From Jim Amrhein, in today's "Whiskey & Gunpowder" (
http://www.whiskeyandgunpowder.com):
"Like it or not, wild animals are a crop to governments. And in those 20 or so African nations that allow safari hunting, wildlife is so valuable as a source of foreign cash (estimates put this number at as much as $100 million or more annually) that it becomes worth regulating and protecting from the real danger: Poachers that slaughter for skins, ivory or horns they sell on the black market for a fraction of their value to a trophy hunter — and farmers that kill the rarest of wild cats for snatching the occasional $5 goat or cow, or the most threatened of rhinos and elephants for rutting up the odd sorghum field…
In Botswana, elephant populations are growing at a rate of 5% per year, and have been ever since hunting them was re-opened in 1996, when the population was around 80,000. By 2003, there were around 123,000 of them there — making Botswana the country with the world’s largest concentration of the lovable pachyderms. How many of them got trophy hunted that year?
Just 210. Less than two-tenths of one percent of the herd.
Translation: Because trophy elephants are so valuable to Botswana’s bottom line, it pays the government there — and the locals, via the trickle-down of hunting-related revenues — to actively prevent the snaring and poaching of them for their flesh, ivory and to stop the killing of them for destroying crops and forests, which they regularly do…
Conversely, when Kenya banned the sport hunting of elephants in the 1970s, they had a healthy population of 140,000 of them. Today, because of poaching, agri-slaughter and a lack of economic incentives to conservation (like high-dollar trophy hunting fees), there are fewer than 23,000 of them. Less than one-sixth as many. In neighboring Tanzania, where elephant hunting is once again allowed, populations have exploded, like in Botswana."