Self-indulgence of animal trophy hunting must end

By Wayne Pacelle

Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Las Vegas is perhaps the nation’s top convention destination, hosting millions of enthusiasts for everything from electronics to roller derby to hacking. But even Vegas has its limits, and we’ve found it in the form of a gathering of the Safari Club International and its globe-trotting members, who have converged on the city to plot their forthcoming treks to kill the most majestic and often rarest animals in the world.

Thanks to SCI member Walter Palmer — who killed a magnificent black-maned lion named Cecil in July after he lured him out of Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe — the world has a clearer sense of what’s at work in this bizarre subculture of wealthy Americans who spend their money and time killing large numbers of big-game animals.

SCI encourages this slaughter by offering accolades to its members, who then scurry around the world to claim them. As author and animal advocate Matthew Scully once described it, the Safari Club awards program is sort of a “frequent slayer” scheme; you gain credits within the fraternity as you do more killing. Palmer won a “continental” award for killing a dozen animals in North America. When caught with Cecil, he was on his way toward claiming the Africa Big Five award, which requires the killing of an African elephant, an African lion, a rhino, a leopard and a Cape buffalo.

We know about Cecil, but not much about the thousands of other animals SCI’s members target. Over the past 10 years, Americans have killed 5,552 African lions and brought their parts back home. From 2005 to 2014, more than 1.2 million trophies of over 1,200 kinds of animals were imported into the United States, according to our analysis of hunting trophy import data obtained under Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Americans are not only a menace to other countries’ wildlife, but native species such as wolves, bears, mountain lions and bobcats. Recently, the New York Daily News reported on a female mountain lion named Sandy who was radio-collared as part of a study and made an amazing 450-mile journey from Canada into Montana, arriving only to be shot dead by a trophy hunter. The echoes of Cecil are too great to ignore.

So are the numbers. A recent nationwide poll by HBO Real Sports showed that 86 percent of Americans disapprove of trophy hunting of big-game species. Research shows the loss of each animal disrupts families, depletes populations, reduces ecosystem resiliency and biological diversity, and deprives local economies of ecotourism opportunities.

At SCI’s convention, the group will auction guided hunts as a way of generating cash for its activities. According to 2015 online auction postings, SCI earned more than $2.7 million from last year’s 314 mammal hunt auctions alone. According to SCI’s financial statement, in 2014, $14.7 million of its $23.8 million annual revenue (62 percent) was generated by that year’s convention. With this money, SCI works to open up trophy-hunting seasons for wolves, fight efforts to restrict the hunting of African elephants and lions, and lobby Congress to enable its hunters to import endangered polar bear trophies into the U.S. The group has also pushed for trophy hunting on National Park Service lands and is fighting a proposal by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to restrict the baiting of brown bears and the snare trapping of black bears on Alaska refuges.

In the wake of Cecil’s killing, SCI’s adherents are no longer getting a free pass. Since July, 45 major airlines including Delta, Virgin Atlantic and United Airlines banned the transport of any trophies of the Africa Big Five. The DoubleTree Hotel by Hilton in Orlando, Fla., canceled a trophy-hunting expo, as did the Holiday Inn Toronto International Airport and the Saskatoon Inn in Canada. The Doobie Brothers and Huey Lewis and the News also canceled their shows at the 2016 SCI convention.

What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas. But while the Safari Club folks stay in Vegas, they slay creatures just about everywhere else. The city shouldn’t give them a meeting place where they can develop their plans to loot the wildlife of the world to win accolades within the world of competitive trophy hunting.

Wayne Pacelle is president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States.