BY JOHN NASH

I have now recovered enough to comment on the Hunting Trophy Import Ban Second Reading in the Westminster Asylum on March 24th. 

Whenever trophy hunting is about to be mentioned in the Commons, you can always read the script well beforehand – it is written in the Mirror by Eduardo Goncalves. This latest mystic Mirror message promised such excitement, Dear Reader, entitled, “Exclusive!  African conservationists plead with MPs to finally ban barbaric trophy hunting imports”.

The Mirror’s “African conservationists” turned out to be a sum total of two, neither of them actually field conservationists:

The first up, an executive of the Africa Network For Animal Welfare (ANAW) said, “My community now and most other African communities abhor sport hunting as backward and colonial. We love our animals. They are more profitable alive than dead”. Then came the founder of the rather grandly-named Africa Climate Change Communicators, who said: “…trophy hunting interferes with biodiversity. How am I going to feel when I tell my grandchild, ‘we used to have lions, we used to have giraffes, but now all we have are pictures’?”  Crikey – words so familiar that the hidden hand must be writing in the sands of Africa, too.

With all the sage wisdom of a pair of trainee witch-doctors off their tits on happy lettuce, they both must surely know all about disappearing and dead animals because they are Kenyans, a country renowned for its dead wildlife. According to Kenya’s own Wildlife Conservancies Association, Kenya has lost nearly 70% of its wildlife during the past thirty years – strangely enough, since Kenya banned trophy hunting (reportedly only after crooked elites looted the animals). With their ban on selling to hunters, they rendered wildlife worthless to locals who promptly replaced it all with more valuable cattle. 

Meanwhile the elites, feted overseas for their uplifting “conservation” ban, also uplifted many envelopes of largesse from global NGO’s and AR souls in exchange for rendering $220 million worth of ivory, an asset belonging to the people of Kenya, worthless by burning it. Fortunately for the wildlife in Africa’s 53 other countries, the idiotic Kenyans’ tutored claims in the Mirror are to successful conservation and  “most other African communities” what Diane Abbott’s mathematics are to particle physics. 

Meanwhile, back in the real Kenya, Governor Joseph Ole Lenku has threatened to direct area residents to kill even more of the remaining wild animals unless the Kenya Wildlife Service signs a 50% revenue-sharing deal, saying “If KWS does not accept mediation talks… we will no longer be custodians of wild animals. We will start killing and feeding on the ones that are edible.”  It looks like the foreign brown envelopes are stuck in the sticky system. He had better hurry – Kenya’s animals are running out fast thanks to their hunting ban. He could have both money and venison by moving to Southern Africa where animals can be trophy hunted and eaten and, as a direct result, bring in foreign exchange. Animals there are increasing in number and are plentiful. 

Like The Mirror and its tame Kenyans, the House of Commons debate this time around had absolutely nothing to do with actual physical wild animal conservation or actual Africa and precious little resemblance to either facts or truth.

MPs Bill Wiggin and Chris Chope got up in the middle of it like two winos who had wandered unaware into an Evangelical Temperance Meeting. They spoke about reality, real animals and real conservation, but they might as well have been throat singing in Mongolian among this lot.

For this was a meeting of the eco-pious, those half-wit MPs who speak with all the self-satisfied smugness of a six year old clutching a can of mummy’s alcohol free shandy at a vegan barbecue.

They are far more concerned with exercising their mental disorders of lobster sentience, farmless farming and fishless fishing than considering the UK’s other minor distractions like a major war in Europe, an imploding NHS, people exchanging their children for tins of beans at food banks and burning their stash of COVID toilet rolls just to keep warm.

• Care these MPs a single whit for the warnings of more than 160 real, eminent experts?
• Heed they the concerns of the Environment Ministers of the most successful wildlife countries in Africa? 
• Listen they to the six African High Commissioners who asked them to be more truthful? 
• Toss they a solitary toss for the pleas of the community leaders of millions of Africans whose lives they are destroying? 
• Give they one hoot for the advice of the Government’s own Joint Nature Conservation Committee or the IUCN, the competent world body, or even CITES, the world wildlife trade licensing authority, all of whom who advise against a knee-jerk ban? 

No, Dear Readers – for verily I say unto you, they have been up the mountain (or up the Portuguese Khyber, at least) and holdeth aloft the Book of Goncalves, Chapter 1:

1:1 “The path of the righteous animal lover is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish pragmatists, farmers and people of tribe who liveth among actual wildlife and the tyranny of evil scientific truth. Blessed is he who, in the name of animal rights and unctuous sentimentality, shepherds the stupid indigenous locals through the valley of rural darkness into the light of urban piety, for he is truly his voters’ keeper and the finder of many followers on social media. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my zealotry with naked factuality and you will know my name is Cerebrum Faecium* when I lay my political vengeance and menaces upon thee”.

Well, stone me. These rabid zealots are dangerous to the world’s wildlife, arrogantly neo-colonialist and blindly racist.

Hear now the words of Clive Efford MP: “We have heard arguments today about being racist towards African countries, but it is not just about African countries. I have not heard anyone say we are being racist to Canadians by not wanting polar bears to be imported”. Perhaps he should get his ear wax seen to. Canadian Iqaluit Mayor Madeleine Redfern said (referring to another AR soul organisation that similarly accused hunters of putting profit above bear welfare), the “remark was racist and factually untrue”.

President Masisi of Botswana called the fiasco, “condescending” but also a “resurgence of a colonial conquest”. 

Prof Dickman, Director of Oxford University’s Conservation Research Unit WildCRU, said: “The Parliamentary debate today was riddled with misinformation. “MPs pushing for a blanket import ban demonstrated that they were willing to ignore scientific evidence, major risks to conservation and animal welfare, and the rights and livelihoods of affected people.”

Here’s conservation scientist and entomologist Prof Adam Hart on X – who knows a thing or two about destructive insects, “It is awful to watch. Self-congratulatory braying, casual racist tropes, misinformation. Genuinely shameful stuff from people too arrogant or too stupid to realise they don’t know what they’re talking about”.

African Maxi Louis, director of the Namibian Association of Community-Based Natural Resource Management Support Organisations, earlier accused UK MPs of meddling. “We ask for no more virtue signalling. It is arrogant, ignorant and racist.“

The Maverick, Johannesburg reported on the “debate” thus: “Here we go again. Having failed last year to legislate a ban on the import of hunting trophies, UK MPs are trying to ram through a similar bill while once again ignoring African voices and conservation scientists. It is a campaign based on lies and distortions…a rejection of science to advance an agenda that will have a detrimental effect on conservation and the environment. As Botswana’s president said, it is “condescending”. Not to mention hypocritical, when you think of those 350,000 deer mowed down in the UK each year – an average of about 1,000 a week”. They have a point.

The last word should go to chief AR soul John Spellar in Hansard. “..the Bill was amended to take account of various views. It was carried forward without dissent in this House and was forwarded to the Lords. That is precisely why the Bill should be voted on again, sent back to the other House, and incorporated into the laws of this land”. So, you see, Dear Readers, they are going to railroad it through Parliament using The Parliament Act, just like they did with the dishonest Fox Hunting Act that turned out to be such a disaster for rural foxes. Now they want to do the same to other people’s wildlife. 

How arrogant. How imperialist. How counterproductive.

My advice to your grown-up Lordships in the Upper House is clear – the lying, deceitful vegan abettors in your basement have purposefully ignored Truth, science, presidents, rural Africans, the IUCN, CITES and even the government’s own JNCC, so brace yourselves and think of England. You are about to be doodled by the demonic digit of destiny once more.

Do your stuff.

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.