At face value, this appears pragmatic, even responsible. But there’s a troubling premise underneath it: the survival of South Africa’s wildlife depends on its ability to generate an enormous income for a select group of wealthy farmers and professional hunters from an even wealthier foreign clientele.
According to this logic, wildlife is protected not because it is ecologically vital, culturally significant, or ethically deserving of life, but purely because it can be killed for a hefty price. When conservation is built on the premise that wildlife must pay its way to exist, we should ask not only who benefits, but what is being lost, and at whose expense.
Each year I examine the professional hunting statistics provided to the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) to demand transparency regarding how South Africa’s wildlife is being utilized for financial gain. The most recently available statistics (for 2024) show a substantial increase of 17%: 7,756 visitors killed 40,508 wild animals (if one includes indigenous mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and exotic mammals also killed). For proponents of the euphemistically termed “sustainable use,” this will naturally look like a significant success. But can we continue to justify the continuous intensification and amplification of commercial wildlife use on ecological and ethical grounds?
‘If it pays, it stays’
Superficially, this phrase sounds like a pragmatic, “real world” solution. But digging deeper, it reveals an ideology intent on reducing wildlife and ecosystems to financial assets alone. There’s a concerning thought process within this assumption that the only way to safeguard wildlife is through assigning it economic value and effectively disregarding intrinsic value, ecological roles and intergenerational justice. Moreover, it entrenches the idea that wild animals are valuable in their deaths and limits reimagining and investing in a way forward that explores nonlethal and progressive conservation models. We cannot ignore the risk of making conservation contingent on the notion of continuous profitability and the desires of wealthy foreign hunters. Creating a dependency on such a narrow revenue stream and outsourcing our wildlife conservation to markets not fully in South Africa’s control is precarious and economically fragile.
We need only look to the COVID-19 pandemic to see that placing a financial value on wildlife conservation has devastating consequences. We cannot ignore the risk of travel bans and warnings, as well as reputational damage, as a result of changing social norms. Despite a push to ramp up the commercial use of wildlife, global opinion regarding sport hunting and the captive lion breeding industry puts South Africa at risk of a tarnished reputation as both a tourism and conservation destination.
Recent scientific research led by World Animal Protection confirms that international tourists would be willing to pay a “lion levy” to replace trophy hunting revenue, and that communities living along the Kruger National Park border themselves want to see wildlife-friendly options over killing animals as a means to earn a living.
The very basis of this economic conservation model is designed for an elite group of wealthy, primarily foreign, hunters, while the impact of extensive hunting is felt at a local level: among ecosystems, local communities and species dynamics. There’s a glaring imbalance of power in which foreign hunters, outfitters and landowners almost exclusively shape the conservation of wildlife more than rural communities who already bear the brunt of historical marginalization and exclusion, or even the broader South African public. This colonial legacy of managing wildlife reinforces existing global inequities in which the biodiversity of the Global South is commodified for leisure purposes and consumption by the Global North. South Africa’s wildlife does not only belong to those who can monetize it.
It has become a narrative all too often taken for granted that local communities living near game reserves and protected areas benefit immensely from trophy hunting. But in reality, such narratives only invoke local communities rhetorically and do not actually grant them meaningful decision-making powers without the disruption of elite capture and shaping attitudes through tokenistic, superficial involvement. “Trickle down” income from hunting is limited and demonstrates little meaningful change on the ground. Ultimately, such biased industry involvement risks shaping policy narratives and positioning the idea of sustainable use as a panacea and the only viable way forward.
Lions bred as 'prey': Inside South Africa's big game hunting industry
Protection versus production
The 2024 statistics show a clear alignment and significant shift toward wildlife ranching, blurring the line between wildlife conservation and farming. Thousands of the animals hunted as trophies were fenced, bred and killed based on market demands rather than ecological need. Maximizing the availability of “huntable” animals further legitimizes using techniques such as artificial breeding, genetic manipulation and intensive management practices that can no longer be considered genuine ecosystem management for the greater environmental good. Ultimately, if the use of wildlife is set not to be maintained but ramped up, wildlife numbers will be based on maximizing extraction and not on restoring functioning ecosystems.
Year on year, trophy-hunted lions have increased substantially, with only 2020 — the onset of the pandemic — as an exception. The vast majority of these lions are captive-bred and hunted in “ranched” or captive hunts (colloquially known as canned hunting). Industry role players have stated several times that canned hunting is considered illegal in South Africa, but the reality is more complex than the industry wants us to believe. Regardless of the terminology used, captive, ranched or “canned” hunts involve killing a captive-bred animal that has become reliant on people for sustenance and shelter its whole life.
These hunts take place in fenced-off areas of about 1,000 hectares (almost 2,500 acres), where the lions are shot, often from the back of a vehicle, with no chance of fair chase or escape. Minimum release times in North West province are 96 hours and in Limpopo province a mere 24 hours: that’s a single day until a lion is considered “wild enough” to be hunted at close range.
According to the South African Biodiversity Management Plan for the African lion, there are three categories of lions: Wild lions are considered part of fully functioning ecosystems such as Kruger National Park or Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. Managed lions occur on smaller fenced reserves and require a level of management to monitor population growth and genetic diversity. And then there are captive lions, which are bred purely for commercial gain at every life stage, from birth through death.
The captive-lion industry is simply playing with semantics by claiming that “canned” hunting is illegal and that they only utilize “ranched lions” for hunting, a term that is not in our legislation. Regardless of the terminology, a recent video published by an organization I work for, Blood Lions, captures the brutality of these hunts, with a fenced-in lion walking right up to a vehicle before being shot by a laughing hunter at close range.
If indigenous wildlife conservation and land restoration are reliant on the promotion of trophy hunting, then critical questions need to be asked regarding the trophy hunting of exotic species — including predators — happening within South Africa. While numbers are comparatively small, it is unclear how shooting a barbary sheep, fallow deer, or even a tiger could be considered a genuine conservation effort.
Likewise, thousands of antelope were trophy-hunted, but notably the color variants stand out. Black springbok and golden wildebeest need to be specifically bred and serve no conservation value to their species as a whole. The popularity of shooting an animal based on its color is a telling sign that rarities and unnatural variations trump real conservation and habitat restoration.
The sheer number of animals bred and kept for private ownership and economic gain further undermines any notions of a shared African natural heritage. Once again, industry narratives promoting African heritage can no longer be taken at face value and must be critically examined for what they are: greenwashing and exploiting local heritage for financial gain.
The false binary
There’s a false binary evident in the argument that wildlife can only survive through economic value or face certain extinction. Through this framing alone, we risk ignoring a wide spectrum of potential viable alternatives, including, but not limited to, photographic tourism (not without its own risks, but which nevertheless takes a least-harm approach); ecological restoration; public funding mechanisms; and community-led stewardship, which remains underexplored and underutilized. We’re stifling any opportunities for transformation when we treat hunting and economic value as default solutions.
South Africa stands at a crossroads with regard to how we envision managing wildlife and protecting biodiversity. On the one hand, we can continue to defend a conservation model that ties the fate of our wildlife, small and iconic, to the spending habits of wealthy foreign hunters. Or we can explore a way forward that recognizes wildlife for its ecological and intrinsic value, not as a private commodity. Wildlife should not have to earn its right to exist through death, nor should our conservation policies be dictated by markets that are ever-changing, unequal and increasingly out of touch with global values. Conservation needs to move beyond the taken-for-granted logic of extraction and shift toward approaches that embrace justice and ethics.
For South Africa to become a global leader in protecting wildlife and our biodiversity at large, we must stop outsourcing the value of our wildlife to those who can afford to kill it.
Stephanie Klarmann, Ph.D., is a conservation psychology researcher based in South Africa.
