A force for good

Well-managed trophy hunting offers revenue and incentivises people to conserve Africa’s endangered wildlife, argues Marcus Janssen

- Marcus Janssen

When I first moved to the UK from South Africa, I stuck some of my favourite photographs on the wall of my halls of residence bedroom to serve as reminders of the life I’d left behind. One of those photographs happened to be of a close friend and me with a dead Cape buffalo that an American client had hunted on safari with us. Looking back now, I can see just how naive I was.

But that photograph was a reminder of some of the incredible experiences I’d had on safari, and of a very memorable hunt that had ended in success. I knew how much of a contributor to wildlife conservation regulated big game hunting is. And of all the wildlife conservationists I’d met and idolised growing up in southern Africa, most of them were pro-hunting, or recognised that hunting could be a force for good.

Even the late, great, Dr Ian Player, who masterminded Operation Rhino, a programme in the 1980s that brought the southern white rhino back from the brink of extinction, recognised the value in commercial hunting. “Hunting led to the increase from 437 rhino in 1953 to in excess of 18,000 in 2010,” he said in an interview in 2009. “For the loss of a few animals (for the purposes of trophy hunting), their overall numbers increased. Regrettably, this is a form of logic that is lost on most people.”