An extract from the Game Rangers Assoc. of Africa news letter

Dr. Laurence Frank, from the University of California, Berkeley and the Wildlife Conservation Society, has studied predators in Kenya for 37 years.

He runs the Living With Lions project, working on lion conservation outside of national parks. He is not a big game hunter.

Once internationally famous for its magnificent wildlife, Kenya is in a conservation crisis, due largely to the cynical and corrupt influence of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the US Humane Society and other animal rights groups which spend millions to prevent rational conservation policies that would benefit both wildlife and impoverished rural Africans.

Seventy percent of Kenya’s wildlife has died in the last thirty years, strangled slowly in snares and sold as cheap, unidentified meat. Even animals in national parks are in serious decline due to poaching and habitat destruction on their boundaries. Lions are being speared and poisoned into extinction.

In that same period, South Africa and Namibia saw an immense increase in wildlife numbers, as over ten thousand ranches found that wildlife for trophy hunting is more profitable than cattle. Wildlife in Zimbabwe quadrupled with the growth of hunting on large conservancies, until Mugabe’s ‘land reform’ resulted in most of it being snared. Wildlife continues to flourish in Tanzania, Botswana, and Zambia, where hunting contributes significantly to national economies.

Sentimental love of animals is a luxury affordable by comfortable westerners, but meaningless to the world’s poor and hungry. With ever-increasing human numbers, wildlife in Africa is doomed unless it produces income for rural people. That is not possible in Kenya because retrogressive policies, bought by tragically naive American animal lovers, ensure that rural people resent wildlife instead of profiting from it.

For rural Kenyans, wildlife is an unmitigated nuisance: lions kill precious livestock, wildebeest and zebra compete with cattle for grazing, elephants and buffalo destroy crops and occasionally kill people. While tourism brings wealth to hotels and tour companies, virtually nothing reaches the rural people who bear the costs of living with wildlife. Telling a Masai herdsman that he should cherish wildlife is like telling an urban American that he should cherish muggers and murderers.

Although unpalatable to many urban westerners, carefully regulated trophy hunting is the one avenue through which wildlife can bring serious money to rural Africans. Foreigners pay over two hundred million dollars for hunting safaris elsewhere in Africa, taking old males with impressive horns, tusks or manes, animals that are no longer of importance to the population (as any man my age knows all too well). In North America, Europe, and southern Africa, carefully managed hunting has greatly increased wildlife populations because people value them.

Tanzania has set aside over 100,000 square miles of wilderness for hunting.

It has more wildlife than any country in Africa, and half the world’s remaining lions. In Botswana, a very few male lions are shot every year, earning $65,000 each for the rural community in which the lion was taken, and half that amount for the national conservation agency. The community profit would pay for 350 cattle taken by lions, or support teachers, nurses or wildlife rangers. Lions and all the associated wildlife are a source of income, to be valued and protected.

In Kenya, that lion is only a cattle-killing nuisance, to be poisoned and left to rot in the sun. A rural community would earn far more from a single old male impala shot as a trophy than a poacher earns from snaring an entire breeding herd of females and young for bushmeat.

Kenya shut down legal hunting in 1977, when the world was outraged by hunters’ reports of industrial scale poaching of elephants for ivory, abetted by high government officials. The ban silenced the hunters and the elephant slaughter continued. In the absence of the hunters’ anti-poaching patrols, bushmeat snaring exploded. Vast regions of this country that teemed with large mammals thirty years ago are now barren of any animal bigger than a rabbit.

In spite of plummeting wildlife numbers, that failed policy has been maintained by foreign animal rights groups. Whenever real conservationists try to reform Kenyan policy to reverse the decline in wildlife, these groups launch disinformation campaigns in the local press, relying on racial resentment combined with outright fabrication: “Rich white foreigners want to kill all the animals in our national parks; only rich whites will profit from huntingâ€. They hire mobs to disrupt public policy meetings and fill the press with nonsensical claims that hunters would indiscriminately slaughter all game.

It is widely believed that these groups rely heavily on bribery, spending huge sums to buy sympathetic media coverage for their propaganda, and to buy influence at the highest levels of government. In a young democracy struggling against entrenched corruption, large scale bribery by westerners is stunningly irresponsible.

Worst of all, these ideologues apparently do not seem to care that millions of animals die wretchedly in snares, so long as none are shot for profit.

They boast to their American supporters that their donations prevent hunting in Kenya, never telling them that, as a result, there is little wildlife left, either.

The animal rights crowd is about control, like any other liberal. They profess love of animals but are just anti-hunting.

A good report.

One of the most well written and well thought out articles I have seen in awhile. Is anyone listening (besides us hunters)?

unfortunately, you wont see this in or on any of the major news outlets let alone discovery, national geographic or the animal planet.

This is very well said.

Yes, this is very well said.

I copied it to print off for my non-hunting friends and family.

Actually, National Geographic has occasionally discussed the value of trophy hunting in the conservation of African wildlife. For example, I remember an article I read a few years ago about cheetahs where the author explained that one reason Namibia has as many cheetahs as it does is becuse cheetah conservationmists have worked at convincing ranchers that they can actually make money by refraining from poisoning the cats and letting hunters shoot and pay for them instead. I entirely agree, however, that this very basic concept does not get the coverage it ought in the "nature show genre."

An amazing and well written article. It needs to be copied and sent on to every anti-hunting and bunny hugging group known to man, as well as to the liberal, drive-by news media.

That is excellently worded. I will print it and save it to use in future "discussions" on the issue.

We all should copy and paste this article all over the Internet. Let the truth be known!

Thanks Mich. I agree with the comments it is one of the best written attacks on the "preservationalists" read on the net.

I have certainly copied it to NitroExpress.com and will to some other forums as well which I visit.

Do you have a link for this, Bwanamich? I would like to quote some parts of this in an article I am writing.
Thanks.

http://www.gameranger.org/gra_objectives.htm
try this

Actually it hasn't been posted on the website yet. It cam as an email newsletter to a friend who is a member. If you look at their website in a few days under news and cleftstick it should appear