BY JOHN NASH
There are moments when, even ignoring the vegan propaganda, one article captures a much wider malaise. Such was the case when I recently read a Psychology Today piece by Dr Marc Bekoff, titled “Keeping Cecil the Poster Lion Alive to End Trophy Hunting.”
What troubled me was not just its truth-bending and the familiar disapproval of hunting— particularly trophy hunting—but the fact that it came from a professor of evolutionary biology who appears to have forgotten the most basic law of evolutionary competition: eat or be eaten. That competition, the first leg, makes it possible to survive and carry out the other leg of evolution, reproduction, that is, in our case, now evolved into human civilisation.
Dr Bekoff paints a familiar moral cartoon for civilians: lions are noble, hunters are cruel, and the modern world must outgrow its primal past. He believes the death of Cecil the lion in 2015, killed by a bowhunter in Zimbabwe, should be turned into a rallying cry to end all trophy hunting. But this argument—and the moral fervour behind it—betrays a profound misunderstanding of human evolution and history, reinforced by a profound ignorance about hunting.
The truth is that without hunters, there would be no civilisation to retreat into. The land we build on and farm, the walls of our towns, the books on our shelves, and even the moral standards we now apply to the world—all of these are built on a foundation of hunting. The meat, the hides, the tools, the fire, the discipline, the risk, the cooperation, the sharing of spoils: these were the raw materials of human culture. To turn now and sneer at the hunter from within the nurturing civilisation that hunters provisioned and protected for more than 100,000 years is a kind of modern historical amnesia.
Trophy hunting, so often the focus of civilian disgust, is not some twisted vanity project. It is a celebration of the hunt—a ritualised expression of something ancient, difficult, and deeply human. The “trophy” is not a bauble; it is a testament. It says: “I went out, I matched myself against nature, I succeeded, here is the proof, and I remember”. To someone who has never hunted, this may sound absurd or self-aggrandising, but to those who know nature as a predator rather than as a spectator, who have tracked, waited, failed, tried again, endured, and then succeeded—it is anything but.
I write as someone who has spent a lifetime observing, thinking, and speaking with people across the world about the deeper patterns of human life—patterns that urban modernity has mostly forgotten, steamrollered beneath the wheels of the industrial revolution and by urbanisation. The urge to hunt, particularly in men, is not a cultural glitch to be corrected—it is a feature built by hundreds of thousands of years of survival pressure. It is part of what made us who we are. And it does not vanish simply because you have access to a supermarket.
Indeed, it is only in the last two or three generations, in industrialised societies, that hunting has been widely replaced by pre-packaged abundance. Those who live within the soft cocoon of civilian modernity—the well-fed, the well-shod, and the well-meaning—now try to extend the nurturing morality of human civilisation outward into nature. They forget that nature runs not on ethics and comfort, but on energy and competition. In the natural world, life feeds on life. That has always been the rule. Even now, in times of famine or displacement, people return to hunting—not because it is cruel or arrogant, but because it is necessary, normal, pragmatic and works.
It is telling that anti-hunting sentiment is strongest in the very societies most insulated from natural law, and within those societies, strongest in the service industries, education and entertainment, all consumers, farthest removed from the supply side of resources. Urbanised Westerners, many of whom have never held a dead animal in their hands, sit in judgement over those who still live by their wits, their tools, and their understanding and management of the land. But ethics are not one-size-fits-all. The moral codes that govern the nursery, the courtroom, or the urban park are not the same ones that apply in the wild areas and farmland of Great Britain, let alone in the Kalahari or the Luangwa Valley.
Consider the example of regulated trophy hunting in southern Africa. In countries like Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, trophy meat feeds and trophy fees fund not only anti-poaching efforts but also schools, clinics and employment and hope for local communities. In many cases, these are regions where photographic tourism is not viable due to remoteness, danger, or lack of infrastructure. Without the income and meat from hunting, the vast lands outside of national reserves would be turned to cattle and goats, the wildlife displaced or destroyed, and the lions— Cecil’s kin—not spared, but simply gone. Hunting and trophy hunting keep farming at bay.
So what, exactly, is more ethical? A trophy hunter paying £30,000 to hunt an ageing, nonbreeding bull elephant—whose meat then feeds an entire village—or a foreign activist condemning it from afar while contributing nothing to that community’s survival? Even worse, is it more ethical for tin-shaking activists to intercept donations in the UK by insulting a trophy hunter who spent a small fortune in Africa to hunt a dangerous old lion that strayed off the reserve into surrounding farmland? A lion that would have been killed by locals anyway?
To those who recoil from hunting, stop thinking in imaginary symbols and start thinking in actual, physical reality. A lion is not a mascot. A hunter is not a monster. Real life is not a Disney film. Hunting is messy, dangerous, and dependent on difficult choices. Trophy hunting, the only form of hunting that can afford to have chivalric rules, is not outside of ethics, but it is outside of civilisation’s indoor ethics. The ethics of the human predator in a hunt are not the same as the ethics of the nursery. They are older, harder, but no less real. Respect for the quarry, gratitude for the kill, and responsibility for the consequences—these are values as old as our species, and they deserve understanding and respect, not blanket condemnation by consumers far removed from the field.
To forget hunting is to forget where we came from. Worse—it is to forget that many others in the world still live close to that reality. A trophy hunt is, like the cultural ritual of a fully dressed foxhunt with hounds, a celebration and a reminder of our past challenges, to once again feel the ancient passion and euphoric reward that evolution gave us to overcome challenges on our long journey from darkness. To dismiss it all as mere “fun” is to throw a blanket of ignorance over our evolutionary determination. Let us not pretend that moral superiority can be built on such urban ignorance and disconnection. Let us, instead, respect the past, understand the present, and preserve a future in which hunting, done well and wisely by those who still harbour the fire, still has its place.
As for Cecil, let him be remembered—not as a weapon in a culture war or a charlatan’s deceitful prop, but as part of the world that still works according to the old rules, where life must be earned, not assumed.
And let the hunter, too, be remembered—not as villain or hero, but as what he truly is —a descendant of the ones who fed and clothed us for thirty thousand generations.
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.