BY JOHN NASH
A few days ago, Jeremy Vine spoke with Chris Tarrant about trophy hunting on Channel 5, not because either of them understand or do anything for Africa’s wildlife, but more because Tarrant is a prominent, if misled, flag-waver for the Scam-paign to Ban Trophy Hunting operated by “Honest Eddy” Gonçalves.
The Scam-paign itself is Ed’s nice little earner in which he grooms willing donkeys like Tarrant, UK MP’s and other celebrities to parrot his deceptive propaganda, aimed at milking gullible UK animal lovers for donations.
You have to hand it to him – it’s very, very clever – establishing a donkey farm and a sewage farm in Westminster, then using the resulting methane to inflate his company account. The last company disappeared in a puff of smoke before accounts were filed.
On Channel 5, here is the much loved Mr Tarrant, following a career launched by throwing custard at grown-ups to impress children on Tiswas. Alas, his actual wildlife experience apparently extends only as far as Bob Carolgees’ puppet, Spit the Dog.
There is a clip of this unfortunate C5 diatribe on Youtube.
Don’t bother.
It’s like watching two mentally impaired blind people from the Society of Limbless Arse Painters criticising the Mona Lisa, having never seen it. Neither of them has a single, grown-up, important idea about the subject – what trophy hunting is, the fact that the animals are eaten, what modern selective hunting is all about, the sustainable use of wildlife resources, modern hunting’s great conservation dividends, the rural economics of Africa, or the importance of practical land use on the dry, marginal soils of that great continent.
The script was the usual rat droppings, betraying a Portuguese ghost in the machine – Vine opened the bidding by describing selective (trophy) hunting as “Getting a kick out of shooting magnificent animals with high-powered rifles” over an image of a bow hunter and guide with a lion, explaining “This was Cecil”.
Wrong on both counts.
Tarrant, smug, with a lot of money, then helpfully sneered, “A smug American dentist with lots of money” and after the mandatory Trump mention, said, “Much British Trophy hunting still goes on”.
Then Vine, to his credit, poked in a hurried repair from the voice in his ear, correcting his earlier mistake… “It wasn’t Cecil”, neatly summing up the accuracy of this exchange.
“We’ve been trying to stop it for over ten years!” exclaimed Tarrant. Really?
Ban Trophy Hunting (donate here) was launched in 2018, and Honest Ed conned Parliament into becoming his PR department only a year later. When you are unhampered by principles, accuracy or truth, you can build a political empire even faster than a Unite the Union garbage mountain.
“Every party says they’ll stop it, but they don’t”, Tarrant complained.
There is a perfectly good reason why they don’t stop it – and you don’t have to be a millionaire to find out. You see, while most see it for the bandwagon it is, some of the more gullible sheltered residents of the Westminster Asylum take Honest Eddy’s words as gospel and they sing them with great reverence, filling the hearts of all those present. But then, sadly, truth dawns and when those words are exposed to the sunlight of reality, they disappear into dust faster than a vampire in a Hammer House of Horror movie. Tarrant, the disciple, may think that he is casting sunlight on the subject of hunting, but unfortunately, his brand of sunlight shines not from Northern Heavens, but from Southern Gonçalves.
Tarrant continued with the confidence of a fool rushing in, “Brits have killed over 100 lions (cem leões in Portuguese) since Cecil was murdered! We kill polar bears (ursos polares in Portuguese)! Just to bring them back stuffed!”
Meanwhile, the only thing being stuffed on C5 was Veritas, the Goddess of Truth.
Er, Cecil wasn’t murdered, Chris – he was a very old lion, pushed out of the reserve by the 500 younger lions inside the reserve, and once outside, he was killed, like all the other evicted lions that leave reserves – a sign that the lions inside are actually doing very well. Getting selective hunter tourists to pay dearly to hunt these evicted dispersals brings in vital extra income for very poor Zimbabwe – the escaped lions are all dead anyway. You can’t have hungry old lions running around the countryside.
A hundred lions hunted in ten years is not a lot, either – more than 95% of lions hunted in South Africa, for example, are from the 12,000 privately raised lions, farmed for live sales, pets, hunting and derivatives. They are separate and extra to the wild born population. The only wild born lions you can hunt are, like Cecil, problem animals, better described as pest control, so regulated hunting does not affect the wild population, which is stable. Lion hunting is very closely controlled by local authorities who use facts, not fiction. Most trophies come from farmed lions.
As for polar bears, there have been 18 polar bear trophies imported into the UK in 30 years, and since trophies can be any part of a bear, it doesn’t even mean 18 actual bears. In any case, they can only be hunted in places like Nunavut – a few hundred surplus bears there, over and above the carrying capacity of the area, are harvested sustainably by locals. Their population is stable and hunting is non-detrimental. With or without UK hunters, they will still be hunted, so banning imports will not stop hunting – it will just take extra income away from the local Inuit. Polar bears are very closely conserved, by global teams of scientific professionals, using backbone, not wishbone.
Jeremy V then tried a half-hearted pretend balance, “They say that locals breed the animals and tourists come and pay a lot of money, so it all ends up sort of balanced”, but Tarrant quickly micturated copiously on that little squib – “They would make far more money if people came with cameras and lions could live for years and years. Lions are now threatened. It’s horrible”, he lied.
If he was still on Tiswas, he would be covered in custard by now.
Tourists already come with cameras – to tourist areas. Hunters go to non-tourist areas. They’re different places, extra income. In South Africa alone, selective hunting brings in $2.5 billion to the country’s economy, annually, all extra to the photo-tourism income. They need both. It’s not instead of, it’s extra to… and there are no extra photo tourists available to replace hunters – stopping the hunters would simply take billions of $$$ out of the economy, remove 30,000 tons of organic, free-range game meat from local mouths and see forty million acres of privately owned hunting reserves, presently raising wildlife, turned back to raising cattle. The wildlife would be gone. The land has to work, too.
And as for lions, they live about 12 years in the wild, and all of South Africa’s national reserves have as many lions as they can carry. They are not hunted in the reserves. The wild lion population is stable and they are not “threatened”. Indeed, the only “horrible” thing in this C5 nonsense is the sound of bending truth and strangling facts.
Tarrant ends with a flourish, “I feel ashamed to be British. If you could stop bringing them in, that would kill it (trophy hunting) at a stroke”. If you believe that, you likely employ Diane Abbott as your accountant.
So disappointing coming from you, Mr Tarrant.
You have sane people around you. Bright people. People who can see through cons. That is why you have kept hold of your fortune and seen it grow, so why be hoodwinked by Goncalves when you should be able to do the maths, both financial and moral? Think it through, son. You are not a dimbo. It may feel good campaigning for something that at first seems like a no-brainer (humans hurting animals) but then, as you chew away on a burger or drive over a squirrel, consider nature’s indifference and then consider the poverty that is so rife in Africa (that you must have seen as you drove through it on those trains).
The look is a bad one.
You can jump off the dodgy bandwagon still.
Yet for now you sit there smugly on Channel 5, lying and hate-mongering against a perfectly sustainable, important, legal foreign industry that has, in thirty years, in one country alone, increased wildlife numbers twenty-fold and tripled the area of its land set aside for wild animals. Meanwhile, the foreign people that you insult all know that in the UK every year, 3 million wild mammals are shot, snared or trapped,15 million wild birds are shot and 20 million rats and mice are killed as pests. The cats of UK animal lovers alone kill 100 million wild animals and we kill or injure a million more with our cars (RSPCA).
That’s reality.
That’s truth.
Not equivalence.
It is no excuse that you incite resentment out of complete ignorance, or just to attract C5 viewers or to enrich a truth-bending, tin-shaking rodent who has never conserved any animals in an oily, parasitic life spent intercepting donations that could be helping real conservation in rural Africa.
The Collins English Dictionary defines Tiswas as, “A state of anxiety, confusion or excitement”. You left that nonsense behind a long while ago, Mr Tarrant. It is time that you learnt how to see. Contact me via the magazine. You are welcome to pop by for a cuppa.
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.