Data on number of African elephant trophies imported to U.S. from 2005 to 2014.The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last month moved to allow hunters to bring home trophies from elephants killed in Zimbabwe and Zambia. Safe to say, few conservationists saw it coming.
In a 39-page report, the agency cited Zimbabwe's progress in creating a sound management plan for its 82,000 elephants and evidence hunting revenue is in fact reinvested into conservation. Well-managed trophy hunting "would not have an adverse effect on the species, but can further efforts to conserve the species in the wild," the agency concluded.
The announcement, which would have turned back an elephant-trophy prohibition instituted during the Obama administration, was met with praise from pro-hunting groups, such as the National Rifle Association and Safari Club International, and criticism from animal-rights advocates.
Unexpectedly, President Donald Trump intervened on Twitter, saying the trophy decision would be delayed "until such time as I review all conservation facts." Two days later, the president referred to trophy hunting as a "horror show" and cast doubts on its effectiveness for helping conservation of elephants and other species. An updated decision, the president added, is pending.
Whether the proceeds from big-game hunting should be used to protect threatened and endangered species is a difficult question to answer. In some areas, including in Namibia and Zimbabwe, the strategy has helped revive wildlife populations. In others, including Tanzania, hunting has fed corruption and decimated species.
Among conservation biologists and advocacy groups, trophy hunting is the third rail: Their supporters largely are repulsed by the sanctioned shooting and butchering of elephants, lions and other big game. The killing of Cecil, a Zimbabwean lion, by an American hunter set off a global social media storm.
Many conservationists "have been bullied into silence" on the subject of hunting, said Michael 't Sas-Rolfes, a research fellow at Oxford University who studies wildlife trade.
Yet many experts also believe that the proceeds from hunting are all that prevents many poor communities from turning against local wildlife.
"While the noise in the press is all about morals and entitled white men killing innocent animals to hang obnoxiously on their wall - all of which I agree with - this actually has very little to do with pragmatic conservation," said Brian Child, an ecologist at the University of Florida. "Like everything else in life, it's all about the money - money to combat illegal wildlife trade, and money to prevent the much more serious problem of wildlife's replacement by the cow or the plow."
Critics of big-game hunting seldom offer viable alternatives for the communities that rely on these funds to protect wildlife, Child said. Nor do the countries that issue trophy bans typically provide financial assistance sufficient to make up for the shortfall when hunting income goes away.
Hunters pay $65,000 to $140,000 to hunt lions in Zimbabwe, for example; an elephant hunt can run $36,000 to $70,000. (The price would be higher were it not for the U.S. trophy ban.)
"Zimbabwe is on its knees because of economic downturn, yet the international community expects our poor country to look after elephants and lions when we can't even feed our nation," said Victor Muposhi, a zoologist at Chinhoyi University of Technology in Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe.
"No one is coming to the table to say, 'Yes, we want you to stop this hunting, but here is a budget and an alternative plan you can follow instead.'"
Calls for blanket bans, Muposhi continued, overlook the benefits that well-managed hunting programs can bring and gloss over the complexities of the industry and of conservation itself.
"I think one of the real problems in this whole debate is that people are looking for generalizations about trophy hunting, and there just are none," said Rosie Cooney, chairwoman of the sustainable use and livelihoods specialist group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. "There's great examples and terrible examples and ones we don't have a clue about - and everything in between."
Those looking for the terrible examples will find no shortage of them.
A study by Craig Packer, director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota, found that sport hunting directly contributed to the decline of lions in most of Tanzania's hunting areas. Over the past dozen years, he also reported, 40 percent of these areas were abandoned because of declines in trophy species.
In other countries, including Zimbabwe, officials have simply seized hunting preserves and reaped the profits without reinvesting in conservation, according to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "The Extinction Market."
The trophy hunting business "becomes very commercialized, and the profits are captured by elites," she said. "You can also end up with trophy hunting serving as a cover for trafficking."
Even where this conservation strategy seems to work, however, some critics question the contradiction inherent in hunting threatened and endangered species.
"Any trophy hunting of an endangered species is by definition unsustainable, as it cannot sufficiently contribute to the survival of the species to justify removing individuals from the population," said Elly Pepper, a deputy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Indeed, savanna elephant populations across Africa declined 30 percent from 2007-14, primarily as a result of poaching. But the numbers were not evenly distributed.
Most legal trophy hunting for elephants occurs in southern Africa, in countries like Namibia and South Africa. The region accounts for nearly 40 percent of the continent's 415,000 elephants, according to data presented last week at a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in Geneva.
In Zimbabwe's Campfire communities - which are equivalent in size to the country's strictly protected national parks, but reliant on trophy hunting - elephants destroyed more than 17,000 acres of crops from 2010-15. Along with other animals, elephants have killed 139 community members since 2010.
Lions, likewise, killed four people in Mozambique in 2016, not to mention 220 cows. Tolerance for wildlife quickly wanes if animals cease to bring benefits - a growing threat in Zimbabwe, Muposhi said.
Elephant hunts are still legal there, but leaving behind the animal's tusks is a deal-breaker for most big-game enthusiasts. After the 2014 trophy ban, 108 of 189 American hunters canceled their trips.
The Campfire program's annual income dropped to $1.7 million from $2.2 million; private landowners reported similar losses. Zimbabwe's Parks and Wildlife Management Authority derives about 20 percent of its funding from hunting fees, more than half of which traditionally comes from American hunters.
"All of Zimbabwe's hunting areas are surrounded by communities who are hungry for agricultural land," Muposhi said. "If people see that elephants and lions no longer have value, they'll kill all the animals and let their cattle use the land currently set aside for wildlife."
Some argue that photographic tourism can make up for these losses, but Muposhi disagrees.
Before the trophy suspension, hunters were undeterred by Zimbabwe's political turmoil. But tourism overall suffered a decade-long decline.
Hunters also tend to relish the chance to spend three weeks or more in rugged wilderness lacking roads, cellphone service and treated water. Tourists on photographic safaris, on the other hand, "are soft people," Muposhi said.
"They expect to sleep in a nice bed in a nice lodge where there's no mosquitoes and there's electricity and pure water."
That's why transforming hunting areas into destinations that appeal to conventional tourists often requires prohibitively expensive investment in infrastructure and marketing.
For 't Sas-Rolfes and other experts, the trophy hunting debate remains a tiring distraction from the pivotal question of how to sustainably finance conservation in Africa, and how to deal with poaching and growing human populations.
In a 2015 survey of 133 experts in 11 African countries, trophy hunting came in next to last in a ranking of 11 threats to wildlife. Poaching was at the top.
"We're talking about the wrong thing right now," said Dan Ashe, president of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. "Trophy hunting is not the issue. We should be focused on wildlife trafficking and the broader plight of elephants."