Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa Hunting for the experience, not trophies?

Chipolopolo,

Believe me, I have also seen the results of intense elephant poaching in Africa--and run into elephant poachers while on safari. All except one of the poachers were killed the next day by anti-poaching patrol, which is why they ran from us when we encountered them. (I sure wouldn't have shot any of them, but the Tanzanian game scout would have, if he hadn't left his rifle in the Land Cruiser, less than 100 yards away.) We also found dozens of elephant skulls, of all sizes, with the tusks chopped off, and very few elephants. I just talked to the PH at the SCI convention, and he isn't even offering elephant hunts anymore, in what a decade ago was one of the best elephant areas in Tanzania.

And yet you still claim that a handful of American trophy hunters posting photos on Facebook has anything approaching that impact? Or that NOT posting will delay the inevitable result of far too many other problems for Africa's wildlife? Oh, sorry, I forgot, you're trying to delay the death of our sport.

You should have read Ortega y Gasset a long time ago, because that might have prevented you from somehow falling for the notion that hanging a head on the wall somehow ennobles both us and the animal.
You have also failed to explain why heads on the wall are somehow so much better than photos on the wall. Is it because of the "educational" qualities of taxidermy that so many trophy hunters espouse? Museums have been doing that a lot longer than yet another generation of safari hunters.

I have plenty of African taxidermy on my walls, but quit bringing heads back a few safaris ago. In fact am probably not going to on any more big game safaris, though might go back to photograph in parks or reserves--which I have always spent some time doing in the days before or after my hunting safaris.

But I have taken all the African animals I ever dreamed of (which did not include lions or elephants), and hunting them took me far deeper into their lives, and the wild parts of Africa, than any amount of photography on game reserves--just as hunting elk or grizzly bears takes North American hunters into places they couldn't imagine or predict far more than visiting Yellowstone Park with a telephoto lens.

Yes, a well-taxidermed head is a fine symbol of a hunting memory, but I gave my best-ever kudu head to my PH, because at that stage of my hunting life I realized it meant more to him than to me. What meant more to me was the actual hunt, and how it led me into places I couldn't have anticipated with only a camera instead of a rifle in my hand.

He was thrilled, and I was quite happy with the photos of him and me and a fine day in Africa. But neither the head nor the photos of us have any meaning other than a stirring of the memory of hunting days, how kudu steak tastes, learning new birds and trees, and climbing yet another hill to see what's on the other side. Which is apparently something you somehow cannot understand: A trophy is only as valuable as the memories it stirs, because taxiderming a head only delays the inevitable breakdown of the animal we kill. And that delay only really means something to us, not the world at large.

I'm not saying you don't appreciate the hunt itself, or everything connected with the experience, but like Ruark you're confusing a symbol of the hunt with something deeper inside the experience of the hunt. Which is probably why you believe that not posting trophy photos on the Internet will somehow delay the inevitable decline of African big game, a decline due to issues as complex and perhaps unknowable as the essence of hunting itself.