BY JOHN NASH
COP20 — the latest Conference of the Parties to CITES — has just drawn to a close in Uzbekistan, and once again, what ought to be a sober gathering of grown-ups discussing wildlife trade was overrun by the usual swarm of parasitic NGOs and tin-shakers clutching fluffy toy elephants like infants’ emotional support animals. Instead of encouraging the tried-and-tested systems that actually protect and grow wildlife, “expenses-paid” delegates from countries with precious little wildlife of their own ensured that conservation funding will continue to be combine-harvested by global charities long before a single penny reaches a ranger, a community, a private reserve owner or a waterhole.
The only creatures being meaningfully conserved by these thieving vampires are pigs — their own pink china variety with the slot on top. Meanwhile, the real wildlife is left outside their tent.
CITES, like most practical science-based trade regulators, is perpetually short of funds to do the work that matters. Yet tens of millions donated by well-meaning animal lovers disappear annually into the gaping maws of anti-trade NGOs — organisations committed to blocking the very thing that would make wildlife valuable enough for rural people to conserve by means of regulated, sustainable use.
With a brass neck long enough to impress a diplodocus, the Born Free Foundation (one of Britain’s largest anti-use charities) even offered to “help fund CITES”. This from a charity with a £6-million annual income, founded on a film that used 27 captive lions to tell a profitable fairy tale about “one freed one”. Thus continues the multi-million-pound industry of looking concerned while achieving nothing.
Why does this matter? Because almost everything the public is told about wildlife — and the definitions sneaked into the public debate, the media and so to the online aggregators — is upside down. And this matters not merely for policy or wildlife but for civilisation itself. So, Dear Reader, if you are sitting comfortably, let us begin.
It is a matter of archaeological fact that humans have been hunters for at least 400,000 years — possibly a million. And it is a matter of evolutionary psychology, not opinion, that while hunting techniques are learned, the desire to hunt is instinctive. Vladimir Dinets calls it a selective pressure, and it’s wired into us by Spencer’s “survival of the fittest”. Russell Chatham put it simply: “Hunting is an ancient practice with deep roots in human culture and psyche, connecting us to our ancestors and the natural world.
Evolution, as any CSM reader knows, walks on two legs:
Leg 1: survive long enough to acquire sufficient resources.
Leg 2: consume them, reproduce, and send your offspring back to perform Leg 1 in turn.
The global shorthand for these principles is masculine (Leg 1) and feminine (Leg 2): opposite, equal, complementary — two halves of the same wheel. For almost a million years, hunting has been the indispensable first step of that wheel. The Hunter’s Mandate requires a human being to step outside civilisation’s safe cocoon and become, temporarily, a predator among predators. It is the great adventure – to go out where you compete, you win, and you bring home the prize that civilisation needs to continue. Every part of that process provides men with their masculine principle: risk, competition, winning, objectivity, possession, return.
And let us be blunt: hunting is uncivilised, because all predation is uncivilised. Nature is not kind. She tears, bites, poisons, constricts, and eviscerates. She kills with indifference. Human hunting, by contrast, is quick, purposeful and — when done properly — merciful. But it is not cruel, because cruelty requires moral intent, and predation exists outside humans’ indoor morality.
Without Leg 1 — hunting — there would never have been Leg 2 — civilisation. Anyone who believes they hopped through human history on one leg is standing on a 400,000-year-old pile of bones while pretending they’re gluten-free. And to the quinoa-munchers: you don’t get to lecture hunters on kindness while entire ecosystems are flattened so your pulses can be grown in peaceful, industrial sterility. That’s not compassion – it’s conquest wearing hemp trousers and a counterfeit halo. Hunters deserve respect.
Adrenaline built us – the instinct to hunt does not evaporate simply because Tesco exists. What was once essential now becomes recreational — but “recreational hunting” does not mean frivolous fun. It means “re-creation”: a ritual celebration and deliberate return to the primal act that refined the human mind.
A civilian may feel excitement at seeing a stag, but only a hunter knows the electric silence, the world around collapsing to a narrow tunnel between predator and prey as a weapon is brought to bear, the sudden battle between flight and focus, the ancestral roar of adrenaline when the moment comes, hands and legs shaking, finger like some foreigner on the trigger. Then the shot, the uncertainty, the hope, the relief, the solemnity, the gratitude — and yes, the euphoria. This is not “killing for fun”. It is the enactment of a role embedded in us by survival over millennia.
And then comes the part that civilians find more terrifying than algebra is to Diane Abbott or reality is to The Green Party: converting the animal into sustenance. To perform a gralloch alone, hands deep in warmth and life now passed, is to hold life and death, to touch the turning wheel of existence. It humbles, not hardens. It reveals, in that moment, the fragility of life and how easily the wheel turns, a fragility that, in turn, reveals not brutality, but a man’s necessary responsibility to protect as well as provide for those he loves.
The male principle hunts, takes life and, job done, proudly hands sustenance to the female principle – she takes that sustenance and from it, makes life, and, job done, hands the firstborn to him to hunt again. The dance of life continues. He is the opposite of her and she the opposite of him, yet they are equal and complementary, with roots going back to the dawn of time.
These are the deep lessons taught for thousands of years to young men in initiation ceremonies from the Kalahari to the Amazon and yet they have been sliced unseen from the lives of young urban men by two generations of cossetted modern consumer society. Consumerism and civilisation have stolen their birthright, their chance to visit that other great kingdom that evolution prepared them for, and have swapped the glory for the meagre flotsam of social media.
Civilised minds cannot understand the uncivilised, masculine world of risk and reward that exists beyond their pale to feed and protect them. The word “game” itself comes from the human recognition that hunting is a competition requiring skill; it does not imply that predator and prey agree to Queensberry Rules. In nature’s game, you win or you die.
Which brings us to trophy hunting — the most misunderstood and possibly the most abused activity on earth – all of it manufactured fury over trophy hunting that serves as a convenient diversion: a moral pantomime designed to swell NGO coffers rather than save a single animal’s hide. It is fundraising masquerading as compassion—and wildlife pays the price for the performance.
In reality, trophy hunting is the purest celebration of evolution’s Leg 1: the deliberate search for the most challenging quarry, governed by rules far stricter than the necessary brutality of survival hunting or the cost-effective constraints of pest control. It is costly, difficult, humane, and — economically — the engine that circles and protects the widest landscapes and the greatest numbers of animals in Africa today.
Small wonder civilians loathe it. Trophy hunting is everything that modern Western tertiary-sector life is not: dangerous, masculine, objective, competitive and real. The arts-and-media classes, cossetted by civilisation and living further from nature than any people in history, believe themselves qualified to pronounce upon it. These are the same folk who think biology is bigotry and women can have penises – ignorant of history, allergic to evolution, and distrustful of reality, they shout the loudest. Empty vessels do indeed make the most noise.
Back to CITES, and back to reality – as the delegates fly home, half of them clutching petitions about rhinos they have never seen outside a plush toy — one small reminder is due: Nature is not what Born Free and the parasites tell you it is. Hunting is not like their fiction – it is something else, somewhere else entirely, the human interface with reality — the outside realm upon which civilisation depends.
And conservation is not a mood or a hashtag. It is not a silly blow-up plastic toy on a stick held aloft outside Parliament by a half-wit. It is a wheel that turns only when wildlife pays its way through sustainable use, delivering tangible benefits to the people who live with it. Stop the wheel and wildlife dies because farming and settlement soon blanket nature with the desires of human civilisation, as surely as rust eats an old abandoned tractor. Turn the wheel, the engine lives and wildlife thrives. CITES stands for trade, not bans, and sustainable trade and the hands of local people keep the wheel turning. Civilian NGO fantasy brings the wheel to a halt.
The choice before us is simple: Sustainable use and real conservation, or a plush toy that is both the cause and grave-marker of wild animal extinction.
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.