BY JOHN NASH

The simple navel-lint miners of the Westminster asylum have now voted to ban the import of hunting trophies. I will try to put this into context so that readers might understand the true horror of this crass demonstration of arrogant, neo-colonial folly.   

The “debate” on Friday 17th March was a predictable re-run of the kabuki theatre performances seen earlier in October 2019 when Jim Shannon MP, a farmer and alleged Territorial Army missile-borrower, stood up and said, in either blissful ignorance or cunning deceit, “My goodness, who on earth would want to shoot a zebra? Is there not something wrong there?” (Hansard). The asylum, being an echo chamber of piety, soon rang with the dulcet tones of Luke Pollard MP, well known for his submariner activities, who added, “We all share the complete puzzlement implied by his question”.

Sadly, Dear Reader, everything puzzles those bozos, whose blind hatred of their own “evil hunting myth” boils their IQs down into single figures.

You see, most UK hunters go to South Africa, where they can hunt on the 40 million acres of privately owned hunting reserves known as game farms – vast ranches where farmers raise wild animals in natural habitat rather than domestic farm stock. Shannon was a farmer and Pollard was the shadow minister for the environment, so you might think they might have understood a bit about farming and the environment respectively, but sadly neither bulb glows very brightly against the incandescence of false conviction.

I can’t make the principles involved much easier than this – Imagine a game farmer (farmer – Shannon please note) in South Africa with 100 zebra mares among other wild animals on his 10,000 acres of rather dry natural environment (environment – Pollard please note). A number of facts become relevant. His 10,000 acres were formerly a cattle ranch, converted back into game ranching in the late 1990’s and zebras are now his main farm stock and his income. 

Zebras live in mobs of, say, five mares and a stallion, so his 100 mares live in 20 groups of 5. Each group has a stallion, so he has 20 stallions, too, making 120 zebras in total on his land – 100 mares and 20 stallions.

The problem, common to many farmers, is that zebras are born 50:50 male to female (they don’t have the luxury of 67 genders). This means that when they were born, for him to obtain 100 fillies (female), there were also 100 colts (male) born. If 100 males were born, but now he needs only 20, you don’t have to be Einstein to work out that 80 stallions have done a Lord Lucan. 

In fact, those 80 spare stallions were sold to visiting trophy hunters for £1000 each (the high price includes B&B at the farm because it is quite remote). That works out to about 1.5 zebras a week, which leaves the farm pretty peaceful most of the time and the farmer’s life is relatively easy, since zebras look after themselves and visiting trophy hunters are always accompanied by a professional hunter (by law) – two of the farm staff act as trackers and skinners. They also make sure the best stud stallions are not harvested, a reality quite opposite the imaginations of our MPs who, knowing less than nothing about farming game animals, insist that “Only the finest wild animals are murdered, depleting the gene pool“. The trophy hunters, meanwhile, go off home with the skins and the welcome meat and red offal goes to local communities. The grey offal is left for the vultures and scavengers. In Africa, unlike the UK, nothing goes to waste.

Because nearly all of the farmer’s customers are from the UK, a ban badly affects his farm income. The arrogant myopes in the UK Parliament claim that their ban on trophy imports “is about us in the UK, not Africa”. However, if you ban an import from South Africa, you are de facto banning that country’s export, so it is most certainly “about Africa”. They lied. What do you expect? They’re politicians. It’s in Hansard for all to read.

They claim they voted to ban imports of hunting trophies in order to “save endangered species”, but of course they lied (as always, because they are anti-hunting, not pro-wildlife) and in any case, the plains zebras on this farm are not endangered – there are about half a million of them in Africa according to the IUCN, and these “farm” wild zebras are privately owned so they aren’t included with the wild “wild” ones on the IUCN red lists of endangered species. Yet, these non-endangered, privately owned ranched zebras are still banned as trophies in the UK, so his customers don’t bother coming to hunt.

But he still has to get rid of 80 spare zebra stallions – they fight and injure the herd stallions, trying to get to the mares and they eat grass that would be better used for raising breeding groups. So, he calls a culling contractor who comes with a team and shoots all 80 of them by night using hunting rifles with night sights, dresses them on the spot, buries the offal and refrigerates them, all ready for export. 

So, to answer that dimwit in Parliament, “Who shoots a zebra?” the answer is “Someone who sells the meat, you putz”.

Organic, free-range horse meat is eaten in many countries of the world. The 80 skins go off to a tannery to be turned into admired zebra skin rugs because they are no longer hunting trophies – now they are merely by-products of the horse meat industry, like leather. If you ban them too, they will simply go to a glue factory and be wasted, hardly an increase in respect for the unfortunate zebras that are, by now, salami. 

Who cares? The smug, pious farts in Westminster can all sit back smiling and winking, knowing that although they didn’t save any zebras (that weren’t endangered and that wasn’t their aim anyway), they have managed to stop UK trophy hunters, the real reason for their blatant dishonesty. If you tell them that despite their pointless ban, the zebras were still shot, they will shrug and suggest that “you’re paid to lie by the gun industry”, and that’s that. Facts are not valued as highly as piety in the UK Commons.

The ship of fools sails on to other matters of state. But, of course, it isn’t the end of the matter. By selling the 80 spare zebras to trophy hunters for £1000 each, the farmer’s annual farm income was once £80,000, not a fortune after costs, but enough to let him live happily in his remote property, surrounded by the sights and smells of wild Africa. Selling them to a culling contractor is entirely a different matter – the zebras dress out at only 125kgs each, and so he is paid only £100 each for them as meat – the world has plenty of horse meat. The contractor doesn’t pay for the skins because he knows the farmer doesn’t have the staff or facilities to remove them overnight. That will be done at the contractor’s meat processing plant, so the farmer gets nothing for the skins. Now his 80 meat zebras (at £100 each) provide a farm income of only £8000 before costs. He will be lucky to break even and will make no income at all. His two staff who used to be trackers and skinners are laid off.  

The position rapidly degenerates. Thanks to the ban on UK imports, all of his zebras are now worth only £100 each. Unfortunately for them, cattle are worth £300 each. He has no choice. He has all 200 zebras shot and uses the money to start a herd of cattle. So now, the stupid UK ban “to save wildlife” got 200 wild zebras shot and replaced by cattle in Africa. The farmer could perhaps turn to non-endangered animals, but he no longer trusts the duplicitous UK MPs not to extend a ban to those, too. Cattle are a better bet, and they sell locally.

It gets worse. There were antelopes on his farm – kudu, impalas, bushbuck, eland and so on. Not in vast numbers, so he didn’t bother to hunt them and only harvested one now and then for meat. However, they eat the precious grass that he now needs for his cattle, and they carry endemic diseases and parasites that don’t affect antelopes but do kill cattle, so he shoots all of them, too. 

He had one old rhino bull, Eric, that he liked to see now and again, but Eric is very cantankerous and territorial – he couldn’t catch zebras, but he now kills cattle, so he’s bumped off for a precious £50,000. The two old leopards on the local mountain were a wonderful occasional sight, too, but now, with all the game animals gone, there are only beef calves to eat, so sadly, the leopards have to go too. 

All because of some here today gone tomorrow British MPs who read a stat about the legislation they voted on being popular – because the British People were never educated on the facts of trophy hunting, nor the harms that UK bans would do to Africans and animals in Africa.

Then there were also lots of warthogs and other animals that made holes in the ground that break cow’s legs, so they are shot for good measure. And, of course, the farm needs more grass, so the farmer clears most of the unpalatable natural thorn bush and poisonous inkberry and euphorbias and leaves only the bigger trees for cattle shade. That clearance is unfortunate for all the thousands of smaller birds, monkeys, insects, rodents, snakes and other reptiles that once lived in the dense understory, but hey, it stopped those damn evil hunters, didn’t it?  

Wonderful. What was once 10,000 acres of natural bush filled with wild animals, most of which were never hunted (the conservation by-product of trophy hunting also vehemently denied by MPs), is now a 10,000-acre cattle farm. The farmer has to live, and no eco-tourists are going to drive all day to a remote B&B to see a few zebras and impalas in dense bush – they want to see lions and elephants. And a hotel. And a swimming pool and bar. The farmer can’t afford that investment and there wouldn’t be sufficient footfall to make any return on it anyway.

The idiotic UK hunting trophy import ban worked out well, didn’t it?  It got 10,000 acres of natural habitat and thousands of non-charismatic wild animals and birds annihilated on one farm alone. Quite impressive imperious senselessness, imposed on a country filled with wildlife, at the top of world diversity rankings by MPs in the UK, a country that is 124th, near the bottom. Even more strange to ban imports when we export 20,000 deer trophies from here annually. Talk about perfidious Albion. 

But of course, “It only concerns the UK, it doesn’t affect Africa”. Pull the other one, you arrogant, jumped-up jackasses.

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.