Thread by @tSasRolfes

What is the connection between the African #WildlifeEconomy, legal #hunting & trophy trade, and #rhino #conservation? Here are some insights from my work as detailed in recent articles for @ConLetters @Society4ConBio @TC_Africa @africa_resource @OppGenRC & @WildlifeEconomy

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First, consider the context: African conservation’s colonial legacy, a fast-growing human population, growing economic pressure to exploit wildlands, and the recent loss of critical revenue flows to wildlife custodians caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. See
ogresearchconservation.org/african-wildli…

One source of these revenue flows is legal wildlife hunting tourism. Hunting wildlife for meat is common, but international tourists pay the most to hunt large charismatic species (e.g., the ‘Big 5’) and usually (but not always) like to take mounted specimens home as trophies.

Africa’s two most successful rhino range states, South Africa and Namibia both allow private ownership of wildlands and even some wild rhinos. This creates incentives for private landowners and local communities to protect rhinos outside of official state-protected areas.

Revenue from legal safari hunting of rhinos and other species is fed into the system that conserves wild rhinos along with several other sources. The figure below shows how the flow of money from this hunting for conservation works in South Africa and for white rhinos in Namibia.

For black rhinos in Namibia, the money earned from these legal hunts is directed to a special fund that is earmarked for rhino conservation expenses and uplifting local rural communities who help protect these dangerous animals on their land.

Managed legal hunting, for which animals are carefully selected, and which directs money into the conservation system, is quite different from illegal hunting (aka poaching) which is indiscriminate and simply removes economic value from the system.

Persistent consumer demand for rhino horn in East Asian markets continues to drive intense poaching pressure. Wild rhinos cannot survive without the use of expensive physical protection measures in the field. For more details see: [sciencedirect.com/science/articl…].

The sad reality is that most of the world’s surviving rhinos are now found in relatively confined areas where they can be well protected. Not only is this costly, but it creates another management challenge as numbers of males tend to increase to relatively undesirable levels...

Undesirably high ratios of rhino males to females create a drag on population growth and the best way to deal with this is by removing these males from confined areas. See conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11… and Supplementary material for more detail.

Arguments that legal hunting and trophy trade only make a small contribution to national income and therefore can be stopped without harming conservation and communities are grounded in ignorance of how the system works – see resourceafrica.net/reconsidering-…

To illustrate what impact a hunting ban might have on rhino conservation consider the following two conceptual diagrams, which show 1) how the social-ecological system with legal hunting has worked (see below) and then…

This is how things might look if hunting were stopped (see below – reduced rhino range, fewer animals). The reason for this is that the ratio of viewing tourists to one rhino is completely different from that of a single hunter, who makes a far greater per capita contribution.

Critiques of rhino trophy hunting tend to focus on ethical questions related to assumed hunter motivations and whether benefits should flow to private landowners in countries with legacies of socio-economic injustices. Conservation involves unavoidable trade-offs.

To explore this issue in slightly more detail please refer to this summary article: theconversation.com/how-legal-hunt…

This may be of interest to @DefraGovUK @USFWSIntl @CITES @environmentza @ConservationNa1 @ZacGoldsmith @savetherhino @RhinosIRF @UNEP @JonHutton_LHI @WWFLeadWildlife @sslieberman @TRAFFIC_WLTrade @StevenBroad14 @rhino_jo @TurgwePete @duanbiggs @CICwildlife @PERCtweets @TheEWT...

and @RachelNuwer @VFelbabBrown @CatherineSemcer @rfobar @RomanGoergen @mattwridley @DrHWeb @AdamHartScience @Nikolaj_Bi @EricavonE @AmyDickman4 @prjepson @biosec_erc @brambuscher @SianSullivanUK @AHuebschle @Arie_Trouwborst @sheree_bega @BrentLindeque @DrWillFowlds @NikiRust...

and @KSAfricaHack @IvoVegter @EdStoddardZA @FattebertJ @PamelaAnneDolan @TruConserve @ulrik_gh @HeynekeGerhard @AngusGMiddleton @MaxiPiaLouis1 @AfricanWCC @kevinleosmith @MattyFairfax @HayleySClements @EnTembo @Melissa_De_Kock @vkmuposhi @CommunitiesIWT @PCLG_IIED @mikemusgrave