Does Zimbabwe Really Need Trophy Hunting?

By Jane Mayer

This nine-year-old male lion, disturbed from a midday nap in the Selous Game Reserve, in Tanzania, currently has three prides and six cubs. Hunting licenses to kill an adult male like this can be legally purchased in eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY H. V. RUSSELL
The death of Cecil the lion, who largely lived in a protected game reserve, will likely turn out to have been a case of illegal poaching. But, had the thirteen-year-old black-maned lion lived a few miles away, and had the proper paperwork been in order, it would have been completely legal for an American tourist to behead him. Given the international outrage that the case has stirred, the alleged poachers will likely face criminal charges, but it’s the controversial policy of selling permits to big-game trophy hunters that really ought to be on trial.

The rules are currently nonsensical. I was just in Tanzania, at the Selous Game Reserve, where lions were safe on one side of the Rufiji River but fair game on the other, for those who have paid enough to kill them. The lions, which obviously don’t read maps, are astoundingly acclimatized to humans on the side of the river where they are safe, which leads them to be easily confused and picked off by hunters on the other side.


For years, proponents of trophy hunting have argued that the sport is actually a help to conservation. An organization representing the commercial trophy-hunting industry says that, in Africa, the sport generates revenues of as much as two hundred million dollars a year. If the fees are high enough, proponents claim, the hunting will be limited to a sustainable level, and the revenues will filter back into the desperately poor communities that surround many African game parks, discouraging residents from killing the animals themselves and encroaching on their habitats.


In practice though, studies have shown that only about three per cent of these fees actually reaches the local communities. Most of the money is siphoned off by the hunting industry and government officials. Meanwhile, in the eight sub-Saharan countries that currently sell permits allowing hunters to target lions, the animals’ numbers are dwindling alarmingly. Only thirty-two thousand to thirty-five thousand lions are now believed to live in the wild, down thirty per cent over the past twenty years. The decimation of African savannah elephants and other big game species is more alarming still, suggesting that leaving the free market to protect endangered species is a fatal fallacy...

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