Hunting

[okie]

...A jeep load of Mala Mala guests each paying $ 4000 per night stay x 8 people on the land Rover = $ 32000 x 16 land rovers on the property every day on the game drive = $ 512 000 per day x 365 days a year = $ 1.8 Billion ..........................................

Hmmm........ Hey , are we not stretching things a bit here According to their website , maximum rates is $1025 per night , with lowest rate $370 ....

Just asking

[Polentswa]

Okie ..Correct ..but on your figure do the Maths ..Photographic tourism EATS hunting for breakfast for contributing to Conservation funding ..Rich I would say that all PPH's PUSH THE ENVELOPE ..Shoot with Spotlights (Nobody will know , Shoot from Bakkies ..Open secret (Look at how their vehicles are set up with padding over the roof of a Bakkie ..The last Wild lion was shot in the E Cape in the 1840's yet all E Cape PH's offer LION hunting ..Those Free State Caged Lion Breeders cant keep up with demand ...Luring carnivores out of reserves like Kruger and Etosha is common practice ..Funny don't see this abuse in Photographic Tourism ..Ok there was a story from 1980 about of an over zealous Photographer who caused a Bateleur Pair to abandon the nest and eggs in N Cape ...

[Richprins]

Without R6bn hunting industry SA game bubble to burst
Jun 29 2015 16:19




Kevin Crowley of Bloomberg wrote a piece looking at South Africa’s hunting industry and how it is fuelling the game price bubble. And the majority of social media points to a ban on captive hunting, especially when it comes to lions. But in this response, Biznews community member and independent environmental services professional Peddy Bam argues the case for the captive hunting industry.

By Peddy Bam

I do not want to be involved once more in this controversy because generally you are dealing with ignorant people who do not have the faintest knowledge of wildlife management.

Lets just take the captive lion hunting industry as an example.

There are approximately 3 500 lions that are kept in enclosures to breed lions for hunting.

Every year as the population of wild lions decreases, and it is a dramatic decrease, 75% in the past 20 years, these 3 500 captive lions form a higher percentage of the total African lion population.

Every breeder of captive lions has to be licensed. He is producing a product, which if it is not good, will not sell.

The breeders look after their lions extremely well, for obvious reasons.

The hunters are aware of the fact that they are hunting captive bred lions.

So you ban captive lion hunting, and 3,500 lions will disappear in a few years. These lions are very costly to maintain, as they are not for viewing, most of them will be destroyed.

Say these captive lions at present account for 55% of the total South African lion population, in ten years time they will probably represent 75% of the total.

These lions are a very important gene pool to save the African lion for future generations.

Just to mention two of the greatest wildlife conservationists of the past sixty years, Ian Player and Ron Thompson, both in favour of hunting, because they had an incredible knowledge and experience of wildlife management.

Just think about it.



http://www.fin24.com/BizNews/Without-R6 ... t-20150629

[Richprins]

After a clean kill, African game-hunters defend the right to shoot
2015-07-07 09:28

Iwamanzi - Adri Kitshoff aims her gun at the antelope and pulls the trigger. Killed in an instant, the animal collapses to the ground.

The hunter rests her chin on the gun and closes her eyes in a silent prayer of thanks that the animal did not suffer.

Kitshoff, aged 57, has shot many such animals before but, as she goes to the corpse, her hands begin to tremble.

"If I would ever become blas when I've taken an animal, that day would be my last day hunting," said Kitshoff, stroking the dead blesbok's white face and brown coat.

Kitshoff, director of Phasa, the professional hunters association of South Africa, knows that not everyone shares her passion for hunting.

Yet she is determined to prove that hunters in South Africa are an integral part of conservation efforts.

Her argument is a simple one, hunters come to Phasa from all over the world willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to track and kill buffalo, lion and elephants in African countries where trophy hunting is legal.

These hunters pay big money in order to hunt.

A 20-day lion hunt, for example, can cost $90 000.

Some of the money goes back into the reserves, in what hunters describe as a virtuous cycle that enables people to maintain large tracts of land where animals can roam free.

"If practised in a sustainable manner, that is to say by not killing more animals that nature creates hunting protects wildlife and the environment," says Hermann Meyeridricks, the president of Phasa.

"Without sustainable use, there is no incentive to preserve vast natural areas, not for landowners or for the people."

In South Africa, hunting is only allowed on private reserves, not in national parks like the Kruger.

On a cool, sunny afternoon in June, Kitshoff spent hours tracking different animals in the Iwamanzi reserve in North West Province.

Her code of ethics dictates that she does not shoot out of the Land Cruiser as it crosses the savannah.

As a result, several potential prey have fled before Kitshoff succeeds in approaching one close enough on foot.

Finally, she spots the perfect animal: an old solitary male, distinguishable by the white circles on his horns indicating his advanced age, and soon it is dead with a single shot.

"Hunters are not violent people who like to kill," said Meyeridricks.

"Hunting is an experience that brings you closer to nature. You must know how to interpret the bush. You have to immerse yourself to the point of being part of the ecosystem."

Despite their efforts to explain their side of the argument, hunters are facing more and more pressure.

This year, two major airlines, South African Airways and Emirates Airlines, banned transport of elephant, rhino, lion and tiger trophies.

In March 2015, Australia also outlawed the import of lion trophies.

Such policies make hunters furious.

"Africa doesn't have the luxury to argue these things from a very isolated European perspective," said Meyeridricks.

He says that it is not only the animals that need to be taken into account but also the surrounding communities who benefit from the hunting industry.

"For wildlife to manage to survive and to thrive on this continent, African communities need to have some sort of benefit, and the only benefit they can have from wildlife is financial."

Meat for eating

According to the South African environment minister, the legal hunting industry generates about R6.2bn a year.

Several of the large environmental organisations, including the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), support hunting, as long as the outfits follow legal, sustainable and ethical practises.

Back at Iwamanzi, the blesbok is positioned on its belly, with its legs folded under the body, and its snout resting on the ground.

Taking her place behind the animal, Kitshoff poses for a photo.

Afterwards, the antelope will go to slaughtering facilities on the farm, where its hide and skull will be used for trophies and its meat will be processed ready to be eaten.

It is photos like these that have earned Kitshoff, Hermann and other hunters death threats against them and their children.

It is a hatred that they say is bred out of ignorance that they hope to overcome.

"I have an option, I can go to a grocery store and pick my meat, or I can come and have a wonderful hunting experience," said Kitshoff.

"Look at animals being taken to abattoirs, and the stress they go through, whereas the animal I've taken today didn't even know I was around, didn't even know he died."


http://www.news24.com/Green/News/After- ... t-20150707

[Flutterby]

If only all hunters and hunting outfits practised the same code of ethics.

[Toko]

http://www.timeslive.co.za/ilive/2015/0 ... enue-iLIVE

Hunting isn't conservation, it is 'killing for revenue': iLIVE
Adam Cruise, Conservation Action Trust | 14 Juli, 2015 11:28

The World Bank has allocated $700,000 bolster trophy hunting of elephants and lions in Mozambique as a way to preserve wildlife.

“Hunting, when properly regulated and when revenues are distributed to communities in and around parks,” said Madji Seck, a spokesperson at the bank’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, “is an important tool for the sustainable management of parks and natural assets,”

However, in Mozambique elephants are in a precipitous decline. Between 2009 and 2014, their numbers fell from an estimated 20,000 to 10,300, according to a survey by the Wildlife Conservation Society as part of the Great Elephant Census.

The World Bank “is driven by a utilitarian perspective on the consumptive use of wild species,” said Phyllis Lee, zoologist with the Amboseli Trust for Elephants, in Kenya.

The idea of consumptive, or sustainable, use of wildlife, which is written into the Convention on Biodiversity, is that it makes sense for humans to benefit from animals in ways that don’t undermine their habitats and populations.

But, as Lee said, “it now appears to some conservation practitioners that sustainable use has been hijacked to represent [sport] hunting.”

She points to the recent admission of the Dallas Safari Club into the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world body that focuses on valuing and conserving nature by ensuring effective and equitable governance of its use, and the sport hunting club’s controversial auction of a permit to kill an endangered black rhino in Namibia, as “the worst possible way of allowing a hunting voice to speak for conservation.

“It’s obviously not speaking for species preservation,” Lee said. “It’s killing for revenue.”

Ben Carter, executive director with the Dallas Safari Club, said there’s a biological reason for hunting. “It's based on a fundamental premise of modern wildlife management: Populations matter; individuals don't,” he said.

But Will Travers, President of the Born Free Foundation, argues: “Carter’s narrow utilitarian view has wider moral implications which cannot be ignored.

“Individuals matter, he said. “Each one may have survival knowledge to pass on or cultural intelligence, important for social cohesion. But individuals also matter because they have a right to life. They are not the pawns of one species—our own—bent on playing God and dressing it up as modern wildlife management.”

In an interview with CNN on May 20, Jeffrey Flocken, North America Regional Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), said that “from a biological perspective, trophy hunting not only flies in the face of a precautionary approach to wildlife management but in some cases has also been found to undermine it.

“Hunters are not like natural predators, Flocken said. “They target the largest specimens, with the biggest tusks, manes, antlers, or horns.”

Faced with losses of their elephants and other animals, Botswana and Kenya have banned big-game sport hunting.

In April 2014, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service announced the temporary suspension of all imports of sport-hunted elephant trophies from Zimbabwe and Tanzania, citing concern that the two countries showed “a significant decline in the elephant population and concluded that sport hunting of elephants in Zimbabwe and Tanzania “is not sustainable and is not currently supporting conservation efforts that contribute towards the recovery of the species.”

In March, USFWS made the ban on elephant trophies from Zimbabwe permanent. Corruption was cited as one of the main reasons.

Australia has banned the import of trophy-hunted lions, while the European Union has just ordered the ban on elephant hunting trophies from Tanzania and Mozambique because of the threat posed to the animals by poachers.

Recently a number of airlines, South African Airways, Lufthansa, British Airways, Iberia and Air Emirates cargo divisions, announced embargoes on transporting sport-hunting trophies. They join Air France, KLM, Singapore Airways, and Qantas who have had the ban in place for sometime.

These are promising signs, but, said IFAW’s Jeffrey Flocken, given the gravity of the poaching crisis, authorities such as the World Bank “need to catch on to what the rest of the world already knows—that killing animals to save them is not conservation.”

[Richprins]

“Hunters are not like natural predators, Flocken said. “They target the largest specimens, with the biggest tusks, manes, antlers, or horns.”

Legal hunting does not significantly impact on numbers, and hunting farm owners are not stupid!

The old males are past their prime, and they make sure breeding stock are left ok as far as possible, for the most part.

Natural predators don't give a hoot!

[PennyinSA]

Perhaps the head of Phasa has had death threats but I can tell you that there are hard working rangers out there who have exposed the luring and baiting of trophy animals out of reserves who have also had death threats on them and their families so it is a matter of public perception as to whose life would be more in danger as I reckon that its more likely to be be a ranger working in the bush than anyone else.

[Flutterby]

This challenge was posted on Facebook by a professional hunter - Ivan Carter:



This is a response from Dereck and Beverly Joubert - wildlife conservationists and film-makers:

We've been sent this offer from Ivan Carter a few times so thought we'd respond properly.

Dear Ivan,
This economic case is intriguing and worth unpacking, scientifically, and politely. There is a blend of economics and ‘experience’ or emotion in your note and I will attempt to separate them.

1) We have done much of this list already. Most guests in eco tourism camps go out each day and do what most hunters do, except of course the experience is different, they sometimes actually walk more than trophy hunters do and all leave the wildlife intact.
During the period 1995 to 2003 I took notes on trophy hunting in what was called Area 6 (Linyanti Selinda) in Botswana and between 90 and 95% of animals were shot from vehicles, so very little walking and stalking was involved. This of course was illegal but this discussion is about viability not infringements.

2) The photographic tourist with a camera, gets up close enough to take a decent image with a 300mm lens which is about 30% closer than a hunter has to with a high powered rifle and a telescopic sight.

3) It’s a misnomer that each buffalo you stalk you pay $3,000 for. This makes a basic assumption error that once you photograph the buffalo you cannot take another photograph of it, either that day, the next or ever again. An image taken and a bullet have two completely different outcomes. The argument presented also assumes that while the buffalo may live for another 15 years no one else can visit, pay the fees or photograph the buffalo. Great Plains provides free cameras in most of its camps and the resulting statistics are revealing: most people take about 1,000 images a day. With a burn rate (those that are not keepers) of 50% that implies 500 photographic trophies per day per person) or per couple! It is not good enough to equate one photograph to one bullet. One bullet ends the potential. I would argue that each photograph gets taken back to the visitor’s circle of friends and serves as a brochure for more travellers to visit that same buffalo. One bullet? End of that cycle.
We did a survey in Savuti in Botswana once and calculated the value of a male lion dead (as a trophy) versus its value as a eco tourism asset. It is complicated but the dead value was then $15,000 and the live value was around $2,000,000. This is because of that basic oversight in your argument, that a photographed lion yawns at the dawn over and over for more photographs for over 10 years, attracting fees, and lodging costs and also, importantly, distributing value down the chain to airlines, wages, curios, communities, food purchases etc., (none of those were included in the $2M calculation by the way.) One bullet, ends those yawns in the sunrise forever for that lion. Today you can buy a lion hunt for about $23,000 for a male (and shockingly $9,000 for a lioness!) Who wants to shoot a lioness by the way? A rare white lion, will run you about $30,000. Who wants to shoot a rare white lion and end its life? I could run the numbers again in today’s terms and we would find a proportionate increase in live and wild value.

4) An average (seasonality notwithstanding) stay at a place in Botswana like the Zarafa Dhow Suite, or Mombo) will cost you $2,500 per day per person. If you look at the average lodgings fees for most hunting companies (I researched about 40) that compares at least to the most expensive but outstrips them in most cases (most offer accommodation at $350-$450 each.)

5) Another miscalculation is your price that goes to government. This is calculated to be less than 5% of the cost of the trophy to the ‘client’ not the 1/3 in your calculation according to three sources, not least of which was a government of Botswana study of 1999 and later a study by Animal Rights of Africa in 2008. Similar results are cropping up in IFAW and other NGO studies. In addition, its worth pointing to the costs structures in a place like Botswana where there is a guest royalty of 6% based on that bed-night fee. (15 x 5% per year for hunting, versus 3,000 x 6% per year for eco tourism in the same region at the same cost. Not even a comparison.)

6) All of the Great Plains camps do actually give $100 to communities as a conservancy or community fee as do many others, so that line item is at least equalled in your ‘offer,’... however... most hunting concessions can only service 12-15 or so hunters a year. Even on a 7 day safari, that is at best 20 clients a year. So the average hunting operation produces (by this calculation) $15,000 in community fees (given a 5 month hunting season.) From one camp like Mara Plains, at 14 guests per night for 12 months at an occupancy of 60% the community fee would be $306,000. Even if we remove from this any anti poaching contribution which on a hunting concession calculation may be $15,000 (as per your note) the total very liberal comparison is (hunting...$30,000) versus Photographic $300,000) net benefit to community and conservation.)

7) Keeping the animals alive is clearly more viable but increases exponentially if you include the extra number of animals that the live animal adds to the eco system. In the case of lions, each male lion would be adding an additional $2M each time a cub survived to adulthood and lions have an average output of about 6 in their lifetimes. (Most die naturally but those are needed to keep the system alive, vital and functioning, so don’t see this as an opportunity to say that hunters could take those destined to die, we would never know if one destined to survive would be targeted!)

8) The entire safari costs of $20,000-$25,000 you quote equates to a ten day photographic safari with Great Plains at the very minimum. That excludes flights and tips etc. However I see that if there are two people on a hunt that fee goes down by about 33% for the second person, so a trophy hunt for 2 people would be about 15% less that an average photographic safari. Hence photographic safaris in some cases already exceed the prices achieved from hunting (but again the volumes quite simply make this comparison extreme.)

9) So, yes converting that land to non hunting would probably make more money, especially if your business model that now aims at 15 people could be increased to 100 as per your request!

10)) In summary it is not possible to win any economic argument for hunting so it comes down to an emotional one. It is ironic that the hunting representatives urge everyone not to get emotional about the subject, and yet, no hunter I have ever interviewed or come across comes over to Africa ‘begrudgingly’ because he has to contribute to the task of conservation via hunting, as if he may hate the thought! No, he or she comes to Africa to get the thrill (emotional) of killing. Anyone who says its for conservation only can be saved the hardship by just writing a cheque to any of the great NGO’s saving wildlife today.

The argument for hunting gets thinner each time it is tested. Ultimately, however it may be reduced to some small game farms mainly in South Africa but certainly not in the wild.

Dereck

[Richprins]

The argument for hunting gets thinner each time it is tested. Ultimately, however it may be reduced to some small game farms mainly in South Africa but certainly not in the wild.

What a load of bull!

Hunting farms conserve land for conservation, end of story! A few large animals get shot yearly, but meanwhile trees, insects and what not are kept safe...rather than being left to the tender mercies of communities or subsistence/stock farmers and charcoal gatherers.

Also, the processing of trophies and meat provides a guaranteed annual source of income and jobs, with very few overhead costs. A win-win. There are more than 100 hunting farms in SA, extrapolate that to protected land!