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Skinners (left) in Namibia in 2011 hold up the pelt of a leopard shot by an American hedge fund
manager. Leopards are elusive, and dogs helped track this one down. Namibia later banned
the use of dogs because leopard numbers were falling dangerously. Another American (above,
at center) hired a cameraman to record his 2016 leopard hunt in Namibia.
“If you get rid of those conservancies in Namibia,”
Packer says, “you’d probably get rid of all
the wildlife and be left with cattle.” He says he
and other biologists “are concerned with populations,
and that’s an abstraction. That’s where the
real conflict with the animal-rights organizations
comes, because in their mind, Fifi must never die.
That’s where the biologists can sound pretty heartless
and cold.” For Packer, saving an individual
animal misses the point; what’s crucial is protecting
genetically viable populations as a whole. “I’m
not against hunting. There’s got to be a middle
ground,” he says. In his estimation, though, that
middle ground isn’t exactly in the middle: He believes
that trophy hunting is of marginal value as
a large-scale conservation tool in Africa.
On the other hand, hunters and government
officials often cite a hotly contested estimate
by the Safari Club International Foundation, a
pro-hunting group with the stated goal of promoting
conservation and education, that the roughly
18,000 trophy hunters who come to southern and
eastern Africa each year contribute $436 million
to the region’s GDP. The Humane Society International
says the amount for that region is at most
$132 million, or .03 percent of GDP.
In a 2013 op-ed in the New York Times countering
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal
to list lions as a threatened species, making it
more difficult for Americans to hunt them, the
Tanzanian wildlife director, Alexander Songorwa,
stated that hunters on 21-day lion safaris
paid government fees of up to $10,000 and
pumped $75 million into the economy from 2008
to 2011. Packer says the 120,000 square miles of
hunting areas in Tanzania need $600 million in
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