12/08/2025
It is with sadness that we learnt about the deaths of two people by wildlife in the past weeks. FC Conradie, the CEO of Gondwana Private Game Reserve was trampled by an elephant on the reserve just west of Mossel Bay on 23 July, while Asher Watkins, an American real estate agent from Texas, was gored by a Cape Buffalo while being on a hunting Safari in the Limpopo province of South Africa. Both being killed by one of the so called big five, being the sought after game species to spot, photograph or hunt by tourists in Africa. The term originated from the big game hunters in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s as the most dangerous and difficult game to hunt in Africa.
Following the media at the time, there was a much bigger response to the death of the hunter than there was for the co-owner and CEO of the private reserve. Comments condoning trophy hunting and responses from the hunting fraternity flooded the media which brought me to respond to what was said. The death of anybody is sad and it really doesn’t matter what your personal beliefs are. To say that when a hunter gets killed that he got what he deserved is barbaric and puts the anti-hunting lobbyists in a very negative light in my eyes. Hunting, specifically in Africa, is a big business and brings in billions of foreign currency into African countries, but to say that it is a conservation effort is a farce. It is a business practice and the sole purpose is to make a profit. Yes, there might be some benefits for the environment and some species might benefit from game farms and hunting concessions, but to sell it as a conservation effort and hunting as the secondary purpose is not true. Surely the impact of a game farm on the environment is much less than for instance a cropland or a feedlot, but most game farms are fenced and restrict “natural movement and migration”. Most parks in Africa are unfenced and have buffer zones around parks and reserves where the governments allow hunting of game that occur outside the boundary of the parks by selling hunting permits hunting safari companies and in turn sell packages to their clients. Yes, the communities benefit from these concessions, and governments collect revenue of which only a small percentage is spent on conservation.
This brings us to the ethics of these operations, and the hunt itself. I grew up in South Africa and spend most of my time outdoors in and on the farms and reserves mentioned, and have been involved in conservation for most of my adult life. I do not have a problem with hunting but the ethics of it. I don’t want to say that all professional hunting operations are unethical, but it opens doors for unethical practices. If you hunt on foot, walk and stalk, shoot your animal, no problem, but I have been around for long enough to know that is not always what happens in practice. Often the hunt is done from a vehicle. Lions are lured out of reserves by dragging carcasses along fence lines, or by leaving a carcass just outside the boundaries of the protected area. That is what happened to Cecil the lion back in 2015. Leopards are very elusive and difficult to find, and if a client comes out on safari for just a few days, the chances of finding a leopard, let alone hunt, is very challenging. A bait station is set up weeks before and the leopard habituated so that once the client arrives, there is a good chance of him getting his trophy. I don’t even want to touch on captive lion breeding.
I can carry on about the ethics of the hunt itself, but my main issue is that the game industry is a farming practice with financial benefit the main driver and not conservation. There are numerous game auctions not much different from livestock auctions. A springbok ram with 21 3/8 inch horns were recently sold for R 3, 45 million (US $ 190 000) in the Karoo and moved to the Kalahari for genetic purposes, yet another ethic topic I am afraid to touch, may be at a later stage. I just can’t see the conservation benefit here. Rhino were bred on farms and their horns harvested and stockpiled., The owners, which I will not mention, tried their best to legalize the trade in rhino horn, and in the end when they were unsuccessful, sold the rhino to African Parks, whose sole purpose is to translocate the rhino to their natural distribution range. They were willing to spend money to conserve the species and not for potential financial benefit. Maybe it is time to follow in Richard Leakey’s footsteps, he initiated the burning of all the stockpiled ivory in Kenya in 1989 and again in April 2016 when the stockpiled rhino horn were added to the fire. That is the only way to show the world that it has no value.
I just want to make it clear that the ideas and statements I made are my own and not that of the organizations I am affiliated with or was affiliated with in the past.
