BY JOHN NASH
In another recent podcast from the excellent Blood Origins, host and hunter Robbie Kröger sat down for a chat with Fiona Tande, an environmental journalist from Nairobi, Kenya, to discuss hunting and trophy hunting in particular. Once again, it is was a pleasant exchange without rude shouting and it makes for good listening.
From the start, it became clear that, although Fiona hails from Africa, she is an anti-hunting journalist and, despite being African, appears to have very little knowledge about hunting and its modern application. The reason is obvious – she is a modern, urban person, an African Townie. Her viewpoint bears a striking similarity to that of modern journalists and Townies here in the UK and elsewhere, who, without investigating rural subjects properly, tend to choose attention-grabbing stories and then turbocharge them to attract eyeballs. Without the facts, they are better described as content makers rather than journalists.
Humans evolved to notice threats quickly, so bad news still always gets precedence, especially when the penny-dreadful “evil hunters kill innocent and endangered animals for fun” fiction is so easily decorated with bumper sticker rationale, like “You can’t save wild animals by killing them”. Presented on a bed of environmental doom, they become the perfect confection for eco-anxious Urbanites.
Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, however ignorant – but here’s the rub for rural folk, farmers and hunters – Ms Tande is the distinguished founder and organiser of Pridelands Wildlife Film Festival, (PWFF), Africa’s own first wildlife and nature conservation film festival.
“Celebrated for her dedication to wildlife conservation through storytelling, Fiona’s work bridges local and global narratives, highlighting the importance of African voices in environmental discourse. Through her leadership, Fiona aims to inspire a worldwide commitment to biodiversity preservation, embodying the spirit of exploration and the power of storytelling in shaping a sustainable future.” (PWFF). Top marks to her – from a civilised, urban viewpoint, she is forging ahead with genuinely important, admirably virtuous work and it goes without saying that local African voices should be heard when it comes to rural matters like hunting.
But modern urban African voices are as cut off from the realities of rural life as urban voices anywhere on Earth. The void in their understanding is, like Townies everywhere, filled with a fictitious story telling of rural life that is more sunshine, nodding daffodils and gamboling lambs than the long hours, blood, shit and mud of reality. For most Townies, conservation means leaving “nature” and wild animals alone in their imaginary Garden of Eden, a garden that evil farmers and hunters destroy.
When the PWFF says it intends “to be a pioneering convention and platform in African storytelling, shaping global perceptions of wildlife and conservation through the authentic voices and unique perspectives of African filmmakers”, somehow you just know that, with Fiona’s drive and passion, the unique perspective will go like the clappers – in the wrong direction. Sadly, filmmakers have to sell films to stay alive and their market is an urban one – if granny has to be pushed into the nettles for the sake of art, so be it.
Fiona’s concerns were the usual litany of urban confusion that countryfolk, farmers, field industry workers and hunters hear all the time. I won’t want to add indigestion to your toast and marmalade or pump up your blood pressure, Dear Reader, so I won’t list them here. They are largely misguided urban fear of the unknown – concerns about abstract ideas, based on weary anti-hunting tropes or else on the categorical mistake of making judgements using indoor civilised human ethics rather than outdoor rural pragmatism based on reality. Even where they are based on reality, good rural things get studiously ignored while bad rural things get magnified enormously. You can listen to the interesting podcast as Fiona gropes in the dark for answers. At least she tries.
Fiona has two disadvantages when it comes to judging hunting matters – she is an urbanite and she lives in Kenya, a country that is blindly opposed to hunting, thanks to the influence of foreign conservationists and their financial clout. If she wishes to be more journalist than content provider, she would be well advised to examine the real Kenyan model first, and then compare it to, say, the South African model.
Kenya’s wildlife is world renowned, but outside the fame and fortune of the great parks like the Masai Mara, Amboseli and Tsavo, things are not so rosy. The major concerns inside Kenya were highlighted by Mbaria and Ogada in their book, “The Big Conservation Lie”. Their criticisms include:
- Colonial Legacy – Modern Kenyan conservation stems from colonial ideologies, displacing indigenous groups like the Maasai to create “pristine” parks.
- White Saviour Myth – Celebrated Western figures overshadow local expertise, reinforcing neo-colonial narratives in conservation.
- Ignored Indigenous Knowledge – Communities’ centuries-old ecological wisdom is dismissed in favour of Western scientific approaches.
- Institutional Corruption – Bodies like Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) face allegations of profiteering and complicity in wildlife crimes.
- Profit-Driven Conservation – Tourism and foreign funding commercialise preservation, often exploiting wildlife and marginalising locals.
- Socio-Economic Neglect – Conservation fails to address poverty, alienating communities critical to protecting ecosystems.
In Kenya, all wildlife is government property. Hunting was originally banned in 1973, but only after Kenyan elites had allegedly decimated the elephants for ivory after independence in 1963. A ban means that wildlife, outside the great parks, has no legal cash value. If people could pay to hunt the wildlife sustainably, wildlife would have some cash value, but without hunting, it becomes a straightforward liability, like too many deer on a UK farm. Why should people put up with wild animals that eat the grass they need for their animals (that do have a cash value) or, worse still, that eat their livestock? Besides, apart from being a liability, they taste good grilled.
The result is inevitable – since banning hunting, Kenya has lost a huge percentage of its large wild animals, while sheep, goats, camels and donkeys have increased in number. Worse still, the stockpiles of ivory and horn – perhaps £200 million in assets belonging to the people of Kenya, has been burned in wasteful publicity stunts organised by those same foreign interests.
Here is the decline in Kenyan wildlife: Graph taken from Extreme Wildlife Declines and Concurrent Increase in Livestock Numbers in Kenya: What Are the Causes? By Joseph O. Ogutu et al.
By contrast to the decline in Kenya, in South Africa, wild animals can be privately owned provided a property is high-fenced. It means that land owners can establish, buy, sell and generally enjoy property rights in the wildlife on their land. Wildlife becomes a book asset that can be used as collateral for farm bank loans or a source of income from sales for re-stocking, hunting and meat. It makes good business sense because the wild animals evolved there, so on marginal lands, they do better than domestic cattle and other stock. The results have been spectacular. In the time that Kenya’s large wild animals have decreased by some 70-80%, South Africa’s large wild animals have increased from ½ to 20 million, in addition to the animals in their great parks like the Kruger. It makes good conservation sense, too – there are 40 million acres of these privately owned “game ranches” there, supporting billions of indigenous animals and plants that are not hunted, then there is the regenerated soil they all sit on.
And when it comes to hunting, the cream on the top of ranch turnover is trophy hunting, because trophy hunters pay well for an exotic hunting experience, then they take home only the inedible bits that would otherwise been thrown away. The animals, raised for hunting and meat, are still eaten locally.
The wild animals in the great parks are still there, to be enjoyed separately by eco-tourists. On the private game ranches, however, hunters contribute some £600 million to the local economy, extra and above that of the separate eco-tourist industry and it is a huge rural economic gain – entirely missed out by Kenya, where the hunting model is now being seriously considered because of its clear advantages to people and wildlife.
That is the reality of Fiona’s home country but these truths are never heard in urban circles because they do not fit the narrative (and plutocracy) of the hordes of virtue-parading celebrities, political ideologues and tin-shaking organisations, particularly here in the UK, making cash and political capital out of denigrating rural people and lying about hunting. That narrative and the urban hate-mongers who produce it deny rural people at home and abroad a fair hearing – and they put wildlife at risk.
At least Fiona Tande had the rare honesty and courage to sit down with a real hunter like Robbie Kröger on Blood Origins to ask questions and seek some of these truths. If you want to hear two Africans reaching out to each other politely, listen to the podcast.
It’s a pity the same can’t be said of the UK, where these truths are actively suppressed and rural people at home and abroad are denied a voice, a fair hearing or justice. Instead, all we get from politicians and the media is emotional, ideological codswallop that gets in the way of proper, pragmatic solutions to the actual challenges that affect the lives of rural people and wildlife.
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.