Just out of curiosity, who would know how many ele licences were issues and how many ele were poached last year in these 2 countries? What would the ratio be as a direct comparison to see the effect of hunting on population as opposed to what poaching is doing to population.
What has happened in Botswana since the ban on hunting? Have the animal populations improved?
If anyone has any info on this, it would be interesting to see some numbers.
The number of licences issued can be controlled which should in effect protect the trophies for the coming years.
My feeling is that there are a bunch of unscrupulous outfits who would be limited in their activities by this ban, based on this comment
"Questionable management practices, a lack of effective law enforcement, and weak governance have resulted in uncontrolled poaching and catastrophic population declines in Tanzania. For example, the Selous, Africa's largest protected area, has lost 66 percent of its elephants in the past five years"
The problem then is that the USFWS is not addressing the fact that saving the ele or lion or rhino or whatever depends on money, without the funds to control poaching, there is not going to be any respite. Hunting in Africa does provide an assistance to anti poaching whether it be cash from the actual hunt or by having people on the ground in the various areas hunting, tracking and scouting, whether they are Wildlife Police Officers or not it is still a deterrent to poaching.
"In Zimbabwe, available data, though limited, indicate a significant decline in the elephant population, while anecdotal evidence, such as the widely publicized poisoning of 300 elephants last year in Hwange National Park"
How many of those 300 were hunted?
How would a ban on trophy hunting have changed the fact that they would still have been poached?
What has USFWS done to mitigate that action and actions like that which occur on a daily basis?
Unfortunately for hunters, ban's like these are 'people pleasing' actions that receive a lot of publicity and approval, yet they do very little for the very subject they are trying to 'preserve'.
The other thing you have to look at is who has done the animal counts and how accurate are they.
There can be glaring errors in the government counts, such as an area that claims to have 2,000+ Sable but there are no licences issued. I wonder why?
