BY JOHN NASH
On 4th April, Channel 4 TV News Chief Correspondent, Alex Thomson, ran a tailpiece about the continuing attempts in the Westminster Asylum to ban hunting trophy imports into the UK, together with a short article on the C4 website.
He pointed out that it is still legal to import “heads and body parts of species like buffalo, lion and giraffe despite promises of successive governments to ban it”. Right from the start, describing hunting trophies as “heads and body parts” are signature weasel words emanating from a particularly well-known weasel.
Trophies aren’t “heads and body parts” – they are the non-edible treated skins and horns of animals whose body parts disappeared into mouths, cooking pots, apothecaries and butcher’s shops in Africa and the Far East.
And, because most UK trophy hunters, the objects of hate in this news item, hunt in Southern Africa, his choice of “buffalo, lion and giraffe” was as unfortunate as it was misinformed – all three species are listed as “of least concern” in that region by the IUCN because their populations are either stable or expanding. None of them is endangered in Southern Africa where UK hunters hunt – there are plenty on the game ranches and private hunting reserves of South Africa and Namibia, where they are part of sustainable land use. As many as needed can be raised.
So why ban them?
Having made a small molehill out of fairy-dust, Thomson then conspired to pile it higher with an even more charismatic species, “the cheetah, Africa’s rarest big cat” and a C4 “exposure” followed – he “revealed” CITES import documents to prove cheetah hunting trophy imports are coming into the UK – wait for it – “one in 2022 and one in 2023”. Good grief.
Pulitzer in the post!
My Dear Squires, I apologise if this sudden, immense shock caused you to blow toast and marmalade crumbs over the family at the breakfast table, and I will wait patiently while you pick up the vicar and put him back on his chair.
To drive this totally underwhelming Channel 4 newstory home, it featured three photos of hunters with harvested cheetahs. Permit me to reveal something about them, while reminding you that this is a story about a ban on trophy imports into the UK. All three pictures were lifted from the website of a rather wonderful, well-known, privately owned, Namibian hunting reserve with impeccable standards. I have no idea if clearance to copy and use the photos was sought by Channel 4, and even more ominously, if signed clearance to show the hunters’ faces was ever obtained. The unauthorised use of copyright material is a familiar tactic of the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting (CBTH). If they are pictures of non-UK hunters, as I suspect they are, spread over many years, their use as “evidence” against two UK imports would be a tad deceitful, Channel 4.
The featured private reserve is 75,000 acres, set up as a hunting reserve forty years old, home to 15,000 free-roaming wild animals with 30 huntable species. It is also home to untold millions of animals, birds, reptiles, insects, plants and trees that are thus protected and not hunted – the well-known conservation dividend of private ownership and sustainable use that only honest people dare mention in the UK.
It is private land, like any huge farm, that, if used for photo tourism instead, would take away footfall and dilute the income of other photo reserves. If it was turned to cattle and goats, most of the wildlife would be gone – especially the predators like lions, leopards and cheetahs that eat farm stock. The cheetahs and other creatures there all owe their existence to sustainable trophy hunting, an excellent, pragmatic, tax-paying use for this beautiful, remote, dry land, conserving it and its people.
Namibia is also home to a stable population of cheetahs – about a third of the world’s 7000 southeast cheetahs live in Namibia – and that suggests roughly the same number of cheetahs must survive to adulthood each year. It is hardly surprising CITES, a world organisation that, unlike Channel 4, actually knows what it is talking about, has given Namibia a sustainable hunting quota of up to 150 cheetahs annually. Two cheetahs are not going to crash the population any day soon. It’s also a bit of a cheek when MPs from the UK, a country near the bottom of the World Biodiversity Intactness Index think they can tell Namibia, at the top of the index, how to protect its wildlife.
At this point in the piece, the reason for the weasel words popping up like little magic mushrooms became apparent – the chief stink-weasel himself appeared for “interview” in a cloud of sulphurous fumes. More slippery than a polecat dipped in pilchard oil, Eduardo Gonçalves, operator of the financially opaque CBTH (Mr Thomson, why are you not investigating Mr Gonçalves and his imaginary crowdfunded lynxes?), helpfully pointed out that cheetahs are so endangered that even American hunters are not allowed to bring them back, while the British government officials issue permits to bring back (drumroll, please) “bodies and body parts” from Africa.
Mr Thomson, once an excellent counter terror investigator, still solemnly pretending that his item was a Channel 4 idea and v.v. important, then reminded us that successive UK governments have made manifesto promises for a ban but it never quite happens, “despite support from left and right.” Then he added, rather sadly, “the Office in Parliament isn’t taking any more questions on this, because they are inundated with it, as another Private Members Bill goes through the houses and will get nowhere”. Realising that his dead donkey story had suddenly keeled over again, he tried turning up the tempo, “So this government is under pressure to ban trophy imports in a way no other government has been till now – so will this government keep its promise to ban imports?”
Talking of donkeys, one of Eduardo’s chief beasts of burden from his defunct Westminster willing-donkey farm called the Ban Trophy Hunting APPG, then appeared. It was the delightful, fragrant and earnest Baroness Sue Heyward. Speaking from deep within her fundament, she spoke with impeccable logic, “We will, because it’s in our manifesto”. (Translation – “If it’s in our manifesto, it’s Holy Writ, you Philistines”). Who cares about mere facts? Hee-haw. The Baroness should know – she once had a job in a bookshop and knows things. “It’s absolutely shocking that species like cheetah are coming in and one thing we are concerned with is the impact on endangered species”.
Ahh, impact indeed, my Lady – so far, this great Channel 4 exposure had given us lions, buffaloes, giraffes and cheetahs – none of them at all affected by regulated trophy hunting, yet all four offered as evidence for a UK import ban.
That’s what happens when you get freebie policies and TV scripts from a stink weasel in a back alley. Unaware, Thomson ploughed on – this was his Channel 4 News, so a contentious counter argument had to be aired, to prevent those few viewers’ heads from dropping comatose into their suppers or switching over to GBNews as so many have done.
To liven proceedings, he cunningly spliced in Dr Amy Dickman, looking embarrassed, poor soul. Let me explain why. She is a proper, widely published, serious and honest scientist, Director of Oxford University’s WildCRU’s search for practical solutions to conservation problems via original scientific research. Her field of expertise is human-wildlife conflict, with a particular focus on large carnivores. She is the joint CEO of Lion Landscapes, a project that works to improve human-carnivore coexistence in Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia. She is also the Chair of the Board of the Arabian Leopard Fund, helping to facilitate the recovery of Arabian leopards across their range. In addition, she is a member of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group, the IUCN Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Specialist Group, the IUCN Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group and the African Lion Working Group. She spends a lot of her time in Africa doing important fieldwork. You get the message. (The opposite of a cheap propagandist like Gonçalves).
No wonder Prof. D looked embarrassed – despite having such important real work to do, she had to waste time climbing down from the gleaming towers of rigorous scientific endeavour to the bottom of this political parrot cage to answer, politely and factually, the irrelevant mephitis of a stink weasel and the manifesto braying of an ennobled but brainwashed donkey.
A vegetarian who hates the very idea of trophy hunting, Professor Dickman explained that well-regulated and sustainable trophy hunting can help land owners maintain wildlife in places where photo tourism isn’t viable. She said, “The fact is, that these animals can and do kill livestock, which means farmers in these areas will take matters into their own hands and kill cheetahs. If a carefully controlled quota can be achieved and that, for example, can fund farmer compensation schemes for lost livestock in areas like Namibia, there is a very selective case for saying that trophy hunting, however much we may not like it, might actually be a small but important part in maintaining the numbers of these species”.
“I hate the idea of trophy hunting, land owners need to maintain species like cheetahs, their prey and their habitat, and if a small amount of trophy hunting helps, then we should be more tolerant and make decisions based on evidence and not on emotion”.
Thomson spotted a media moment and invited Gonçalves with this cunning question… “Some scientists insist that shooting these animals is the best way of conserving them…what’s wrong with that argument?” Please note, Dear Reader, that suddenly, “regulated and sustainable trophy hunting can help land owners maintain wildlife in places where photo-tourism isn’t viable” had now become “shooting these animals is the best way to conserve them,” after passing through the Channel 4 News Enigma machine.
Gonçalves rose to this entirely unscripted prompt, “The IUCN red list says that trophy hunting is affecting species like lions – in the 1970’s there were 200,000 lions, today maybe 20,000. Lion populations have been falling throughout Africa except in countries like Kenya, where trophy hunting is banned and lion populations have risen by 25% in the last decade”.
Classic Gonçalves polecat skat.
Here’s the reality – Kenya actually banned hunting way back in 1977 and since then, Kenya has lost some 80% of its wildlife (just as, Mr Thomson, Gonçalves has closed 80% of his limited companies before tax records go public). 20,000 lions at the time of the ban went down to 2000 by 2010. According to the Kenya Wildlife Service, an emergency programme has since increased them “by 25% in the past decade”. Kenya had to save their lions from the ban. Meanwhile, the countries of the south, where trophy hunting is legal and regulated, have seen wildlife numbers increase by up to 20x in the same period.
The reason why successive UK governments have problems getting a ban on hunting trophy imports in place is because the proposed ban is both emotional and political – gesture politics – and has absolutely nothing to do with wildlife conservation. In reality, if turned into law, a ban will save wildlife like an ejector seat will save a helicopter pilot.
Once again, the misused Channel 4 “charismatic animal” evidence is blatant deception of the UK public, part of the repeated, dishonest attempts in the UK Parliament to introduce this Bill to “Ban the importation of trophies of some 6,000 endangered species of animals on the IUCN red lists in order to protect wildlife”. It is actually a clever publicity stunt thought up by Eduardo the Stink Weasel, ex-CEO of the League Against Cruel Sports (of Dan Norris infamy) and a gross abuse of both Parliament and animal lovers.
If Alex Thomson had a relapse of truthtelling, he would sit several metres away from Gonçalves in a court of law.
If the charismatic animals are a cheap con trick, what about the unmentioned? “In reality, of the six thousand two hundred and thirty-three species that would be covered under the proposed Bill – over 2000 of them are coral. It would cover 585 lizards, 300 hummingbirds, 299 frogs, 209 turtles, 96 molluscs, 69 bats, 58 insects, 56 salamanders and newts, 36 tarantulas and even six sea cucumbers. Not one of these species is trophy hunted, so it is extremely hard to see how it would meaningfully ‘protect’ them as promised to the UK public” (Dickman).
I can think of one excellent use for a spiny sea cucumber, involving Gonçalves……
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 and his book, “Animal Rights, complete and utter bullsh*t” both available on Amazon.