Hunting - a threat to our national interests
HOW THE HUNTING INDUSTRY IS A THREAT TO OUR NATIONAL INTERESTS
Chris Mercer
Which national interests are threatened?
1. Our economy.
2. Our land use.
3. Our unemployment problem.
4. Our wildlife heritage.
5. Our foreign currency reserves.
6. Our Fiscus – tax receipts.
7. Our agricultural industry.
8. Our tourism industry, and the jobs that come with it.
9. Our efforts to stop corruption.
10. Our efforts to transition to a more caring society from a violent one.
11. Our environment.
UNDERSTANDING THE THREAT:-
Even though hunting is a major threat to our wildlife heritage, it is remarkable that no decision has ever been made in South Africa, that impacts adversely upon hunting. This is because conservation is heavily influenced, if not controlled, by an elite multinational group of hunters, who I regard as environmental terrorists. Thanks to them, South Africa remains a colony, with our heritage being plundered remorselessly.
Read the surprising facts in this IUCN report
• in sub-Saharan Africa, 16,5% of land produces only 0.0001% of jobs.
• 1.4 million square kilometers – more than 22% of all the national parks – are devoted to hunting.
• Returns from hunting are insufficient for governments to provide adequate management.
• Hunting uses vast amounts of land to produce negligible socio-economic benefits.
• Economic returns for local communities are negligible.
• Every year trophy hunters kill on average 105,000 animals, including 800 leopards, 600 lions, 640 elephants, and 3,800 buffalo. These numbers are unsustainable.
1. Environmental Ruin Inc
The trophy hunting industry is centered around Safari Club International. (SCI) is headquartered in Tucson Arizona, but its annual conference is held in Reno, Nevada where tens of thousands of hunters and hunting operators gather every year to buy and sell hunts. For an illuminating description of how this event functions and how the prizes given out prove beyond doubt that this is a terrorist group, not a conservation organisation, read Chapter Two of Matthew Scully’s best – selling book “Dominion.”
Prizes are given out for bizarre actions, all totally contrary to conservation. For example the person who has killed the highest number of animals anywhere in the world gets a prize. So does the hunter who has killed the highest number of endangered species.
Scully’s description of what happens in Reno, Nevada should convince the most skeptical that SCI is not a conservation organisation. It is a killing machine built around money: those who have it and want to kill, and those who want the money and can produce the living targets.
SCI is a threat to the wildlife heritage of every third world country which still has wildlife to kill.
As if this were not enough, the tanning and mounting of trophies involves a serious pollution problem problem. Large amounts – tonnes- of toxic heavy metals,mainly Chromium, lie dumped outside waiting to be washed by rain in to our streams and rivers. Environmental legislation seems to be winked at when it affects hunting.
2. Bribery on an Unimaginable Scale
The trophy hunting multinational conglomerate is obscenely wealthy. It is rich and powerful enough to bring down non-compliant third world governments. Safari Club International (SCI’s) board of directors have included Presidents and past presidents, captains of industry, celebrities and less famous but even richer people dripping in inherited or acquired wealth.
The membership of SCI is a virtual who-is-who of the Republican party in the U.S.A. including war mongers and war profiteers, and gun ‘nuts’ like the National Rifle Association.
Just one example of the scale of wealth – and the vast amounts that trophy hunters are prepared to spend on their sick sport: former SCI Committee member Kenneth Behring was exposed by an investigation which showed that over a period of years, he paid the venerable Smithsonian Institute to import his endangered species trophies as “museum specimens” to exploit a loophole in the Endangered Species Act.
The payments totaled US$100 million. Behring was prepared to pay in S.A. terms three quarters of a billion (billion with a ‘b’) Rands to import his wildlife body parts in to USA.
And that was one man. One SCI member. Add up all the money value of the whole hunting conglomerate and the scale of the threat to vulnerable third world countries becomes evident.
To understand the threat even better, I annex my article on the extraordinary efforts of the trophy hunting colonials to subvert conservation policies in Africa.
When I was in Nairobi for the wildlife symposium, I heard anecdotal evidence from members of the government steering committee of how many Kenyan Parliamentarians and officials had been paid to help overturn the hunting ban.
3. Foreign Currency Swindles?
The present strength of the S.A. Rand is artificially high, being held up by the international Carry trade. Banks and dealers are borrowing in Yen at 0.25% interest, buying S.A. bonds at 6% and pocketing a handsome profit. But this can and will change overnight. Rising interest rates overseas, global instability, natural disasters etc, can reverse the capital inflow into capital flight – overnight.
The Rand will plummet . Aware of this inevitability, many rich South Africans are getting their money out while the rand is still over-valued. Although foreign exchange controls have been relaxed to enable wealthy South Africans to invest abroad, the bureaucracy involved is formidable and carries the risk of triggering a tax audit.
One of the easiest ways to run down local funds and build up foreign assets must surely be through trophy hunting. Businessman have the opportunity to form syndicates and set up game farms for the captive breeding of lions, rhino, buffalo, Sable and other high value animals. These enterprises would have nothing whatever to do with conservation. They would be foreign currency swindles - with tax evasion thrown in for good measure.
A foreign trophy hunter may be prepared to pay, say, R400,000.00 for a male lion trophy. But the hunting operator/landowner could easily arrange to split that sum in to two portions. He could then declare to SA tax and forex authorities that the lion was sold for, say, R200,000. That R200,000 would come into the country legally - but the other half might be paid overseas in to tax haven bank accounts. In this simple way, unknown but perhaps vast sums of foreign currency that ought to be repatriated to S.A. – and subject to tax – might easily be kept outside the country.
We cannot point to any individual hunting operator and say that he is guilty of tax fraud and foreign currency swindling, and certainly there must be many who operate legally, but it is perfectly proper for us to point out how easy it would be for hunting operators to use the special opportunities offered by the trophy hunting industry to cheat the taxman and build up foreign funds at the expense of the SA fiscus.
We have seen how widespread and commonplace these forex schemes can become. They are extremely difficult to detect, even by forensic audits, and ‘sting’ operations plus the co-operation of foreign banks might be needed to expose them.
4. Subverting SA Conservation Policies
The Trophy hunters have adopted an extraordinarily successful strategy of invading and occupying conservation space, thereby displacing real conservationists, who are dismissed by industry propaganda as ‘bunny huggers’, radicals and extremists. This King-of-the-Castle strategy takes place at the highest levels, such as the UN Environment Programe and the IUCN (World Conservation Union) based in Switzerland, and conceals its darker side in iconic conservation organisations like WWF.
Hunting industry lobbyists have devised a policy of Sustainable Use. South Africa has adopted this policy through the Biodiversity Convention, perhaps without knowing that its whole purpose is to legitimise the slaughter of wildlife.
Wild animals are reduced to a commodity, like tin or copper. Animals can be killed without pity, so long as sufficient numbers are left in order to provide living targets for the hunters next year. It is a policy custom made to justify hunting.
Notice the racial and xenophobic consequence of this hideously exploitive policy. If you are poor and black and you kill an animal, then you are a poacher. But if you are rich and white and you kill the same animal, you are a conservationist. If you are an Oriental and you kill a rhino so that people can shave rhino horn in to their traditional medicines, you are an evil exploiter. But if you are a rich white hunter and you kill the same rhino in order to hang its head on your wall, you are a conservationist.
The truth, of course, is that hunters, poachers and Asian crime syndicates are all the same in my view - environmental terrorists. The difference is that hunters are the only ones who pretend to be conservationists.
In South Africa, because of the culture of hunting that our conservation services have inherited from our dark political history, SCI is regarded as the God of Conservation. For the same reason, South Africa is easy prey for the international hunting machine. Many conservation officials here are themselves Professional Hunters - with a financial interest in the destruction of wildlife.
The corrupting influence of the hunting fraternity is evident in the Annual Hunting Proclamations, where grossly excessive daily bag limits are allowed. By law, where officals have no science-based knowledge of wildlife population numbers, they ought to declare a moratorium on hunting. But again, the powerful hunting industry exempts itself from laws that apply to everyone else.
5. A Worldwide Intelligence-gathering network
Sharing of information between South African hunting clubs like PHASA and SCI, takes place with military intensity. SCI committee members know exactly what is going on in South African conservation circles; indeed, I contend that they are controlling the process.
Recently I was approached by a well-known hunting operator in the Eastern Cape at a workshop on farmer/predator conflict in Port Elizabeth.
“Ah Mr. Mercer,” he said. “I’ve just come back from an SCI meeting in Arizona. We were wondering what had happened to you – you’ve been quiet lately!”
I thought this was a very revealing statement because it exposed just how well-informed industry executives in U.S.A. are - even about a small, insignificant NGO like mine.
6. Policy and Legislative corruption
Look how powerful the hunting conglomerate is, exempting itself from laws that apply to all other citizens:-
• TOPS regulations.
When one considers that hunting is recognised as one of the major threats to wildlife, one would expect that the new Threatened or Protected Species (TOPS) regulations would carefully regulate hunting practices. Instead, astonishingly, the hunting industry is exempted from these regulations and specifically granted the power to regulate itself.
This is an abdication of government. There is no logic or the slightest reason for such a surrender of government regulatory powers. And it is a direct threat to our wildlife heritage.
• Firearms Control Act
Whenever government comes up against the hunting industry it shrugs off responsibility and backs down. Take the firearms control legislation. In an effort to crack down on gun crime, government has tightened up the laws relating to gun ownership. Except for the hunters, who are once again, as a result of heavy lobbying by an industry with vast resources, exempted from the new restrictions.
If a citizen wants to own a gun for the serious and legitimate purpose of protecting his family from violent criminals, he must satisfy onerous requirements, and may only carry or possess a very small amount of amunition.
But if a hunter wants guns for the frivolous purpose of hunting or killing animals, then he is exempted from all the restrictions applying to other citizens. He may own and keep as many guns as he likes and may store tonnes of ammunition in his home if he wishes.
• Stock diseases
The Department of Agriculture has always exercised strict control over the movement of livestock, to prevent the accidental spread of disease. It is known that generally speaking, one can move livestock from East to West without too many adverse effects, but not from West to East. Moving animals from the arid areas where many parasites and lethal diseases such as heartwater, are not prevalent into wetter areas where they are, can result in serious stock losses, and disease contagion.
Somehow, the hunting industry has exempted itself from all the important veterinary controls that apply to the movement of other livestock. Wild animals captured in arid Namibia or even as far away as West Africa, are brought in to the country and sold at game auctions as if there were no such things as disease transmission, spread of pathogens or genetic pollution.
Cross-breeding to create mutant freaks takes place without any control, to produce un-natural species that hunters will pay more for. Much of the wildlife is smuggled in across the porous Botswana borders. The game industry is a ticking time bomb. It will surely bring in disease pandemics that will spread to our livestock, with potentially disastrous economic and social consequences.
To sum up:
the multinational hunting conglomerate poses a direct and serious threat to several South African national interests. More specifically it threatens:-
1. The land reform programme and food security by wasteful use of a high percentage of land.
2. The economy and job creation by wasteful use of large swathes of land.
3. (No proof but I would bet my life on it) The fiscus through foreign currency swindling and tax fraud.
4. Our wildlife heritage, by subverting natural processes, killing the strong instead of the weak, removing from the environment valuable animals.
5. Food security and our agricultural production by increasing substantially the risk of disease transmission.
6. Conservation policies and legislation designed to protect our wildlife heritage
7. Social security and gun controls in S.A - the hunting fraternity is in effect an unnecessarily over-armed militia, owing allegiance only to themselves.
Remedies:-
1. We should follow the example of Kenya and ban all sport and trophy hunting.
2. To ascertain if foreign currency swindling and tax fraud that goes on, a combination of forensic audits and a couple of highly publicised sting operations should be mounted by SA tax authorities. There are specialists in this field in U.K. Finding a whistleblower and/or securing the co-operation of foreign banks would also be useful.
3. The expropriation and consolidation of suitable wilderness land in to viable mega-game reserves, turned over to eco- tourism lodges, would bring in revenue to government – not the hunting industry - though leases and taxes, and prevent the wasteful use of land by hunters.
4. Gun controls need to be applied strictly and equally to all citizens. The exemptions and privileges currently provided for hunters, who want to use an array of weapons for the sole purpose of killing animals, should be abolished.
Chris Mercer
Which national interests are threatened?
1. Our economy.
2. Our land use.
3. Our unemployment problem.
4. Our wildlife heritage.
5. Our foreign currency reserves.
6. Our Fiscus – tax receipts.
7. Our agricultural industry.
8. Our tourism industry, and the jobs that come with it.
9. Our efforts to stop corruption.
10. Our efforts to transition to a more caring society from a violent one.
11. Our environment.
UNDERSTANDING THE THREAT:-
Even though hunting is a major threat to our wildlife heritage, it is remarkable that no decision has ever been made in South Africa, that impacts adversely upon hunting. This is because conservation is heavily influenced, if not controlled, by an elite multinational group of hunters, who I regard as environmental terrorists. Thanks to them, South Africa remains a colony, with our heritage being plundered remorselessly.
Read the surprising facts in this IUCN report
• in sub-Saharan Africa, 16,5% of land produces only 0.0001% of jobs.
• 1.4 million square kilometers – more than 22% of all the national parks – are devoted to hunting.
• Returns from hunting are insufficient for governments to provide adequate management.
• Hunting uses vast amounts of land to produce negligible socio-economic benefits.
• Economic returns for local communities are negligible.
• Every year trophy hunters kill on average 105,000 animals, including 800 leopards, 600 lions, 640 elephants, and 3,800 buffalo. These numbers are unsustainable.
1. Environmental Ruin Inc
The trophy hunting industry is centered around Safari Club International. (SCI) is headquartered in Tucson Arizona, but its annual conference is held in Reno, Nevada where tens of thousands of hunters and hunting operators gather every year to buy and sell hunts. For an illuminating description of how this event functions and how the prizes given out prove beyond doubt that this is a terrorist group, not a conservation organisation, read Chapter Two of Matthew Scully’s best – selling book “Dominion.”
Prizes are given out for bizarre actions, all totally contrary to conservation. For example the person who has killed the highest number of animals anywhere in the world gets a prize. So does the hunter who has killed the highest number of endangered species.
Scully’s description of what happens in Reno, Nevada should convince the most skeptical that SCI is not a conservation organisation. It is a killing machine built around money: those who have it and want to kill, and those who want the money and can produce the living targets.
SCI is a threat to the wildlife heritage of every third world country which still has wildlife to kill.
As if this were not enough, the tanning and mounting of trophies involves a serious pollution problem problem. Large amounts – tonnes- of toxic heavy metals,mainly Chromium, lie dumped outside waiting to be washed by rain in to our streams and rivers. Environmental legislation seems to be winked at when it affects hunting.
2. Bribery on an Unimaginable Scale
The trophy hunting multinational conglomerate is obscenely wealthy. It is rich and powerful enough to bring down non-compliant third world governments. Safari Club International (SCI’s) board of directors have included Presidents and past presidents, captains of industry, celebrities and less famous but even richer people dripping in inherited or acquired wealth.
The membership of SCI is a virtual who-is-who of the Republican party in the U.S.A. including war mongers and war profiteers, and gun ‘nuts’ like the National Rifle Association.
Just one example of the scale of wealth – and the vast amounts that trophy hunters are prepared to spend on their sick sport: former SCI Committee member Kenneth Behring was exposed by an investigation which showed that over a period of years, he paid the venerable Smithsonian Institute to import his endangered species trophies as “museum specimens” to exploit a loophole in the Endangered Species Act.
The payments totaled US$100 million. Behring was prepared to pay in S.A. terms three quarters of a billion (billion with a ‘b’) Rands to import his wildlife body parts in to USA.
And that was one man. One SCI member. Add up all the money value of the whole hunting conglomerate and the scale of the threat to vulnerable third world countries becomes evident.
To understand the threat even better, I annex my article on the extraordinary efforts of the trophy hunting colonials to subvert conservation policies in Africa.
When I was in Nairobi for the wildlife symposium, I heard anecdotal evidence from members of the government steering committee of how many Kenyan Parliamentarians and officials had been paid to help overturn the hunting ban.
3. Foreign Currency Swindles?
The present strength of the S.A. Rand is artificially high, being held up by the international Carry trade. Banks and dealers are borrowing in Yen at 0.25% interest, buying S.A. bonds at 6% and pocketing a handsome profit. But this can and will change overnight. Rising interest rates overseas, global instability, natural disasters etc, can reverse the capital inflow into capital flight – overnight.
The Rand will plummet . Aware of this inevitability, many rich South Africans are getting their money out while the rand is still over-valued. Although foreign exchange controls have been relaxed to enable wealthy South Africans to invest abroad, the bureaucracy involved is formidable and carries the risk of triggering a tax audit.
One of the easiest ways to run down local funds and build up foreign assets must surely be through trophy hunting. Businessman have the opportunity to form syndicates and set up game farms for the captive breeding of lions, rhino, buffalo, Sable and other high value animals. These enterprises would have nothing whatever to do with conservation. They would be foreign currency swindles - with tax evasion thrown in for good measure.
A foreign trophy hunter may be prepared to pay, say, R400,000.00 for a male lion trophy. But the hunting operator/landowner could easily arrange to split that sum in to two portions. He could then declare to SA tax and forex authorities that the lion was sold for, say, R200,000. That R200,000 would come into the country legally - but the other half might be paid overseas in to tax haven bank accounts. In this simple way, unknown but perhaps vast sums of foreign currency that ought to be repatriated to S.A. – and subject to tax – might easily be kept outside the country.
We cannot point to any individual hunting operator and say that he is guilty of tax fraud and foreign currency swindling, and certainly there must be many who operate legally, but it is perfectly proper for us to point out how easy it would be for hunting operators to use the special opportunities offered by the trophy hunting industry to cheat the taxman and build up foreign funds at the expense of the SA fiscus.
We have seen how widespread and commonplace these forex schemes can become. They are extremely difficult to detect, even by forensic audits, and ‘sting’ operations plus the co-operation of foreign banks might be needed to expose them.
4. Subverting SA Conservation Policies
The Trophy hunters have adopted an extraordinarily successful strategy of invading and occupying conservation space, thereby displacing real conservationists, who are dismissed by industry propaganda as ‘bunny huggers’, radicals and extremists. This King-of-the-Castle strategy takes place at the highest levels, such as the UN Environment Programe and the IUCN (World Conservation Union) based in Switzerland, and conceals its darker side in iconic conservation organisations like WWF.
Hunting industry lobbyists have devised a policy of Sustainable Use. South Africa has adopted this policy through the Biodiversity Convention, perhaps without knowing that its whole purpose is to legitimise the slaughter of wildlife.
Wild animals are reduced to a commodity, like tin or copper. Animals can be killed without pity, so long as sufficient numbers are left in order to provide living targets for the hunters next year. It is a policy custom made to justify hunting.
Notice the racial and xenophobic consequence of this hideously exploitive policy. If you are poor and black and you kill an animal, then you are a poacher. But if you are rich and white and you kill the same animal, you are a conservationist. If you are an Oriental and you kill a rhino so that people can shave rhino horn in to their traditional medicines, you are an evil exploiter. But if you are a rich white hunter and you kill the same rhino in order to hang its head on your wall, you are a conservationist.
The truth, of course, is that hunters, poachers and Asian crime syndicates are all the same in my view - environmental terrorists. The difference is that hunters are the only ones who pretend to be conservationists.
In South Africa, because of the culture of hunting that our conservation services have inherited from our dark political history, SCI is regarded as the God of Conservation. For the same reason, South Africa is easy prey for the international hunting machine. Many conservation officials here are themselves Professional Hunters - with a financial interest in the destruction of wildlife.
The corrupting influence of the hunting fraternity is evident in the Annual Hunting Proclamations, where grossly excessive daily bag limits are allowed. By law, where officals have no science-based knowledge of wildlife population numbers, they ought to declare a moratorium on hunting. But again, the powerful hunting industry exempts itself from laws that apply to everyone else.
5. A Worldwide Intelligence-gathering network
Sharing of information between South African hunting clubs like PHASA and SCI, takes place with military intensity. SCI committee members know exactly what is going on in South African conservation circles; indeed, I contend that they are controlling the process.
Recently I was approached by a well-known hunting operator in the Eastern Cape at a workshop on farmer/predator conflict in Port Elizabeth.
“Ah Mr. Mercer,” he said. “I’ve just come back from an SCI meeting in Arizona. We were wondering what had happened to you – you’ve been quiet lately!”
I thought this was a very revealing statement because it exposed just how well-informed industry executives in U.S.A. are - even about a small, insignificant NGO like mine.
6. Policy and Legislative corruption
Look how powerful the hunting conglomerate is, exempting itself from laws that apply to all other citizens:-
• TOPS regulations.
When one considers that hunting is recognised as one of the major threats to wildlife, one would expect that the new Threatened or Protected Species (TOPS) regulations would carefully regulate hunting practices. Instead, astonishingly, the hunting industry is exempted from these regulations and specifically granted the power to regulate itself.
This is an abdication of government. There is no logic or the slightest reason for such a surrender of government regulatory powers. And it is a direct threat to our wildlife heritage.
• Firearms Control Act
Whenever government comes up against the hunting industry it shrugs off responsibility and backs down. Take the firearms control legislation. In an effort to crack down on gun crime, government has tightened up the laws relating to gun ownership. Except for the hunters, who are once again, as a result of heavy lobbying by an industry with vast resources, exempted from the new restrictions.
If a citizen wants to own a gun for the serious and legitimate purpose of protecting his family from violent criminals, he must satisfy onerous requirements, and may only carry or possess a very small amount of amunition.
But if a hunter wants guns for the frivolous purpose of hunting or killing animals, then he is exempted from all the restrictions applying to other citizens. He may own and keep as many guns as he likes and may store tonnes of ammunition in his home if he wishes.
• Stock diseases
The Department of Agriculture has always exercised strict control over the movement of livestock, to prevent the accidental spread of disease. It is known that generally speaking, one can move livestock from East to West without too many adverse effects, but not from West to East. Moving animals from the arid areas where many parasites and lethal diseases such as heartwater, are not prevalent into wetter areas where they are, can result in serious stock losses, and disease contagion.
Somehow, the hunting industry has exempted itself from all the important veterinary controls that apply to the movement of other livestock. Wild animals captured in arid Namibia or even as far away as West Africa, are brought in to the country and sold at game auctions as if there were no such things as disease transmission, spread of pathogens or genetic pollution.
Cross-breeding to create mutant freaks takes place without any control, to produce un-natural species that hunters will pay more for. Much of the wildlife is smuggled in across the porous Botswana borders. The game industry is a ticking time bomb. It will surely bring in disease pandemics that will spread to our livestock, with potentially disastrous economic and social consequences.
To sum up:
the multinational hunting conglomerate poses a direct and serious threat to several South African national interests. More specifically it threatens:-
1. The land reform programme and food security by wasteful use of a high percentage of land.
2. The economy and job creation by wasteful use of large swathes of land.
3. (No proof but I would bet my life on it) The fiscus through foreign currency swindling and tax fraud.
4. Our wildlife heritage, by subverting natural processes, killing the strong instead of the weak, removing from the environment valuable animals.
5. Food security and our agricultural production by increasing substantially the risk of disease transmission.
6. Conservation policies and legislation designed to protect our wildlife heritage
7. Social security and gun controls in S.A - the hunting fraternity is in effect an unnecessarily over-armed militia, owing allegiance only to themselves.
Remedies:-
1. We should follow the example of Kenya and ban all sport and trophy hunting.
2. To ascertain if foreign currency swindling and tax fraud that goes on, a combination of forensic audits and a couple of highly publicised sting operations should be mounted by SA tax authorities. There are specialists in this field in U.K. Finding a whistleblower and/or securing the co-operation of foreign banks would also be useful.
3. The expropriation and consolidation of suitable wilderness land in to viable mega-game reserves, turned over to eco- tourism lodges, would bring in revenue to government – not the hunting industry - though leases and taxes, and prevent the wasteful use of land by hunters.
4. Gun controls need to be applied strictly and equally to all citizens. The exemptions and privileges currently provided for hunters, who want to use an array of weapons for the sole purpose of killing animals, should be abolished.