BY JOHN NASH

Last week, US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum fired a polite paper dart at UK Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds (our Minister in charge of UK Rural Affairs, who unfortunately doesn’t understand that hunting is one of the most important rural management functions). He urged her to reconsider the fraudulent Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Act 2025. Sadly, nobody told him that the wheel of the UK government is still turning, but the hamster fell out long ago.

Being an American and having no concept of Labour’s stale and vulgar cat-litter of a class war, he emphasised that while the bill may be “well-intentioned, it risks undermining conservation efforts not only in the United States, but in communities around the world. Legal, well-regulated hunting, particularly trophy hunting, plays a vital role in supporting healthy wildlife populations, restoring habitat, and supporting local economies. The proposed UK ban risks undermining decades of globally recognised, science‑based wildlife management practices that have helped restore numerous species from the brink.” He highlighted the existing CITES framework that provides a global mechanism to raise and solve concerns, and made clear his department’s alarm at the direction Britain is taking under Sir Queef Starmer. It is obviously also far beyond American comprehension that any modern country, let alone Blighty, can be led by somebody so lacking in direction that he couldn’t even find his own bum using both hands, Grey’s Anatomy, and a road map.

The letter from across the pond joined similar appeals from the governments of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, and Canada, all of whom argue that the UK’s proposed legislation is out of step with modern international conservation management. The strongest criticism has come from southern African nations, where leaders and conservationists have labelled the UK’s proposed ban as “neo-colonial” and “racist.”

In countries like Namibia and Zimbabwe, trophy hunting contributes up to 70% of conservation funding in some regions, supporting anti-poaching units, veterinary services, and community development. Banning imports of legally hunted trophies would strip these programs of vital income, potentially leading to increased poaching and habitat degradation. None of that counts for much in the Westminster asylum, where talk outperforms walk.

Nor does a 2024 report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which found trophy hunting generates over $200 million annually (in actual money, not Miliband rainbows and unicorns) across sub-Saharan Africa, supporting more than 50,000 jobs. In Zimbabwe alone, hunting revenues fund 60% of the country’s national parks budget. Meanwhile, a 2025 YouGov poll found that while 62% of UK respondents support a ban on trophy imports, only 18% were aware of the role such hunting plays in African conservation financing.

It’s not as though there is a lack of qualified evidence, Dear Reader:

Dr Francis Vorhies, director of the African Wildlife Economy Institute at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Research Visitor at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford, said: “There are already international agreements that govern and support a sustainable trade in trophy hunting. Britain should not come in, overwrite these rules, and hurt African communities and animal conservation.”

Dr Shylock Muyengwa, Programs Director at Resource Africa, a charity supporting rural African communities that use their natural resources to sustain livelihoods, said: “Colonialism is over — yet British politicians still forget to respect the will of African communities. There’s not a shred of evidence to justify a ban. It’s just counterproductive virtue signalling.”

Dr Mike Musgrave, Conservation Leadership Faculty at the ALU School of Wildlife Conservation, said: “African wildlife is not endangered by trophy hunting and the attempt by the UK government to interfere with the revenue from sustainable hunting is unwelcome. It’s the last gasp of an entitled elite who thinks African wildlife conservation still falls under the jurisdiction of the Colonial Office. It does not.”

Dr Dan Challender, Research Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science (ICCS) and Oxford Martin School, said: “While the UK is entitled to adopt such measures, it is likely that a hunting trophy import ban would serve to undermine successful conservation models in sub-Saharan Africa by reducing revenue flows to rural economies. It would also likely negatively impact the benefits that marginalised rural communities receive from trophy hunting programmes. A more evidence-based approach is required.”

Dr Wiseman Ndlovu, Programmes Manager & Post Doctoral Fellow at the African Wildlife Economy Institute, University of Stellenbosch, said: “Banning trophy hunting could lead to a crisis in rural economies that rely on it to create jobs and stimulate growth in related industries such as tourism, game meat production, and artisanal markets. I cannot begin to imagine how the wildlife economy can sustain itself without the crucial support from trophy hunting, that promotes both ecological and economic sustainability.”

Dr Adam Hart, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Gloucestershire and a conservation scientist, said: “If lawmakers want to help conservation then they should listen to the many voices telling them that trophy bans are a bad idea. On the other hand, if they want to ban trophy hunting then they should do so in the UK.”

Dr Amy Dickman, conservation biologist in the Department of Biology and at Pembroke College, Oxford University, said: “Trophy hunting occurs across the globe from stags in Scotland to markhor in Pakistan and polar bears in Canada. It is not threatening a single species, generates revenue for local people, and helps reduce major threats such as habitat loss and poaching.”

Dilys Roe, Principal Researcher at the IIED and chair of the IUCN Sustainable Use Group, said: “Trophy hunting — while many may find it distasteful — does not pose a threat to the conservation of any species, and indeed it often provides a rare source of revenue that supports conservation.”

Sadly, none of this means anything to our beloved leader Starmer, who does his robotic best to emulate the oration of his hero, Leon Trotsky, only to end up sounding like a man with an icepick stuck in his head.

Meanwhile, Labour Minister for Animals, Baroness Hayman, oblivious to silly matters like biology, evidence, or science, is “engaging with stakeholders to ensure that we can implement a robust ban”. And what stakeholders they are – if you want to see them, the parasitic Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting (CBTH) can shed some light on the subject for you – unlike its secretive financial affairs that are as far from daylight as the inside of a well-digger’s colon.

The helpful parade of activists on the CBTH knife-less mugging website is a veritable God’s waiting room of faded careers. Once upon a time, they were all important public performers of one kind or another, but now, much reduced, they have become lobotomised, pathetic, furious performing monkeys, serving their organ-grinder master, the Goebbelsian hate-monger, Eduardo Gonçalves, a propagandist who will grind your organ like no other. Closely resembling a Florida sheriff’s rogues’ gallery of deadbeats, they are the saddest pages of sorry, self-serving, smug, virtue-signalling celebs, luvvies and has-beens you have ever seen. If you have children who dream of becoming online influencers, please use their images to show the young what can go wrong when delusion sinks into the mud of real life.

Pray, who among you will tell these gullible simian eco-chuggers that, while they jump up and down in their ridicu-pious CBTH T-shirts, mesmerised by Eduardo’s organ-cranking, they are being abused — used to intercept public donations that could be helping people and wildlife in Africa, but instead, they help divert it into Eduardo’s pink china piggy? It may seem cruel to tell them the truth because, sadly, most of them appear to have an unshakeable, unblinking, childlike belief that they stand on a shining ethical mountain.

While BASC and Fieldsports Channel reported the matter with some sanity, others, shaking their tins, didn’t. On cue, the UK Mirror, Gonçalves’ vuvuzela, headlined the news of the US Interior Secretary’s polite letter with a spoiler crafted from Wily Eduardo’s own nasty rodent droppings, “Donald Trump team trying to bully UK into scrapping ban on sick trophy hunting”, while The Born Free Foundation (BFF), no doubt more concerned about conserving its £7.5 million in annual donations “to protect animals”, let loose its resident animal rights (AR) soul, Dr Fishvet Jones, who hastily donned his green incontinence pants and shed copious floods of charitears with the more academic, “A comprehensive ban would not only reflect our values; it would also encourage the development of non-lethal, non-extractive, community-centred conservation models such as responsible ecotourism, and initiatives such as Dr Ralph Chami’s Living Nature Economy Framework (LNEF)”.

Unfortunately, Dear Reader, BFF claims that community and LNEF opinion support their infantile chuggery are fake news. The real community-centred opinion, in real Africa, was mentioned above by Dr Muyengwa, an actual African, “There’s not a shred of evidence to justify a ban. It’s just counterproductive virtue signalling.” And BFF’s “LNEF claim” is another rubber chicken — the LNEF actually supports sustainable use, as stated in their declaration, “When living nature is recognised as productive economic infrastructure, the model traces how new revenue and stabilisation channels emerge, reducing debt pressure, lowering sovereign risk, strengthening resilience, ensuring equity, sustaining growth, while protecting and restoring nature”.

Meanwhile, on the vast hunting grounds of Southern Africa, where real organisations like the Sustainable Use Coalition (SUCO) get on with their important, hard work, and suntanned farmers have raised twenty million extra actual wild animals, saving them from any danger of extinction, reality is something entirely different. There, the Afrikaners have a more apt description of the Ban, the CBTH and the BFF…

“Die brommer is koning op sy eie mishoop”… (The blowfly is king of its own dungheap).

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John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa. John is the co-author of Dear Townies with the Editor.