Killing Animals to Save Them from Extinction

Is killing an endangered animal for sport the best way to save the species from extinction? The World Bank, one of the largest sources of financing for biodiversity conservation projects in developing countries thinks it is.

 

The World Bank approved a U.S. $46 million grant to Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries, late last year to bolster tourism and alleviate poverty. Now, $700,000 of that has been earmarked to bolster trophy hunting of elephants and lions.

 

Mozambique's elephants, poached for their ivory for the illegal trade to Asia, are in a precipitous decline. Between 2009 and 2014, their numbers fell from an estimated 20,000 to 10,300, according to a survey by the Wildlife Conservation Society as part of the Great Elephant Census.

 

In Mozambique as well as other poor African countries, such as South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania sport hunting has long been embraced as a way to help finance wildlife protection. Hunting hasn’t saved Mozambique’s rhinos, however, which were declared locally extinct in 2013.

By contrast, in the face of losses of their elephants and other animals, Botswana and Kenya have banned big-game sport hunting.

 

Opinions about sport hunting as a conservation strategy are sharply divided.

“When properly regulated, and when revenues are distributed to communities in and around parks,” says Madji Seck, a spokesperson at the bank’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, hunting “is an important tool for the sustainable management of parks and natural assets.”

 

Many opponents say that hunting revenue isn’t substantial enough to give poor communities a meaningful boost, especially if corrupt government officials line their own pockets with some of that money.

 

For Jeffrey Flocken, North American Regional Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), it’s also a moral issue. Given the gravity of the poaching crisis, authorities such as the World Bank, he says, “need to catch on to what the rest of the world already knows that killing animals to save them is not conservation. It’s just wrong.”