Bill Wiggin is the MP for North Herefordshire.
It is worrying when a deep-blue Conservative like me finds myself agreeing with George Monbiot. Such a matter is hunting in Africa. A bill has been reintroduced to the Commons to ban the import of animal trophies.
The goal everyone shares in this debate is that Africa’s big animals must survive into the future. This is no easy task given the extraordinary growth of Africa’s human population. It will have risen eight-fold during our lives causing immense pressure on the land available for wildlife.
This means that Africans increasingly come into conflict with big animals that eat their goats, threaten their children, and trample their villages. Of course, it is counterintuitive that hunting these animals could be good for their numbers. But that is what George Monbiot and I agree is the conclusion of scientific research.
It is this science that also gives the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the global regulator, the confidence to back legal hunting. One paper observed that in Kenya, where hunting has long been banned, there has been a dramatic fall in wildlife numbers. Another study found that after Botswana banned hunting there was a horrific surge in human-wildlife conflict with a 593 per cent increase in elephant carcasses being discovered. That disaster led to the ban being quickly reversed.
It is difficult for those in our Westminster village to understand the degree of threat caused to African villagers by elephants and lions. That is why rural Africa welcomes controlled legal hunting – it helps manage excessive herds and rogue animals. The fees the hunters pay also bring significant cash into remote areas far from where tourists and their photo safaris can get to. This income creates incentives for villagers to refrain from poisoning, snaring, or shooting the animals.
It is Africans who are managing these risks – not us. We got rid of our last brown bears 1,000 years ago and our last wolves 264 years ago. Do we have a moral right to impose additional risks from large animals on African villagers? No.
Nor are we intellectually superior to Africans. They know that legal hunting reduces illegal hunting. It is such poaching, often by Chinese-funded criminal gangs, that is the critical risk to the survival of the species we treasure. These brutal gangs are indiscriminate in how many animals they kill. They do not care about the long-term survival of any species.
By contrast, the legal hunting estates want to grow their herds to ensure the future of their businesses. That is why they invest heavily in anti-poaching patrols. They provide armed guards which are vital to protect these animals from gruesome deaths. This legal hunting operates under strict quotas agreed upon by national governments and the international regulator. Accordingly, the herds flourish.
African nations are harnessing private money to benefit the wildlife they cherish. What right do we have to interfere in how Africa manages its wildlife? When the bill for the proposed ban was read a second time last year, ministers told the Commons that its purpose was to reduce “the impossible pressures” on Africa’s wildlife.
Other MPs argued that the measure would “save thousands of animals” from the “barbaric” and “savage” African practice of legal hunting. But the Government and Labour know that the High Commissioners of six African nations have jointly condemned this bill as inexcusable meddling in Africa’s democratic affairs.
They find it appalling that British politicians show no concern for African lives threatened by these animals. They are furious with virtue-signalling proposals which lack scientific credence. It would be a mistake to underestimate this anger.
MokgweetsI Masis, the President of Botswana, has described Western interventions in Africa’s wildlife as “a racist onslaught [from people who] sit in the comfort of where they are and lecture us about the management of species they don’t have.” The President was not just speaking for himself. Recent reports suggest that ordinary Africans share his view. Papers quoted from a survey of 4,000 people in Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe who said that the UK legislation was “racist” and “neo-colonial”.
It is easy for well-meaning MPs to blunder into inadvertent racism – all the more so when full of self-righteous indignation about animals. MPs backing this bill are ignoring African sovereignty. And, in their ignorance, they are a danger to the animals they profess to care about.
The post Bill Wiggin: Supporting legal hunting is the best way to protect Africa’s big animals – not a trophy import ban appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Sir Bill Wiggin MP
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