The number making up the 14 percent, therefore, will get smaller and smaller as the population size diminishes by 7 percent each year.
In those populations that are being culled, therefore, the population will be halved—and halved again repeatedly—every ten years. And in those populations that are not subject to culling, the populations will double their numbers every ten years. Ironically, the new elephant management plan for Kruger National Park—although it came about because of animal rights objections to the culling of elephants—will probably end up killing more elephants every year than was the case before.
The hard reality, then, is that elephants must be somehow controlled if Kruger is to maintain its biological richness. As Ian Parker noted, elephants are engines superbly designed for changing landscapes. If allowed to reproduce freely, they would change Kruger’s landscape right down to the hardpan, leveling every standing tree. And despite its threatened status, the African elephant is hardly a shy breeder: when not subject to culling, Kruger’s elephant population typically grows at 6 to 7 percent a year. Contraception and translocation, it is now known, are ineffective. Creating transnational parks to accommodate more elephants, as the International Fund for Animal Welfare and other groups advocate, is certainly a good idea, but opportunities are limited. Ultimately, effective elephant management must rely on a bullet. As Thomson observes, lethal force will remain the cornerstone of Kruger’s new elephant policy—a policy that was developed in direct and sincere response to protests from animal rights advocates. There is simply no alternative, except for a complete cessation to all culling and trophy hunting, habitat degradation notwithstanding. And this may well happen. For many people of good conscience, including some with extensive backgrounds in wildlife issues, the specter of shooting any elephant for any reason is too horrible to countenance—to contemplate, even. To them, the elephant is sentient—more than that, intelligent—and killing sentient and intelligent creatures is murder. Better, perhaps, that there are fewer elephants, worse habitat, less biodiversity, as long as there is no murder. It is thus not a matter of conservation; it is a matter of essential morality, of civilized behavior.
Certainly, organized resistance to hunting is growing, particularly in the United States and Europe. Trophy hunting, especially, is drawing concentrated fire. A 2004 white paper titled The Myth of Trophy Hunting as Conservation, submitted to the British environment minister Elliott Morley by the League against Cruel Sports, limns the battle lines in no uncertain terms. The report inveighs thunderously against sport hunting, dismissing as lies any claims that hunting can be effectively employed as a conservation tool. And while the paper acknowledges that trophy hunting inevitably will continue in Africa for the foreseeable future, it suggests another strategy—depriving hunters of a major incentive for killing charismatic game: “While it may not be possible in the short term to prevent hunters from travelling around the globe to kill endangered animals, it is possible to deny them the perverse pleasure of bringing back a stuffed, mounted trophy of their kill.”
Further, the report casts the argument as a conflict between good and evil, as a struggle between wealthy “pale males” (white hunters) and poor disenfranchised people of color who are the natural beneficiaries of ecotourism. Nor can there be any compromise, the report warns: “It is virtually impossible for these two groups to co-exist. The hunting industry, and the governments they have wooed, are battling against eco-tourism operators and local communities for control over the planet’s endangered species—and are often winning.”
At a certain point, vetting the arguments of both the pro-and anti-hunting camps feels utterly futile; to paraphrase Mark Twain, it becomes a matter of trying to separate the lies, the damn lies, and the statistics. More charitably, both groups can make compelling arguments for their respective positions on the consumptive use of game in Africa and elsewhere.
Only one group, however, can claim ascendance. Just as the hunting ethic was considered an integral component of the social contract in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so its obverse is now true. A general opposition to hunting now prevails in the urban centers of the developed world. This anti-hunting sentiment has combined with a larger sense that cruelty to animals in general, including simple neglect, is anathema to civilized people. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, between 1975 and 2006 the number of hunters in the United States (e.g., people who had purchased hunting licenses) declined from 19.1 million to 12.5 million. That figure is expected to plummet to 9.1 million by 2025. Some states—most notably those with large rural populations—have shown relatively slight drops, but the decline in others has been profound. In California, the decline was 38 percent; in Rhode Island, 59 percent. Some of this is due to expense (hunting is a relatively pricey activity), the loss of public-land hunting opportunities, and habitat loss. But the biggest driver appears to be a shift in the zeitgeist. Hunting is not considered au courant, especially among younger people. This is glaringly apparent in the American media. There are a great many TV shows dedicated to alternative and extreme sports—surfing, snowboarding, motocross, even street luge racing. The participants are young, fit, and attractive. And while there are some hunting and fishing shows on television—there’s even a channel or two devoted wholly to field sports—their presentation and production values are stodgy by comparison, and the hosts and participants are generally middle-aged, paunchy, and anything but sexy. In the most basic terms, the culture that really counts in America—youth culture—has moved decisively against hunting.
The same holds true for urban Africa. As the League against Cruel Sports claims, compromise of any significant degree is probably impossible for anti-hunting and pro-hunting groups. But the organization is wrong when it maintains hunters are winning. The hunters are not winning, including those in Africa. In Nairobi and Johannesburg, hunting is viewed as a colonial relic, something pursued by wealthy white men besotted with delusional fantasies of Hemingway, Ruark, and the Golden Age of the Safari. Even in countries where the hunting tradition is still relatively strong—Tanzania and Namibia, for example—the activity is viewed as a somewhat atavistic rural pursuit and, at best, a source of foreign currency. Hunting big game is not an aspiration of the people who really count in Africa—educated, upwardly mobile, professional urbanites. Thanks to the Internet and cellular technology, Africa is now integrated into world culture in a way that was unthinkable even a few years ago. By way of illustration: I visited Kenya’s Laikipia highlands in 2001. At that time, standard hardwired telephony had just made it to the region. Up to that point, ranchers had communicated by CB radio—or more often, by driving or flying to one another’s homes. I observed that the ranchers seemed somewhat flummoxed by the technology, which was then more than a century old, of course. When they picked up the phone, they had a tendency to say “over” after finishing their part of the conversation, as they would on a two-way radio.
Flash forward eight years. Cell phones are now ubiquitous across East Africa, including in Laikipia and the Maasai Mara. Everyone—city dwellers, ranchers, pastoralists—has at least one cell phone. They are calling, texting, Googling, reading news feeds. They are as exposed to the world—and to global popular culture—as anyone in Paris, London, or New York. Just as it has in the United States, this vastly enhanced access to media hasn’t necessarily raised the level of discourse: a lot of attention seems concentrated on scandal, sex, and crime.
Still, matters of more elevated import percolate through the new African media, including those related to wildlife conservation. The debate in Kenya over reintroducing big game hunting has drawn particular attention. In the countryside, the issue is strictly a matter of shillings and security: conversations with any pastoralist or farmer revolve around protection of livestock from predators, excluding elephants from crops, or the return in meat or money that game animals may yield. In Nairobi, however, the issue is both more complicated and familiar: it sounds a lot like the heated point and counterpoint you’d hear in any American or European city. In 2007, a Kenyan journalist opposed to hunting described it as bored and wealthy Arab royals and Americans potting away at big game while starving children looked on from mudand-wattle huts. While the issue is certainly more nuanced than that, this image contains enough truth to make for a powerful self-propagating message—an idea that is simple, clear, and easy to understand
