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That is an impala, or as we call it in South Africa a springbok,
I shot one dead when I was ten years old and I hated it.
I hated seeing such a beautiful wild animal die because of me.
Hunting clearly wasn't for me, so my first hunt was also my last.
Since then Africa's majestic wildlife has become of almost
spiritual importance to me.
There's something quite liberating about looking into the eyes of an animal that
could kill you.
And it's humbling to see an elephant family interact and
think that perhaps it's us who have much to learn from them.
So there is no cause I feel stronger about than conservation, and
then something happened that really upped the stakes, Cecil the lion, remember that?
A global news storm, a hunt gone wrong, the wrong lion shot,
a famous lion, Cecil, star of BBC documentaries.
The shooter, an American dentist called Walter Palmer, the reaction.
>> Walter fucking Palmer.
>> How fucking demented this mother fucker is.
>> May you fucking burn to death.
>> I want somebody to take fucking revenge.
>> What would happen [INAUDIBLE].
>> Sick son of a bitch.
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> I know, that was ugly, but
welcome to the divisive world of trophy hunting.
Every year thousands of foreigners go on organized hunts in Africa,
they take home with them the animal head or trophy to hang on their wall.
They pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for
these trips, the costs include a fee for the animal shot,
as well as professional hunting guides, trackers, accommodation, and travel costs.
Now it's easy to hate this, but what if I told you that hunting can be good,
that it can help protect Africa's wildlife, preserving scenes like this.
I know, counterintuitive right, and today I'm not going to
convince you not to hate photos like this one if you already do.
And I'm also not going to get into a debate about the ethics of killing
animals, whether they be lions or chickens.
Emotionally, I wish we didn't need hunting, but
objectively right now regulated trophy hunting is a good thing for
Africa, there are three reasons why, let's start.
First, resources, conservation doesn't happen by accident,
it's an intentional, managed process requiring resources.
Huge areas of land, fences, water supplies, managers and ecologists, and
squads of armed rangers to protect against illegal poaching,
this all costs money in a part of the world where people are very poor.
It's hard to expect people who live like this to care about nature conservation
before their basic human needs have been met, food, shelter, financial security.
Which brings us to the second point, the biggest killer of wildlife by far,
anywhere in the world, is human encroachment.
Wild habitats are destroyed to create farmland, animals are hunted for meat,
remember in Africa many people eat protein starved diets and cannot afford meat.
Farmers in America might complain about the occasional wolf,
well try being a farmer in Africa, hyenas, leopards, pythons, crocodiles.
Elephants are shot because they trample crops,
lions killed because they eat livestock.
Hippos offer danger when they're alive, but
can feed a whole village if they're dead.
And this problem is only getting much bigger, Africa's population is exploding,
look at this chart, epic performance from Africa over the next 100 years.
So there has to be an economic incentive to conserve wildlife,
and hunting can provide it.
By setting hunting quotas below the animal population growth rate and
by targeting older male animals,
hunting can be both sustainable and profitable and that gives landowners
an incentive to convert from commercial farming to game reserves.
It works, since regulated rhino hunting was introduced in South Africa,
the white rhino population has grown tenfold.
The best example is Namibia's Community Conservancy Program, Namibia's gone and
given ownership and management of wild land over to local communities.
Income from hunting and
tourism goes directly into conservation expenses, local communities gain income,
jobs, meat, these conservancies now cover an area larger than England.
Okay, so then what about the other option for generating income, photo tourism?
I long for the day when tourism can carry the weight of sustaining
Africa's wild areas but we're a long way off from that.
Tourism is a large industry but it's concentrated in a few areas,
it needs to be safe and close to airports, whereas trophy hunters
will go anywhere and pay top dollar to pursue their passion.
Let's look again at those Namibian conservancies, they're clustered up in
the north of the country and on this map they've been color coded to show which of
them are currently profitable, green, and which are loss making, red.
Now let's simulate what would happen if we removed the benefits of hunting,
the map changes green to red.
And those red areas, they'd go back to what they were 30 years ago, cattle farms,
land over-grazed to dust, so you see,
hunting is sustaining remote wild places that many people have never heard of.
And now, now hunting can help pay for
protection against a new crisis, the rampant illegal wildlife trade
driven by demand from China and Vietnam for rhino horn, ivory, and lion bone.
Rhino horn is now worth more than cocaine or gold, and
that means these incredible animals
having their faces hacked off,
sometimes while they're still alive, and
this must never be okay, we have to be better than this.
Unlike hunting, this killing is unregulated, unsustainable, and
totally out of control, and we need every conservation tool available to prevent it.
Now not all hunting is good, as in any system there are problems and
abuses, and canned hunting is one of those.
Animals, often lions, bred in captivity so that they can be shot in staged hunts,
these lions are tame, they can't even hunt for themselves.
They're taken away from their mothers when they're three days old so
that the mothers will breed again and
again, real lions are raised by their mothers for at least 18 months.
Hunters need to take responsibility for
stopping this because it's their dollars that keep it going.
Other hunting systems may be run with incompetence or corruption,
meaning the benefits don't flow to local people.
But this means we need to seek improvement,
not shut the whole thing down, and right now this is real.
Since Cecil the lion, 45 airlines have banned the transport of animal
trophies and several Western governments are considering import bans,
the whole thing is under threat.
And as we saw in Namibia, a knee-jerk,
uninformed ban could lead to the loss of huge areas of wild land.
And then, what about the 184,000 people
who live on Namibia's conservancies, who's thinking of them?
What about African citizens of other countries who live with and
support trophy hunting?
Almost all the anti-hunting backlash comes from wealthy people.
It's so ironic, it sometimes feels like the two things that Facebook
warriors around the world care about when it comes to Africa are human poverty and
wild animals, yet
the anti-hunting campaign could hurt both human poverty and wild animals.
So I dislike hunting, but
the majesty of Africa's wildlife has been one of the highlights of my life,
I must do what I can to preserve it for future generations.
That means making hard and informed choices and
it may also mean having to cooperate and coexist with those who are different from
me, those whom I may never understand, in pursuit of a shared goal.
I hope that this talk has helped you to see some of
the complexities of conservation and how hunting can play a role.
And finally, I really hope that everyone in this room one day has
the chance to come to Africa, have the holiday of a lifetime,
live to the rhythm of nature, shoot with a camera, not with a gun.
You will support jobs and conservation, and
if enough of you do that one day we won't need to kill to protect.
Thank you.
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