Hunting Endangered Species In Africa

The African Big Five are the elephant, the rhinoceros, the lion, the buffalo, and the leopard. Buy this package, for a mere $100,000 in game fees alone, and guides will drive you out to areas where air reconnaissance has spotted the animals. Once there, a team of helpers will either prepare ground cover or set up a blind for you to wait in comfort for the herd to pass by. Sometimes the guides will trek out to drive the game toward guests or, as happened with Cecil the Lion, they might lay bait to draw the animal out of a protected area and into a location where it can legally be shot.
Elephants and rhinos are endangered species across their entire ranges — the western white rhino was just recently declared extinct after five years without any sightings in the wild — so hunters who want to bag these animals must fill out a lot of paperwork and pay fees directly to the South African national government, rather than to the state governments that regulate more common game.
Individuals can book trips for themselves alone, or they can bring along a guest for additional fees. Family packages are available, but according to one Pennsylvania-based tour agent who requested anonymity, the most popular package by far is father-son trips for wealthy men and their teenage or even preteen sons. More importantly, the source said, the trips are about generating memories, not blood sport.
“Lots of people take their kids [on low-risk antelope hunts],” the tour agent said. “The kids can either just observe, or they can shoot also and try to bag their own trophies. It’s a real experience for them, you know? It’s something your kid will never forget.”
The source’s agency tends toward the full-service approach and offers to have its agents pick guests up at the destination country airport, and drive them off to one of their luxurious hunting lodges. Among other things, these lodges offer professionally prepared meals, an obsequious staff, and daily laundry service. The company sets guests’ parties up with guides, transportation, and trophy services such as skinning, dipping, and shipping the carcass to the taxidermist of the guest’s choice after a successful hunt.

The Ethics Of Big Game Hunting

Defendants of big game hunting often say that the practice helps spread money around in economically depressed areas and encourages conservation efforts in places where large mammals are mostly a nuisance for farmers and herders. One South African tour company claims that all of its rhino hunts target old and unproductive herd members who are past their reproductive prime and “[add] nothing” to the species.
These proponents are correct in their assertion that hunting safaris cost money, which is spent to hunt in low-density/low-scenery areas unarmed tourists usually wouldn’t bother to visit. Their view is that European and American millionaires help these depressed regions by paying an arm and a leg for the privilege of hunting animals they could never find at home. Indeed, the only study ever done on hunting’s economic impact determined that the trade contributes around $200 million a year to some of the poorest countries in Africa.