Although the U. Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans to lift the ban on imported elephant trophies in , the organization soon decided to shift to a case-by-case assessment model. It has since opted not to issue any relevant permits, making it unlikely that American hunters will even be able to bring their trophies home from Botswana. Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history.
Website: meilansolly. Here, his mother holds his picture. Post a Comment. National Geographic sums it up well. In short, sport-hunting is a for-profit private system that can help conserve elephant populations. If people are getting rich from elephant hunting, then those people are financially incentivized to protect those elephants. Pretty much all the countries in which elephants live and are hunted are not doing a good enough job of preventing poaching.
And the international community is not doing a good enough job of eliminating the demand for ivory. Yet, on the whole, hunting is still crucial to animal conservation in Africa for the simple reason that the money it brings sets aside vast amounts of protected habitat. We don't have a better system to replace it with yet. Outrage and ignorance won't help anyone—especially not the elephants. Search Search. An elephant in Tanzania. Twitter Icon. Create a personalised content profile.
Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Hunting elephants is a buzz term used to describe a strategy of going after very large customers to sell a good or service, as well as targeting large companies for acquisition. These customers can provide large contracts, but they can be hard to catch and require large teams to tackle.
Hunting elephants is a colloquial term for describing the practice of targeting large companies as potential clients or acquisition targets. Whether selling a toaster or acquiring a competitor, companies can follow one of a number of strategies when deciding where to focus limited resources. From a sales perspective, hunting elephants emphasizes finding enterprise-level customers that will make large purchases.
Startups that are able to close a large client may use this information when convincing other large companies that it provides a good product, as companies are more likely to work with a new company if they know that other large companies are also doing the same thing.
Some experts predict that elephants will be extinct in Kenya within a decade. As the pro-hunting side has it, elephant safaris assist conservation by pretty simple means: A bull killed on a legal hunt is, in theory, worth more to the local economy than an animal slaughtered by poachers.
In the most far-flung parts of the Botswana bush, the hunting industry has been the chief employer, offering a paycheck to people in places where there simply is no other gainful work. Furthermore, hunting concessions are uninviting to poachers. Hunters like Jeff Rann employ private security forces to patrol the remoter parts of the preserve.
For every professional hunter who follows the rules, there are others who overshoot their quotas, or engage in illegal ivory trafficking, or cheat their employees of a living wage. And lately, in Tanzania and Zimbabwe where last year elephants were poisoned in a single massacre , the hunting industry has proven no antidote to poaching.
Fish and Wildlife Service, in April , suspended the import of elephant trophies from both nations. The hunters pump the water for them, but now they will have to move to the villages to find it. Abhorrent as the practice is to most Western, Dumbo-adoring sensibilities, elephant hunting occupies an awkward, grayed-out space in the landscape of conservation policy.
Some nonprofits such as the World Wildlife Fund have quietly endorsed it as part of a conservation strategy but decline to discuss their position on record. But for now, if you are one of those people who chokes up at reports of poachers poisoning elephants by the herd, you may have to countenance the uncomfortable possibility that one solution to the survival of the species may involve people paying lots of money to shoot elephants for fun.
The hunt continues. We are not back in the truck ten minutes before the tracker calls for a halt. Robyn and Will linger in the Land Cruiser while Jeff and the tracker go off into the bush to investigate. On the heels of our run-in with the monotusker and his pal, it feels as though the day has already coughed up a full lode of potential prey.
The bush resounds with a din of timber destruction. The sun is making its descent, and perhaps a hundred yards off, through the brambles, tusks glow in the rich light. The animals are fanned out ahead of us, noisily munching. We come in closer, and the elephants begin to take note, though we register more as a mild irritant, not a mortal threat. The trophy animal is in a lane of dense shrubs, mooning us.
Jeff and Robyn whisper tactically. Not thirty feet from us, the elephant with the missing tusk, the same elephant we just ran into, suddenly appears, having made its approach way more stealthily than an animal the size of a bread truck ought to be capable of. The bull is pissed. It nods and snorts and tosses snoutfuls of sand our direction. I find the performance convincing.
It keeps coming. Two more strides and the elephant could reach out and touch someone with its trunk. The elephant looks to be about twelve feet tall. The trunk weighs hundreds of pounds and is easily capable of breaking a human spine. But the elephant is about fifteen feet away, and I will now confess to being scared just about shitless.
The elephant snorts and brandishes its vast head. Lunch goes to lava in my bowels. If not for my present state of sphincter-cinching terror, I would well be in the market for an adult diaper. This is an amazingly pure kind of fear. My arteries are suddenly capable of tasting my blood, which right now has the flavor of a nine-volt battery.
Jeff Rann is in dialogue with the elephant. This consists of whispering menacingly and jabbing his rifle around in the air. The elephant does its pissed-off little shuffle for perhaps a minute, probably less. And then the tape runs in slow reverse. The elephant retreats backward into the shrubs, eyeing us, curtsying hostilely as he goes.
I regain my bearings, and we resume our approach to the trophy bull. It requires the same strategy. The target is in the middle of the fan of five. A disquiet, a shared unease, is taking hold among these fellows. The racket of salad consumption is tapering off. The elephants are beginning to push on.
But, goddamn, these guys could use a coach. The interaction with the one-tusker notwithstanding, their defense pretty much sucks. The light is caramelizing. The sun, too, seems murderously slow in its descent. We move past one elephant, past another, until we are on the trophy beast.
Again, its butt is to us. Coyness is keeping the elephant alive. If he does not turn his head, the sun will set and the elephant will not be killed today. And then he turns his head. His expression is wary, rueful. In his long-lashed bedroom eyes is the look of an old drag queen turning to regard an importunate suitor tugging at the hem of her dress. Robyn raises her rifle.
She shoots. The shot catches the elephant in the appropriate place, at the bridge of its trunk.
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