Having been an observer of politics for many a year I’ve found that I’ve had to come to the conclusion that legislation based on emotion and emotive statements and images has a nasty habit of either being useless, or worse, counter productive. Therefore I was pleasantly surprised to see a piece in The Critic magazine outlining the problems that will be caused, to often impoverished societies in places like Africa, should a ban on the import of big game trophies to Britain be passed.

As the author, Amy Dickman says, animals like Lions, Leopards and Elephants do immense damage to crops, villages and to humans every year and the sale of hunting rights to wealthy foreigners gives those communities that live with these animals a reason to conserve them rather than wipe out what are to many communities threats to life and livelihoods. To a starving African subsistence farmer the Elephant for example is a destroyer of food crops and not something to be admired or conserved.

Speaking of a film that was made to try to influence MP’s into supporting the trophy import bill Ms Dickman said:

The only wildlife shown is African, transplanted into hallowed UK settings. A cheetah calmly sits outside Parliament. An elephant stands, magnificent, in the halls of UK power. A zebra lies down in the lobby. A leopard reclines on the stairs. A lion relaxes in the centre of the House. It is beautiful — and extremely jarring for many viewers, particularly Africans, who have protested against it. 

It jars because the film is a searingly accurate insight into how wildlife is perceived in this Bill. The focus is exclusively on beautiful, docile individuals, entirely removed from the context of their habitat, populations, and those countries and communities who actually conserve them. In the real world, these animals require massive areas of land. Real lions, leopards and elephants kill and injure people, attack livestock and destroy entire harvests, imposing huge costs on often-vulnerable communities. Protected areas come with major economic and opportunity costs. People need tangible reasons to put up with this – and trophy hunting is one such reason. Just as with photo-tourism, it helps incentivise governments and communities to maintain wild habitats and biodiversity. These areas are vast — more lion range, for example, is conserved in hunting areas than in National Parks. 

Ms Dickman goes on to explain that trophy hunting is not driving any species to extinction and that the main driver for species loss is the destruction of these animal’s habitat. Trophy hunting incentivises habitat and animal conservation and helps often impoverished communities see their wildlife as a benefit and not a curse.

What’s particularly bad about this Bill is that it will undermine efforts to improve conservation and such issues as this have been raised both by Oxford University scientists and African campaigners themselves.

Ms Dickman adds:

Leading scientists and representatives of millions of rural Africans have warned repeatedly that this Bill will undermine global conservation efforts and livelihoods. Unfortunately, it has been heavily influenced by misinformation, largely driven by lobbyists with access through an APPG. In the Second Reading of the Bill, analysis being led by Oxford University scientists suggests that around three-quarters of verifiable statements made by supportive MPs were false. For more than a third of supportive MPs – including the Chair of the relevant APPG – every single verifiable statement appears false. 

In other words what has happened is that the MP’s have been taken in by emotive and demonstrably untrue bollocks peddled by anti hunting campaigners with the possible end result that not only will African villagers starve because the hunting business collapses but the Africans will have no reason to look after the wildlife that they have. We should be ashamed that our MP’s are so shallow and able to be emotionally manipulated that they are likely to vote on a bill that will have the most horrendous unintended consequences both for the Africans who have to live with challenging wildlife and that wildlife itself.