Can Hunting Pay for Conservation Around the World?

The Take home Message

• ​​Funding from hunters supports the management efforts of most state agencies in the United States and that fact is used to great effect as a public relations tool for the hunting industry. Many hunting-interest groups rely heavily on this line of reasoning to advocate for trophy hunting in other countries.
• In the US, the vast majority of hunter-derived dollars come from recreational hunters, not trophy or sustenance hunters. For such a model to work, a country needs a wealthy population and a low population density. Very few countries have that unique combination of traits; by my count, there are nine countries, mostly in North America and northern Europe.
• Trophy hunting is certainly useful as a funding mechanism in some situations, but economic realities mean that wide-scale trophy hunting with the goal of funding conservation is unlikely on a large scale.   

White rhinos are commonly pursued by trophy hunters, but aren't as desirable a trophy as their much rarer cousin, the black rhino.

The full story

It’s not an understatement to say that we are in midst of the sixth major extinction event in the Earth’s history. Species are going extinct, often before we even recognize they existed. The biodiversity losses happening every day are not evenly distributed across the globe. Biodiversity hotspots occur in parts of Africa, South and Central America, and southeastern Asia, where government-led conservation efforts can be weak. The high biodiversity means there are many species that can go extinct. The weak governance and leadership on conservation combined with exploitation by wealthier nations means many species in these areas are going extinct. In some places, community efforts have not been mobilized to fill the conservation void, but these efforts are rarely well supported. Conservation of biodiversity is further hampered by chronic underfunding in many, if not most, countries with high biodiversity, and new revenue streams are desperately needed.

​As a practicing ecologist and conservation biologist, I regularly hear suggestions that other countries would be well served by adopting some of the practices and funding streams used by conservation agencies in the United States and, to a lesser degree, Canada. This view seems especially prominent among proponents of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, a philosophical description of one aspect of the conservation community in North America. Proponents of the North American Model consider it to be the gold standard of wildlife management in the world. If the North American Model works here, why can’t it work everywhere?

Impala are popular trophy species, but command trophy prices far lower than rarer species.

​There are some ideals widely held in the North American conservation community that can and do work overseas. For example, it is a common but not universal practice that wildlife is considered an international resource, and science is widely used in conservation and management in many countries. These are bedrocks of North American conservation, but they usually aren’t the parts of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation that advocates are suggesting we export.

What proponents of exporting North American conservation practices usually mean is that we should introduce the sportspeople-pay model of wildlife management overseas. Widespread hunting and a heavy reliance on hunting-generated revenue to fund game management have led to a unique conservation model in the United States. Trophy hunting organizations like Safari Club International and Conservation Force espouse the idea this management model should spread around the world. It’s easy to imagine why members of these organizations have an active interest in promoting hunting overseas, but this view is not limited to interest groups. No less than former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke once said “Built on the backs of hunters and anglers, the American conservation model proves to be the example for all nations to follow for wildlife and habitat conservation”.

​Do they have a point? Can hunting pay the conservation bills in countries other than the United States and Canada? Perhaps, but it’s important to make a distinction about the type of hunting we are discussing. Hunting falls along a gradient from sustenance hunting to recreational (or sport) hunting to trophy hunting. Sustenance hunting plays a tiny role in generating revenue for wildlife management, so I won’t discuss it here. I distinguish between recreational and trophy hunting based on intent. Recreational hunting is far more common. This is hunting for the fun of hunting or to harvest supplemental meat. Trophy hunting is the directed pursuit of the largest or most spectacularly adorned individuals of a species. In the United States, the sportspeople-pay model certainly encompasses trophy hunting, but trophy hunting pays only a small portion of the conservation bills. Recreational hunting is the workhorse of the sportspeople-pay model in North America.

The sportspeople-pay model of conservation funding works in the United States because recreational hunting is popular. That's not the case around the world.

I argue that most countries hoping to rely on recreational hunting by locals to generate conservation revenue will find limited success. Recreational hunting isn’t cheap, and it requires places with relatively low human densities to allow space to hunt. Thus, two things must be true about a country for recreational hunting to be viable on a large scale: (1) there must be a large portion of the population with disposable income, and (2) there must be sufficient space to make hunting feasible to the masses. I think we often forget just how unique the United States and Canada are in possessing both these traits.

​To make the point, I plotted the weighted net income of citizens in counties around the world against their country’s population density. If citizens of a country are generally low income, few people will be able to afford recreational hunting, and hunting will be reserved for the wealthy or international trophy hunters. At the same time, recreational hunting might be directly at odds with the need for sustenance hunting by locals. A sportspeople-pay model is unlikely to succeed in such a country on a large scale. Conversely, a generally wealthy country that has a high human density is unlikely to have both the space and robust enough game populations to make widescale recreational hunting possible.

There are nine countries I think have both the disposable income and empty space to fund a sizeable portion of conservation and management through recreational hunting: Norway, Iceland, USA, Sweden, Australia, Finland, Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand. Probably not the countries you were thinking about as hunting destinations, right? It shouldn’t be a surprise though that Ireland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have the highest hunter participation among the major European countries. Countries other than these nine are less likely candidates for funding conservation and wildlife management with recreational hunting by locals.

Each dot on this graph is a country. Populations with disposable income and space to hunt are necessary for the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation to be viable. The nine countries that best meet these requirements are spelled out. Notice these countries are quite limited in geographic scope, being mostly in North America, Scandinavian, or on islands.

Further, for recreational hunting to be a viable source of conservation revenue outside North America, most countries would need to change cultural and regulatory norms and resolve other practical limitations. For example, most potential game species are found on large reserves and parks around the world, and therefore hunting opportunities are limited, if not directly at odds with other sources of income like ecotourism. Further, many countries have long traditions of private ownership of wildlife. If wildlife are owned by individuals instead of held in public trust, widescale recreational hunting is unlikely to fund conservation. In some popular hunting destinations like South Africa, most hunting occurs on private ranches where game is stocked and therefore much of the profit from the hunt stays with the ranch and never find its way to conservation organizations or agencies. It’s also true that gun regulations are stricter in nearly every other country in the world and would need to be changed for recreational hunting to be feasible on a large scale. Loosening gun regulations would be contradictory to the trends happening in most countries, and I suspect the larger societal concerns about loosening gun regulations would make it impossible.

There would also need to be the wholesale creation of a regulatory and logistical system to deal with recreational hunting. Regulating and managing widespread hunting by locals is quite different than regulating and managing one-off trophy hunts by international hunters. Even countries that successfully manage trophy hunting, like Namibia, would need a new regulatory system. It would likely require the creation of new agencies similar to those found in states and provinces in North America simply to manage the sale of permits and allocate the funds to conservation. The money collected must find its way to the appropriate agency or community group in charge of conservation for the region and must be used to implement habitat management and conservation relevant to the population, community, or ecosystem. In many counties where hunting is often suggested as a conservation solution, weak governance and government corruption may limit the money that makes it from the hunter to the conservation program.

​If recreational hunting by locals is unlikely to fund widespread conservation of natural resources in a country, trophy hunting is the only viable part of the sportspeople-pay model. Trophy hunting might be viable in many countries where widespread recreational hunting isn’t because most of the hunters are international and less space is needed for the relatively small number of trophy hunters. Really, this is probably the part of the sportspeople-pay model the Safari Club or Secretary Zinke are focused on when they discuss exporting our system. In future stories, I will discuss the ecological, conservation, and societal implications of trophy hunting. Here, I will focus on one specific economic consideration of trophy hunting as a method to fund conservation on a large scale.

Trophy prices relate strongly to rarity of the species. The relationship is probably non-linear, so most species are worth relatively little until they become very rare, when the price skyrockets as the species nears extinction.

To be clear, trophy hunting is quite useful for infusing cash into conservation communities in some countries around the world and it serves as the impetus for the protection of vast swaths of private land. However, the reality is that simple economics will probably preclude trophy hunting from becoming the main driver of conservation in most countries. As any commodity or resource becomes rarer, the price goes up. In the context of trophy hunting, the desire to hunt a species, and therefore the price a hunter is willing to pay, goes up as animals become rarer. This means that species most in need of conservation are the ones that can bring the most dollars to conservation through hunting. For example, one of the most expensive and desirable trophy species in the world is the black rhinoceros, which happens to be critically endangered.

​If you follow this kind of news at all, you probably remember the Dallas Safari Club’s auction in 2014 that brought $350,000 for the right to hunt a mature black rhino in Namibia. Conversely, species with robust populations tend to be much less desirable to trophy hunters. One such species that co-occurs with black rhinos is the southern impala, a medium-sized antelope not unlike North American pronghorns. Trophy prices for impalas fall in the hundreds of dollars instead of the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even hippopotamus, which are similar in size to rhinos, command only a fraction of the trophy price of rhinos, in part because they are much more common.

​Thus, trophy hunting to fund conservation is a catch-22. Common species that could be hunted in large numbers don’t command large fees and are unlikely to alone attract many international hunters. Rare species that can attract huge fees are rare and therefore a highly limited resource. Unless a country can find some creative way around these limitations, I think it’s safe to argue that trophy hunting will always represent a niche funding source in most countries. There are countries, South Africa comes to mind, that have lessened the severity of the rarity curve by creating a private hunting industry supported by wide-scale breeding and selling of trophy species. In countries without such a system, trophy hunting can still be a valuable source of conservation funding to support more widespread and robust funding sources, but if trophy hunting is the main funding source, it will be problematic.

Hippos command a relatively low trophy price, despite their large size.

​So yes, there will be local areas or possibly even entire countries where recreational or trophy hunting can be a valuable tool to fund conservation. Hunting will not be a universal solution, and it’s unlikely be the main conservation solution in most countries. In truth, it’s far from the most important source of conservation funding in the United States.

We also must remember that to date, large-scale reliance on a sportspeople-pay model of conservation is an experiment with a sample size of one: the United States. We have no ability to determine if conservation and management has worked in the United States because it is partly funded by hunters and anglers, or despite that fact. Teddy Roosevelt and others chose to promote sport hunting as an important piece of the conservation puzzle, and it worked. However, had they decided to greatly limit hunting and instead made conservation funding a larger priority in federal budgets, we might be in a similar or better conservation situation than the one in which we currently find ourselves, simply because the United States has considerable resources to spend on conservation. We as a country might have a completely different societal conservation ethic that works just as well. It is possible that almost any conservation and management scheme would work well in a wealthy country with a low population density.

​A sportspeople-pay model happens to be well suited for the United States, but it is misguided to believe the successes of our conservation strategies will universally translate to other countries with other conservation concerns and societal conservation ethics. Regardless of your personal views on recreational or trophy hunting, I hope you can agree that we should rely on local experts and community members to determine if a sportspeople-pay model is appropriate to fund part of their conservation needs. That’s the only way such a model has a chance of working.