Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa Best deal on leopard?

Lol. So would I if I could afford it.

I suppose the more 'fair chase' you introduce to it the less chance of success but each to their own and I'm not blameless on that account.

This is about as "cheap" as I would go:
14 day Leopard/Plains Game Hunt
Daily Rate:
Hunter: USD 950 per day (1 x 1)
Trophy Fee Leopard: Leopard USD 3,750
Trophy Fee Zebra: 900 (bait only 650) (figure on at least four baits expecially if you request pre-bait or whatever animal the cats like in the area you are hunting)

Tophet,

Hey mate, it's your money & your safari but I guarantee you that a cheap leopard hunt will never be as good as one in a more expensive area with a PH with more cat experience.

My comments aren't meant to criticise anyone or anything, just to point out that a cheap leopard hunt can be and usually is a false economy.

Into the Thorns- Wayne Grant is a good read on experienced Zim leopard hunting tactics.

Tophet 1,

Many hunters go several times and never get a cat. The best leopard men with the highest success rates are very much in demand and none discount their hunts. I work with a few of them and I've never seen them discount one in 13 years of doing this full-time because they don't have to. At the end of the day, paying a few thousand extra to take one the first time is a way better value than going two or three times to get one if you're lucky.

At the end of the day, some guys are truly way better cat hunters than others, and some areas are better than others. That's just the way it is. You don't have to seek out the most expensive hunt to get a good one, but bargains rarely are.

For example, I've had a lot of clients come to me over the years trying to get me to compete with one Namibian or another who offered them a leopard on a plains game daily rate + an inexpensive trophy fee. In their hearts, they KNOW they aren't going to be that one lucky guy to get a leopard, and they know my cat guy is a good one, so they try to get me to match his price to get the business. We won't because we shoot our cats. All the dreamers that go with the inexperienced leopard PH / farmer buy the plains game hunt for the whisper of a hint of a chance at a leopard and 99 percent of them go home empty-handed. I paid a lot of money for my leopard and I hunted my ass off, leaving camp at 3 or 3:30 in the morning and running up and down the mountains for hours on end, but it was worth every penny.

The Luangwa Valley of Zambia is stiff with Leopard and at 25K all in, including trophy fee is considered fair. The river has good quantities of hippo and croc. Species such as Puku are an added bonus.

That's actually a very good point. Zambia has a few especially interesting species to make your hunt even more special.

Another good option are the private areas in Botswana such as Tuli Block..... the good news is that a leopard hunt there can be had for a tad over about US$20K but the bad news is quota is very limited and so you sometimes need to book fairly well in advance... but of course the upside of that is you know the hunting pressure on that species is going to be very low which bodes well for success rates and trophy quality.

I need a bit of education here, why does the day rate jump so much? I don't have either the desire or the means to hunt any of the cats, but I am intrigued...

Because leopard scratches hurt........... A LOT!

Next...

Sorry Greg, didn't realize that you booked for Nick as well.

All of us want the best deal that we can get - particularly if we are not sacrificing the quality of the experience. On leopard, I would simply restrict my search to those guys who have proven high success rates. That handful of really good cat hunters have kill rates in the 90th percentile. Nick is one of those. Just don't think really cheap deals is the place to start expecting to stumble upon that sort of expertise.

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Baiting, the time expenditures of staff to prepare and bait sites,etc.

For my June Namib leopard hunt,my daily rate is 600 and I had to book 12 days. 4000 for my trophy fee. I was one of two who were awarded a permit to hunt leopard. The last hunter to draw killed a beauty.

Considering staff earn anything from US$0 - US$100-200 per month depending on country and P/H, I doubt costs vary much from a P/G hunt when baiting. Hunting with hounds will have a few more feet on the ground. Days needed may increase but have a think about it, it is pure supply and demand.

Sure a premium for experience maybe expected but to what level ? What the market will bear.

If you take out the posts by outfitters and P/Hs with a vested interest in 'The Industry' and my garble, there were really only 2-3 helpful posts at the start of this thread.

Mate, with all due respect, I don't see any commercial / hard sell posts here at all. What I do see is several blokes who are pretty danmed experienced in cat hunting and/or the African hunting industry trying to give informed opinions based on their/our many decades of practical experience of cat hunting and the industy.

However, if you're suggesting you know more about it than they do, then perhaps they'll/we'll bow to you're greater experience.

On the other hand, perhaps their/our experience could perhaps be a tad greater than your own?

I appreciate the humour, but I would have preferred an 'informed opinion'.

tophet1 - Do you think the land a safari company hunts on is free? Concession fees are climbing higher and higher and quotas are getting more and more restrictive for the more desirable animals -- and the company doesn't set the quotas, the government does.

The fact is that most PH's don't make a lot of money so the $600 and up daily rate does't go to him --- he "might" get $80-$100 a day for a plainsgame hunt (no dangerous game) and maybe 50% more for dangerous game --- and many of them are required to have their own vehicle -- which ain't cheap to own or operate.

And of course they don't work year round.

I went on a middle of the road cost leopard hunt on my 1st safari and the PH I had seemed to be clueless about both baiting leopard and the ranch we hunted --- 16 days and never had a leopard hit a bait more than once -- a lot of long dark nights sitting in a blind with no result.

The 2nd trip was at a higher rate but not the highest with a new PH who was building a rep as a cat hunter. We hunted in what my opinion was the best concession (at the time) in Zim... Matesi 6. We hung baits for 2 days and saw lots of leopard tracks in the roads but no baits were hit and I was getting a little nervous -- on either the 5th or 5th day of a 16-day hunt we had 6 leopards on 5 baits (1 bait had a male and female on it) and 3 nights later I shot my leopard just before dark.

I don't see the cost of access to land requires a higher fee either. What do Leopards primarily eat ? Plains game like warthogs, smaller antelopes, monkeys, baboons, hares, hyraxes and rodents. Also farm animals bred near suitable leopard habitat. Find an area with these in abundance with suitable broken ground, bush or Riverine and you will find leopard. This habitat is not exactly scarce.

What is scarce is the quota allowed. Why pay higher fees to hunt Leopard in the same environment that hosts plains game, or on cheaper farm land ? There are operators offering these hunts and it is up to the OP to decide how he does it.

I've been in three Leopard rich environments. The eastern Save when it was came together and before poaching had a major impact, around the Matopos and the western Waterberg. All with good leopard populations and it didn't cost extra to hunt plains game there.

Exclusivity is the cost. An exclusive leopard hunt is a good earner for a P/H and I remain unconvinced there are excessive additional costs in running such a hunt.

I don't have any experience shooting a leopard. Over bait I assume it is like shooting from a hide or over a water point but I realise any other possibility except for hound hunting is impossible and good luck to those who try. I do have experience as a consumer and if the 'want' is strong enough then the client will pay.

You just rewrote the theory of economics where the buyer and not the seller now sets the price of a commodity. I guess this might work if the supply of a commodity far exceeded the demand but unfortunately that isn't the case for most hunting.

Let me ask a question -- what do you think is the reason it's so expensive to hunt in Tanzania as opposed to let say Namibia and of course why it shouldn't be?

I don't want to be overly critical, but this is the silliest thing I have seen in a long time. The outfitters charge for leopard what we clients are willing to pay. It is really that simple. The leopard is a relatively scarce commodity which requires some special skills and for which hunters are willing to pay a premium. Pretty simple supply and demand. And you have a perfect solution available to you should you perceive that premium to be too high - don't hunt them. If the prices get too high, a lot of others won't as well, and those prices will come down to where the demand matches the supply at the market created price. The free market works because it is the consumer(the client in this case) who sets that price. Actual cost of the hunt is only relevant as a baseline upon which the outfitter will estabish his margin. Lower margin for more common game - higher margin for rarer game. That mix of margins creates his operating budget and profit. I suppose a socialist government could set a rate regardless of cost, game, or profit but I suspect none of us would be particulary happy in those camps - or any other state planned consumer market.

John,

All joking aside, I hung my first leopard bait in about 1980 or 81 under the instruction/guidance of the guy who got me involved in the African hunting industry and about 20 years later, I got my first and only set of leopard scratches.

They weren't serious and I was very lucky indeed to get away so lightly...... but they truly are helluva painful and even if you get them ultra clean very quickly (which I did) they continue hurting like billy-oh for a very long time.

The only good news is that if you do get them very clean, very quickly, they don't usually scar....... I guess simply because the claws are so razor sharp. (Perhaps one of our medical types could comment on that theory?)

More generally, as I said earlier, it's the buyers money and safari and of course, it's up to him to decide whether he wants to go with the cheaper or more expensive option.

I might be wrong but I get the feeling that Tophet feels I'm in some way criticising his buddy Chris..... and I'm not. I know Chris and he's a good bloke that knows his business but my point is there's no such thing as a free lunch and if you want the best chance of success, you have to pay for the better product.