In October, the Zimbabwe government cleared a Minnesota hunter of wrongdoing for killing a lion last summer that wore a radio collar.
Walter Palmer of Eden Prairie, Minn., killed the lion while hunting with a guide on private property in Zimbabwe.
Palmer, a dentist and avid big game hunter, killed the lion with bow and arrow. Bowhunting requires a hunter to get very close to his quarry, improving an animal’s chance of detecting and eluding a hunter. The odds of success for a bowhunter are considerably less than for hunting with a firearm.
Palmer argued that he possessed all the necessary permits, and that his involvement in the hunt was completely legal, ethical and aboveboard. The Zimbabwe government agreed. Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri, Zimbabwe’s minister of Environment, Water and Climate, said that Palmer’s papers were in order and that Palmer was free to return to the country.
The most remarkable part of this story was the viral lynch mob that mobilized against Palmer in a breathtakingly short time. People who otherwise had no knowledge or sincere interest in the lion whipped themselves into a frenzy under the cloak of anonymity. They bullied Palmer, threatened his and his family’s lives and hounded him so badly that he had to close his practice and go into hiding for a short time.
Cyber mobs did the same to another hunter that paid $350,000 to kill an endangered black rhinoceros in Nambia, even though every penny went to the Conservation Trust Fund for Namibia’s Black Rhino.
They were proud of it, too.
Dale Hall, president of Ducks Unlimited and a fish and wildlife biologist for 40 years, was also the former director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In an editorial he penned in the November/December issue of Ducks Unlimited magazine, Hall wrote that wildlife management is about managing entire wildlife populations and not about individual members of the population.
“The astonishing thing … was the strong outcry over the killing of one animal when these same people have been complacent about the threat posed to all of Africa’s wildlife by poaching for the bush meat, ivory and rhino horn trades,” Hall wrote.
People who are not educated in the science and economics of fish and wildlife conservation bemoaned a rich dentist spending $50,000 to kill a lion. One columnist opined that Palmer could have donated that money to a library or a shelter or to some other noble cause instead of spending it on a hunt. That assumes, of course, that Palmer does not already donate to domestic causes. It also assumes that a citizen hasn’t the right to spend his money as he pleases.
Hall also wrote about the United States model of fish and wildlife conservation, which is funded almost entirely by hunters.
Arkansas and Missouri are unique in this respect because all citizens in the two states contribute through statewide, one-eighth of one percent conservation sales taxes. Still, hunters in Arkansas and Missouri contribute far and above more than non-hunting and non-fishing citizens by purchasing state hunting licenses and federal duck stamps, and paying federal excise taxes through the purchase of firearms, ammunition, hunting optics, apparel and all kinds of other gear covered under the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act. They contribute even more through membership in Ducks Unlimited, National Wild Turkey Federation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and Quail Forever.
That’s just for hunting. The fishing chapter reads the same.
“As a result, no sport-managed species has ever gone extinct in the United States of America,” Hall wrote.
American hunters have exported the same tenets to Africa, Hall added, where sport hunting funds a significant percentage of wildlife conservation.
“In Tanzania, for example, revenues from sport hunting are nearly equal to the entire appropriation of funds available for national parks and wildlife management,” Hall wrote. “This has allowed the doubling of acreage protected and managed for native wildlife.”
In December, the USFWS declared one African lion subspecies endangered and another subspecies threatened. Dan Ashe, the current USFWS director, said the new standards will be a lot harder for hunters to bring lion remains into the U.S.
“It does not bar those imports outright, but it will raise the bar substantially,” Ashe said, adding that the controversy over Palmer’s lion did not influence the new rules.
France and Australia already ban the importation of lions. Great Britain and the European Union are considering similar bans.
By choking the flow of private money to Africa’s legal hunting trade, the U.S. and other nations diminish their influence over wildlife conservation in poor nations that don’t emphasize natural resource management.
Individual animals might benefit, but African wildlife as a whole will not.