the best way to control wildlife, and were willing to pay for that conservation themselves,” said John J. Jackson, head of the Conservation Force, which for some 20 years has assisted African nations in developing lion programs.
American “user-pay conservation” was invented before the nonhunting public started enjoying wildlife through birding, bicycling, backyard feeding and other outdoor recreation. Pittman-Robertson Act excise taxes don’t apply to their binoculars, bikes, feeders or other nonhunting outdoor gear.
Mr. Paynter said he’d support those taxes if the money went into the local economy.
“I think that may be a good direction to move it. But the right idea is to create economic incentives for local people to protect wildlife,” he said.
The lion killings that have caused outrage were conducted on conservancies adjacent to the 3.6-million acre Hwange National Park. The conservancies are private lands designated by the government for hunting. Mr. Jackson describe those “buffer zones” as akin to the U.S. forest lands where hunting is permitted next to national parks.
The hunters who killed those lions — Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer and Murrysville doctor Jan Seski — used compound bows, sporting arms that greatly increase the challenge of the hunt.
“You have to get a lot closer — 20 to 40 yards — instead of 100 or 200 yards or more with a gun,” said archery champion Joe McCluskey of Cheswick, winner of two International Bowhunting Organization world titles.
The curvature of traditional recurve bows creates tension that can propel an arrow at 180 feet per second. Compound bows use pulleys to reduce the draw weight exerted by the archer while increasing the kinetic energy, launching the arrow at some 300 feet per second.
Some African nations are organizing conservation culls, in which tourism hunters pay to shoot one specific animal that biologists have determined has become detrimental to its group, said Bob Kern, president of the Virginia-based Hunting Consortium, which organizes international hunts.
And while many oppose “canned” hunts in which big game animals are raised on fenced farms specifically for hunters to target, Mr. Kern says they, too, have a role.
“I’m opposed to the canned hunts from a purist standpoint, but I’m not opposed to it from a pragmatic standpoint if it takes the pressure off wild animals,” said Mr. Kern, who for some 50 years has hunted wild game around the world. “I accept it as a fact of life that some people are willing to have a lion without earning it, without a wild bush safari, or can’t afford a wild hunt.”
The safari hunting industry often has better funding than government conservation bureaus, said Mr. Kern, and has been more effective in preventing poaching. But he said they have no way to combat the greatest threat to lions — habitat depletion due to human population expansion.
But Mr. Paynter said there has to be a better way.
“I think it’s presupposing to think that killing these animals is a good thing,” he said. “The bottom line is you don’t have to kill them to achieve conservation. Killing isn’t necessary.”
First Published: August 6, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
