Local NGOs lobby House of Lords over hunting
Mbongeni Mguni | Friday June 16, 2023 12:44
Today’s debate on the second reading of the Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill is just one more step towards passing a law many communities who live alongside wildlife in Botswana and the Southern African region, have been dreading.
The bill’s presence in the House of Lords follows a process in the House of Commons, the ordinary parliamentary platform it went through in March this year.
In their spirited campaigns to end trophy hunting in Botswana and the region, animal rights lobbyists have put pressure on legislators in countries where the majority of clients for commercial hunting activities come from. Besides Great Britain, similar legislative lockdowns against hunting are at various stages of debate in Germany and the broader European Parliament.
The British debate represents the most advanced legislative process against hunting, an activity that in the domestic season last year, resulted in P31.3 million in revenues flowing to the local communities that actually have to live alongside wildlife.
The arguments that controlled trophy hunting is a scientifically verified conservation method where revenues from areas unsuitable for photographic tourism can help sustain wildlife management and preservation, have been drowned out by the emotive, loud campaigns by animal rights groups who have run incessant campaigns on all available platforms, including against countries such as Botswana.
The endorsement of trophy hunting by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) through its approval of elephant tusk export quotas for countries such as Botswana, or the support from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the research of respected scientists, has made little impact against the well-resourced, celebrity-backed campaigns mounted by the animal rights groups.
Still, the Community Leaders Network of Southern Africa, a regional civic group of rural communities, engaged with the House of Lords in London this week, attempting to either thwart the proposed bill or at least secure amendments that will not adversely impact controlled hunting in countries like Botswana.
“On Tuesday afternoon, we were accorded an audience at the House of Lords and we were with ambassadors from Southern Africa and two scientists,” Siyoka Simasiku, a representative of the Network and also executive director of the Ngamiland Council of Non-Governmental Organisations told Mmegi.
“We gave them the scientific facts of the issues around conservation, delving into hunting and others, then got into their proposed bill.”
The rural NGO leaders and their allies from academia took the House of Lords through the arguments for controlled hunting, the devastating impact on communities of the 2014 to 2019 hunting ban in Botswana, how the “preferred” alternative of photographic tourism failed dismally to replace hunting incomes and how the populations of species such as elephants were threatening biodiversity, killing and injuring humans and frequently decimating lifelines such as agriculture.
“They said some of the things, they didn’t know about them and they said they would go, sit down and consider them,” Simasiku said in an interview as he left Gatwick Airport returning to Botswana on Thursday.
“Many of the people here don’t travel widely and instead get their information from what others have written.
“They don’t understand how people are living with animals and are actually being fed some kind of rosy picture of the whole situation.
“They think we live with these animals the way they live with dogs and cats, but it’s actually a life or death situation for us.
“So, they don’t know these things and think we are simply cruel people.”
However, as the veteran activist explains, their efforts to change minds in London were not a one-way traffic affair: pushing from the other end were the inevitable animal rights groups for whom today’s second reading of the bill is a step closer to their dream of shutting off the flow of trophies from Africa.
Standing shoulder to shoulder with the animal rights groups are their regional allies, who this week penned a last-gasp plea urging the House of Lords to adopt the bill. The letter, expressing “steadfast support for the bill,” has more than 103 signatories including civil servants, pastoralists and “human rights defenders”. Number 30 on the list of signatories is former president Ian Khama, an avowed opponent of trophy hunting and one of the people most cited by British legislators supporting the bill.
“It’s a dicey time for us,” Simasiku said.
“If this bill goes through and we fail, we are hoping at least it will proceed with amendments that help evidence-based hunting and trophies, not a blanket ban.”
Emmanuel Koro, a Johannesburg-based journalist who writes extensively on environment and development issues in Africa, told Mmegi that wildlife will be the loser if the House of Lords endorsed the “the popstars, comedians and animal rights groups’ fundraising industry NGOs’ influenced decision to impose a blanket and worldwide hunting trophies imports ban into the UK.”
“I hope the House of Lords will reverse this moment-of-madness hunting trophy imports ban decision by the parliamentarians,” he said.
“It would be a sad day if the House of Lords do as thoughtlessly as their parliamentarians did which is to reject a purely scientific wildlife management approach, involving the sustainable harvesting of excessive wildlife populations in specific ecosystems that have large wildlife populations that exceed the carrying capacities of their ecosystems.”
Koro said hunting, as is happening in wildlife-rich and elephant over-populated Southern African countries, helps prevent excessive growth of wildlife population so that wildlife does not die and suffer from insufficient water, food supply and even space to exist.
“The British parliamentarians have stained the British government's 'hands' with innocent African wildlife blood.
“I hope the House of Lords will reverse this mess that will forever be recorded in history books.”