A View to a Kill: How Safari Club Int'l Works to Weaken ESA Protections

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A View to a Kill: How Safari Club Int'l Works to Weaken ESA Protections

 

By Michael Satchell

 

What weighs 21 pounds, contains 2,560 pages, and lists thousands of names

and numbers? It's not the New York City telephone directory, but here's a

hint: Its listings run from Addax to Zebra.

 

The answer is Safari Club International's three-volume compendium of trophy

hunters who are immortalized in this record book for doing nothing more than

killing animals‹an entire alphabet of animals‹to win SCI awards

competitions. The catalog is a macabre scorecard detailing who shot what

animal, where and when. Thousands and thousands of animals, covering more

than 1,100 species, are figuratively buried between the covers here.

 

You can learn, for example, that in 1910 in the Sudan, Theodore Roosevelt

killed a rhino whose horns measured 24 4/8 inches and 7 4/8 inches, scoring

67 1/8 points to make the former U.S. president the No.1 hunter of Northern

white rhino. Or that one Marc Pechenart shot an elephant in the Central

African Republic in June 1970, earning a score of 302 points for the biggest

pachyderm. The animal's left tusk weighed 154 pounds and the right 148

pounds.

 

With its photographs of grinning hunters posing with lifeless animals and

its meticulous rankings for the biggest tusks, horns, antlers, skulls and

bodies, the SCI record book perfectly encapsulates what trophy hunting is

all about: killing for killing's sake. The book lays bare the hunters'

obsessions: a craving to shoot the largest animal, a desire to kill the most

animals and rack up SCI awards, or a fetish to bring home the animal's head

and hang it on the wall.

 

The mother of all these obsessions, though, is the awards competition. SCI

members shoot prescribed lists of animals to win so-called Grand Slam and

Inner Circle titles. There¹s the Africa Big Five, (leopard, elephant, lion,

rhino, and buffalo); the North American Twenty Nine (all species of bear,

bison, sheep, moose, caribou, and deer); and the Antlered Game of the

Americas, among many other contests.

 

To complete all 29 award categories, a hunter must kill a minimum of 322

separate species and sub-species‹enough to populate an entire zoo. This is

an extremely expensive and lengthy task, and many SCI members take the quick

and easy route. They shoot captive animals in canned hunts, both in the

United States and overseas, and some engage in other unethical conduct like

shooting animals over bait, from vehicles, with spotlights, or on the

periphery of national parks.

 

Wayne Pacelle, HSUS senior vice president for communications and government

affairs, captures the essence of SCI members and their motivation:

 

" It's a perverse and destructive subculture, " he says. " Thousands of animals

suffer and die for the amusement of wealthy elites who have the means to

pursue any form of recreation, but choose to shoot the world's rarest and

most beautiful animals. There's no societal value to the exercise, just a

selfish all-consuming mentality of killing, collecting, and showing off

trophies. They know the price of every animal, but the value of none. "

 

High-Powered Rifles

 

It's easy to parody and criticize Safari Club International, but it's a

mistake to underestimate the club's power and influence on shaping policies

that are detrimental to wildlife‹and beneficial to those members who stand

tall over freshly killed animals in the SCI record books.

 

Since it was founded in 1971, the Tucson-based non-profit has grown to some

40,000 trophy collectors. More than half boast an annual income of more than

$100,000 (compared to 6% of hunters nationwide). The average member owns 11

rifles, six shotguns, five handguns and a bow. Two-thirds spend about one

month hunting each year, and a quarter of the members more than 50 days.

 

The club contributes large sums to mostly Republican candidates and, not

surprisingly, has been able to ingratiate itself with various

administrations, most notably the Bush Administration, and with the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). With the help of friendly members of

Congress and officials in USFWS, SCI has consistently attempted to navigate

around the intent of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Marine Mammal

Protection Act (MMPA) and import once-banned trophies of endangered and

threatened wildlife. Sometimes, the club has succeeded, sometimes not.

 

The latest example of SCI's growing influence in Washington is the Bush

Administration's initiative to " save " the world's endangered species by

killing or selling them, and then using the revenues as an incentive for

poor countries to improve their conservation efforts. This scheme to protect

rare wildlife is a formula for disaster. It will reverse 30 years of ESA

protections for hundreds of exotic creatures who are heading for, or

teetering on, the brink of extinction.

 

The proposal, which conveniently dovetails with SCI's agenda, offers several

examples of how wildlife can be exploited for profit. It suggests imports,

such as wild-caught Asian elephants for circuses and zoos, Morelet's

crocodile skins for luxury leather items like shoes and handbags, and Asian

bonytongue tropical fish to supply the aquarium trade. American trophy

hunters could shoot and import trophies of straight-horned markhor, a rare

goat found in Pakistan, and then head north on a quickie expedition to nail

Canadian wood bison.

 

These are only examples. If approved, the proposal portends open season on

many disappearing species, particularly large mammals, the so-called

charismatic megafauna. It would also be a huge incentive for poaching and

smuggling. Imagine how much rich trophy hunters would offer China to shoot

giant pandas‹arguably the world's most beloved animal‹if they were allowed

to import their stuffed remains. Picture furriers importing the hides of

endangered snow leopards to swathe the ethically challenged. And now that

pet tigers have earned a bad rap, might cheetahs become the newest rage

among exotic pet owners?

 

For three decades and under strict controls, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

has allowed only a few rare animals, such as pandas, to be brought in for

scientific research and breeding. Until SCI began to push its agenda in

Congress and at the Interior Department, USFWS very rarely approved the

importation of endangered-species trophies. Now, the agency is proposing not

only to ease those trophy import restrictions but also to allow the import

of live animals for entertainment (or the pet trade) and the import of skins

and hides for luxury apparel.

 

Such a plan goes against USFWS's historic rationale, which quite correctly

notes that fostering a commercial market for disappearing wildlife will

inevitably hasten its demise.

 

 

No Trickle-Down Economics

 

Encouraging the sale and import of heads, hides, and live animals to enhance

survival efforts in the wild may sound logical‹until you examine the sorry

history of other purported " sustainable " wildlife-use programs. The record

shows that few of the dollars trickle down to benefit either wildlife or

local people in the impoverished range states because corrupt officials

inevitably divert the money.

 

During the 1990s, in a well-intentioned-but-misguided conservation effort,

the U.S. government spent more than $12 million to underwrite sustainable

wildlife-use programs in Zimbabwe. The idea was to give local people the

opportunity to raise money for community projects by selling hunting permits

for African elephants. The program ended up subsidizing trophy hunting, and

little of their trophy fees reached the villages.

 

USFWS's new endangered species proposal doesn't offer much hope to alter

this historical course. Despite agency assurances, the plan isn't the

product of careful scientific assessment or innovative thinking. It's

driven, in large part, by the working relationship between the Bush

Administration and SCI, and by the administration's apparent hostility

toward the Endangered Species Act.

 

SCI's membership includes former President George Herbert Walker Bush, who

has lobbied the government of Botswana on the group's behalf to lift the ban

on killing the nation's dwindling lion population. What's more, President

George W. Bush appointed Matthew J. Hogan, SCI's former Government Affairs

Manager, as one of the two current deputy directors of USFWS‹a classic

example of the fox guarding the hen house. Interior Secretary Gale A.

Norton, in turn, has worked to weaken the ESA, from abandoning federal

efforts to restore grizzlies in Idaho to undermining a key provision that

allows citizens to sue the government to speed up protection of imperiled

species.

 

Aiming High...Shooting Low

 

SCI got off to a shaky start during its early forays into Washington

politics. In 1979, when the organization was not even a decade old, it

sought government approval to circumvent the spirit of the law and import an

astonishing 1,125 trophies of 40 animals on the endangered species list.

They included gorillas, cheetahs, tigers, orangutans, and snow leopards.

 

With a straight face, SCI said its goal was " scientific researchŠincentive

for propagationŠsurvival of the species. " There was one small problem. The

trophies weren't dead yet. The prospect of permitting the wholesale

slaughter of more than 1,000 rare animals was a bit too much, even for

USFWS, and the request was denied.

 

As its lobbying became more sophisticated, SCI began pouring money into

national political campaigns. Since the 1998 election cycle, it has

contributed $596,696 to Republican candidates and $92,500 to Democrats. Not

coincidentally, Congressional Republicans have made repeated attempts to

amend and weaken the ESA, while USFWS, turning its back on decades of

precedents, has proposed to allow hunters to import trophies of endangered

animals killed in the wild. These import easements are critical to one of

SCI's true aims.

 

All those pictures in the SCI record books, and in the club's glossy

magazines like Safari and Hunt Forever, are a form of pornography to the

blood sports crowd. Would-be big-game hunters can pore over photos of

triumphant and sated trophy collectors holding up the head of a dead

ungulate by its horns or standing atop the hulk of a dead elephant or posing

with a dead leopard draped around his neck. But like all pornography, the

image is never enough. The hunter eventually wants a taste of the real

thing. And, of course, he must have a trophy to savor the experience.

 

As former SCI president John J. Jackson III once wrote: " A trophy of any

species attests that its owner has been somewhere and done something, that

he has exercised skilled persistence and discrimination in the agile feat of

overcoming, outwitting, and reducing game to possession. "

 

Trophy collectors may rhapsodize about their spiritual love for the quarry,

the hunter's path to self-actualization, the thrill of the chase, the test

of manhood, and other such philosophical jabberwocky. But at the end of the

day, and after a $65,000 safari, the only thing that matters is hanging that

head on the wall‹and the rarer the animal, the better it feels.

 

An example: Kenneth E. Behring, who donated $100 million to have the

Smithsonian memorialize him with the Behring Family Hall of Mammals on the

Washington D.C. Mall, went to Kazakhstan in 1997 and paid the government

enough to allow him to shoot a Kara Tau argali sheep.

 

The animal, even SCI acknowledges, is critically endangered; the species is

listed on CITES Appendix I and can not be imported into the United States as

a trophy without the help of a museum. Behring, who like all SCI members,

regards himself as a conservationist, killed his Kara Tau argali when only

100 remained and shipped it to a Canadian taxidermist. The Smithsonian then

petitioned USFWS for an import permit, but withdrew the request in the storm

of negative publicity that followed.

 

But Behring isn't the only SCI member with questionable ethics. Back when

Teddy Roosevelt was laying waste to Africa's wildlife, hunting may have

embraced those mythic elements that SCI still loves to invoke: a

Hemingway-esque mantra of danger, romance, bravery, and the thrill of

slaying the beast.

 

On today's safari, however, the customer is coddled in luxury tent camps,

replete with flush toilets, hot showers and gourmet dining. All he (or she)

has to do is shell out tens of thousands of dollars, pull the trigger when

instructed, and pose for the money shot. He doesn't even get blood on his

hands. A professional guide stalks the target, lines up the shot, tells the

client when to take it, acts as a backup shooter if the animal is wounded,

and supervises the gutting, skinning and decapitation.

 

And that's in the wild. From South Africa to New Zealand to Texas, many of

these trophy collectors shoot captive animals in canned hunts staged in

fenced paddocks on game ranches, a practice the Boone and Crockett Club

calls " unfair and unsportsmanlike. " The animals are habituated to humans and

are shot at feeding stations, salt licks and watering holes. The " spirit of

fair chase, " supposedly enshrined in SCI's code of ethics, is conveniently

ignored.

 

SCI's highly flexible " fair chase " code also urges members to " comply with

all game laws and demonstrate abiding respect for game, habitat and

property. " That admonition regularly falls on deaf ears.

 

In 1998, several top SCI leaders, including Behring and then-president

Alfred Donau, reportedly went on a wildlife killing spree in Mozambique.

According to a published report, they left animals wounded and dying and

shot elephants in alleged violation of national law. Other SCI members have

been convicted of killing endangered species and trying to smuggle them into

the U.S.

 

Wealthy hunters, including SCI members, have also been caught in federal tax

scams. In one celebrated case, a museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, gave

trophy hunters the title of " associate curator, " which helped them persuade

foreign officials to grant permits to shoot rare animals. Hunters went on to

donate low-value trophies to the museum and receive wildly inflated

appraisals, which were then deducted from their federal taxes. In some

cases, the mounts were reacquired by the donors. Before authorities busted

the ring, the museum took in 1,800 specimens and valued them at a whopping

$8.4 million. At SCI's 1999 annual convention, members were offered a

document titled Secrets of Tax Deductible Hunting, advising them to declare

their home trophy rooms as museums, call themselves curators, and " donate

your record-book animal for the mouthwatering tax deduction. "

 

Incidents like these fuel the club's negative image. Most Americans are

largely ambivalent about hunting wild animals for food, but polls show

strong public opposition to killing exotic animals for fun, competition, and

bragging rights. To counter this perception and burnish its reputation, the

club donates meat to food banks, stages " sensory safaris " where the

vision-impaired can touch and feel stuffed animals, and arranges hunting for

the disabled.

 

To Matthew Scully, author of the highly acclaimed book Dominion, such window

dressing is humbug. " They practice a socially conscious sadism here, " Scully

writes. " Ethics at the Safari Club is ordered libertinism, like teaching

cannibals to use a table napkin and not take the last portion. "

 

Michael Satchell is a senior consultant for The HSUS.

 

2003 The Humane Society of the United States. All rights

reserved.