Grand Safari - Hunting and Conservation

Hunting and Conservation

Hunters are amongst the most active conservationists. The media often mixes up hunting and poaching in everybody's mind, resulting in a false image of the hunter in non-hunters minds.

It is a fact, often verified in african bush, that when hunting stops, game disappears rapidly. Reasons vary from poor game management to heavy poaching. Countries like South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Tanzania are well aware of the problem. They allow intensive hunting, but on a very strict scale and quota system. By the way, these are also the very same countries that offer the most outstanding photographic safaris!

Conservation through hunting has helped a great deal to save African species such as Bontebok and White Rhinoceros. They were almost extinct and are now widely available to sport hunters. Very much the same happened in Tanzania with elephants. The government required a minimum tusk size many years ago, in order to protect and re-establish elephant populations as they were before the construction of the railway line. It worked, and it is now possible for the lucky hunter to harvest tusks close to 2 meter long. The minimum size is now 1,70m (66 inches) or 20 kg (44 pounds) per tusk, and it is now more and more common to harvest a bull on a 21 day safari.

Other countries, like Botswana and Zimbabwe, are having great problems with too many elephants around. They do vast damage to the flora, destroying the habitat of other species too.

Conservation is also the culling of surplus animals to keep the environment balanced. This is the reason why hunting has a crucial role to play in today's conservation efforts.