Beyond The Trigger

[Music] [Music] namibia vast open semi-desert country in sub-sahara africa [Music] where you'll find challenging and unpredictable weather experience rich and historical culture and diverse wildlife and environments [Music] this truly is stop stop stop stop no no no this is not how into the world starts the film come on let's do it properly one two three go [Music] [Music] hey how are you going i'm ryan that dude right there 32 londoner wildlife podcaster nature enthusiast and professional dog walker as early as i can recall nature has been my focus both learning about it and fighting to protect it you know that type of kid always outside looking for insects always around animals crying because it steps on a snail although that was only yesterday what i'm trying to say is conservation and being kept up to date with it has been important to me for a long time trying to be informed as people often say so where does that leave me well i used to think that based on everything i'd read heard and watched that i knew enough to make my mind up about a type of tourism called trophy hunting i like i'm sure many of you hated it and wanted it gone kaput get in the sea mate but then one day in summer 2020 i had a chat with a uk conservation scientist who suddenly gave me information that debunked everything i'd ever learned it quickly made me feel gross about feeling misinformed by wildlife ngos and even wildlife presenters so that was that next came the research but damn is it hard to find reliable sources of info out there on this topic it's either trophy hunters are scum and should all die or hunters save wildlife and they're all heroes how the hell did i not notice something the majority of discussion is dominated by western people but the focus is always on africa so where are the african voices after getting frustrated confused and pissed off i did what anyone else would do in that situation managed to get funding to head out to namibia a country well known to have a decent and grown model of trophy hunted so you can learn about it and these so-called benefits okay maybe that's not what anyone would do but that's what me into the world's producer oscar henderson and professor adam hart decided to do so let's go [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we uh we got to namibia yeah how was it um long the short answer to question oscar has been horrible i looked over and your head was in your hands i'm not kidding you if i said we've got 200 foot above that runway as we're about to land i'll film the craft [Music] and the pilot just went no this and just took off again and then about ten minutes later came over the tunnel i went yes sorry about that everyone um as you may have felt there's a thunderstorm right at the runway if you look at the left-hand window you can also see it at this stage it is not safe for us to continue and impress okay cool she'll circle around it'll go away we're gonna have to go to mount airport um because we're unable to land at vintuck because all four storms have merged to become one colossal storm over the airport so that means in the space of three hours we have we've visited three countries in africa yeah it's pretty wet here as well isn't it it's rained on stock yeah but but we're here we're here now lovely accommodation as you see i have my pyjama bums phone and pillows what more could you need and now we've got to go to sleep we do because we gotta be up at six yeah after 18 hours of traveling four beers one pizza and five hours sleep the first day had arrived for us in vinton namibia where i was off to meet our guide for the trip and chief director of an organization called naxxo which stands for the namibian association for community-based natural resource management support organizations and this person was maxi lewis we call them handing concessions in criminal areas and so hunting is actually helping communities to be able to have benefits so that they can support their activities oh it is warm hello how are you doing nice to see you please tell me his air conditioner this wasn't the first time i'd spoken to maxie i found her passion for community support admirable maxi originally came from a strict eco-tourism route and thought hunting had no place in tourism or wildlife management but after exploring her own country more she found herself being challenged on those very points so i guess max it'd be good to know can you tell us a bit about the history of namibia and a bit about the history of the conservation of this country as well okay so in terms of conservation um namibia has always been conserved even during the apartheid system um the conservation was something that even the colonialists then also valued a lot and the only problem was or the only challenge that that conservation was not a shared vision with people on the communal areas so they were excluded from from managing or owning or benefiting from their natural resources so in 1990 when our government came in the first thing was to include environment as part of of of their constitution which was something remarkable i think we were the first country to do so and then from there on we look at how can we replicate some of the conservation systems that were on what we call freehold land on communal land and that's what we did in 1996 by amending a parks bill to allow for local communities in rural areas to start participating in activities such as tourism and hunting namibia's colonial past is still very much felt today but public ownership of natural resources may well be one way that namibia has stepped away from that legacy i'd like to know how that ownership has worked for conservation in 1998 that's when we started registering what we call our first communal conservancies we had four pilots all over the country and based on those pilots we saw a lot of communities wanting to be part of the conservation model so the model is known as the community based natural resource model then there's activities within that model that is being implemented so some of these activities are tourism activities some of them are hunting some of them deal with plants or trees or anything so that's but involving communities working very closely with government also working very closely with civil society organizations such as ours um yeah so that's that's how the system then came into being in terms of what we are currently doing for conservation on those landscapes namibia is damn impressive when it comes to protecting its wild space over 45 of the country's land is protected or reserved to benefit wildlife and can be split into three main categories national parks private game reserves which we'll come back onto later and community conservancies and forestries these conservancies are what maxie and her organization naxo help to oversee and are the main reason for why i'm here the aim is to empower communities to benefit from the sustainable management and use of land resources including wildlife this could be through tourism activities like photography safaris and lodges or through own use harvesting game meat or plant materials from community forests for building and crafts and finally what i'm hoping to find out more about trophy hunting [Laughter] right let's go [Music] this was my first time in southern africa and i really had no idea what to expect but what did surprise me was how quick it went from built up city to wild open space now namibia is huge i can't stress that enough it covers over 800 000 square kilometers which is over three united kingdoms or 19 denmark if that's easier to imagine so this trip we're going up to several different conservancies what do you think i'm going to learn you need to understand these people don't live in a fenced off area they live with white life and your takeaway is that for me will be there are people out there that make a living on these landscapes yeah and then part of it also includes sustainable use which is part of their livelihoods and also the dynamics for me on the landscapes and those type of information you will not get it from me you get it from there driving around signs of wildlife was everywhere and the way it works in namibia is when an animal like this kudu right here enters the land of a conservancy or private land it falls under the ownership of the land owner or local community do you think people will find it maybe a bit confusing or find it odd that i'm asking so much about just trophy hunting they will find it strange that you are asking them but for them it's very normal it's a very normal occurrence that they do trophy earning it depends what is the questions that you are going to ask them about trophy hunting because if you ask them about oh do you do trophy hands here and what do you do with the meet the usual questions that people ask for them it's very normal but if you ask them questions like don't you think then they will like look at you very strangely really yeah i'm now tempted to ask a question like that i want to see them please just go ahead they will tell you and they will look at you strangely i mean i'm six foot seven in namibia i'm going to get looked at strangely anyway so that's the question that's probably the first thing they will uh look at is like wow this is strange that's tall guy that's tall guys our trip was actually quite simple we would drive to five conservancies totaling over a thousand kilometers across namibia each with different landscapes needs and tourism abilities the first on our list seeksup conservancy namibia is africa's driest country and during the time of our visit the country was still going through an almost decade-long drought ten years with no substantial rain i already knew this would bring great challenges to wildlife and people so a good starting topic for me was to find out if trophy hunting could be sustainable with such a strong added pressure eric thank you so much for joining me this is quite exciting this is my first chat so do you want to just how long have you worked for the conservancy how long have you managed it here thank you very much and welcome around i have been in the community for his natural resource management program for more than 20 years and as we've driven into this conservancy today and as i sit here now and look out it's the habitat is quite as i would describe harsh the area of us that we are living in it's a semi desert added area so normally we don't expect much rain in certain parts of the country we have been experiencing the drought we could see the change in the reigning pattern yeah a number of the years and then we could see now the climate change is really coming really the cloud is coming in and while general wildlife populations within the conservancy how are they doing is there any trends or is it is everything kind of stable in comparison with the past yeah you know when the when the rain was very good you know those times that you could see now the rain is falling even in this part of the of the conservancy you could see the numbers you know but as the drought is coming in it reduces so the other challenge that we're also having is in terms of you know the numbers can can increase and once the numbers increase uh you know so many people here has got also interest in buying game meet and then the illegal activities start to come in the reason i mean the main reason why i'm here and i'm meeting with people is to talk about trophy hunting and to try and understand more about it um and trophy hunting is used within this conservancy wildlife populations are down should trophy hunting still go ahead let me say for sake if we see the numbers of the oryx decreased then we will not really allow to do hunting first and then to see how we can conserve and how we can protect these numbers for them to to increase probably the upon repeating factors orex uh most of the meat people is it's in demand so probably illegal ending is a bit it's okay so those are the mechanisms that you have to see that's why it isn't decreasing eric puts it simply there are many other issues at play for wildlife at the end of the day i've come here to talk about a single factor regarding namibian wildlife but really that's not possible i have to learn about other factors too in communal conservancies trophy hunting's impact is managed by the use of quotas so i wanted to talk to csep staff about how they felt about trophy hunting's current restrictions and the use of these quotas because it's not only the trophy hunting that is in decreasing the population of one life it's also my mitigation of wildlife to another area maybe because of drought or like my manager said poaching also yeah it's not actually paid also but because when when we are doing the traffic endings we are only uh handing the limited thing yeah and then we are handing it according to the rules and little requirements of the yellow book also so the regulation yeah for you is is is that a good quality for trophy hunters yes yeah all i would add is um we should like uh have a show often as to how the trophy hunting is maybe taking place okay and then letting them understand as to how we are doing it so showing more of the process yes yeah that's that's amazing also we'll learn from there and then see that it's not actually a bad thing so say that believing yeah also the mindset of the many people has also changed people start to sense the ownership over the things so you can talk to them and say how are you gonna support namibian police how are you gonna support farmers how you're gonna support it then you make it is a uh integrated holistic type of a conservation effort that you are doing and probably also to see an integrated and holistic approach to wildlife conservation i like that idea that feels proper and solid for any country but for now it was back in the car for a two-hour drive to our next conservancy sorosaurus and i was about to learn a life in namibia lesson pretty quick and that was the weather can change hard and fast from 37 degrees celsius to skies as moody's kristen stewart in twilight now i've seen monsoons before but i've never seen rain like this unfortunately it stopped us in our tracks making us fall behind for our visit to sorosaurus and meaning we only had time for a quick stop [Music] i might try and pull it off the road a little bit just so we don't get rearranged [Music] with such little time at sorosaurus i wanted to get straight to the important question what benefits does trophy hunting bring in most of our community are anti-employees and people of out of fortune they had less privilege to attend schools so with that certain amount we are getting from trophy hunting we pay school fees anniversaries and for the meet we give it as a benefit distribution for some occasions like funerals weddings even to the boarding school for the hostel for the kids to be fit wow so there's a lot of benefits that come through to the conservancy yeah it's it's much benefit that comes to the conservancy from 12 19. the one thing that we didn't pack was rain jacket did you pack your rain jacket so far we've seen a lot of rain [Laughter] going good we had to be up at sunrise with a quick coffee and then off to our next stop today i was absolutely buzzing because i was getting a tour of black rhino habitat maxie had arranged us to meet simson who is a tusk award winner for efforts in conservation so we've just got in the car with uh this lovely gentleman here called simpson from who's the director of save the rhino trust thank you for taking us on this trip today you're welcome and how long have you been the director of safety rhino trust um you know i've started to say that years ago the common sight in the trophy hunting debate is hunters sat on well-known species such as rhino which is controversial due to their status especially black rhino being critically endangered but namibia has become a stronghold for the species and has the largest free roaming population in africa simpson was taking us well out into the wilderness of the toro conservancy a two and a half hour drive right into the african bush and wildlife was everywhere even the elusive desert elephants made an appearance for us but i wanted to talk to simson about black rhinos in namibia and how trophy hunting works for the species that was quite a drive on those it's rough right roads it's rough rocks all over i mean when you come around the hill you don't know i mean it's just rocks where's the road going now yeah yeah in every corner i was like i don't know where we're going but it looks amazing ah yeah it changed i mean it changed every now and then the scenery just changed you know and this area we're in now um so where have we come to what is this area this this area is actually called the poachers camp area you know as you can see here there is a a big spring not not a big spring but it's it's bigger it's still here yeah yeah and it's i mean for the past 30 years that i've been here around i haven't seen it drying out wow there is water always so it attracts all the wildlife from this area here to come here and in the old days i mean the guys the white farmers that was here used this area for hunting actually but it was illegal so it was poaching it's a purchase yeah and that's why we call this place uh poacher's camp okay we had a good concentration of rhinos in this area as i told you we also lost two in a well there but i still it's it's it's it's it's a very nice place i mean if it's raining it's quite green food is close by water is close by the nurses come in go up the hills browse and come and have water i guess with poaching as well something i i i guess i got i had to learn this myself only a couple years ago is that trophy hunting is different to poaching but a lot of people in europe and the uk kind of see it as the same thing but how are they different they are different i mean trophy hunting you choose the animal that you want to suit and we mostly focus on big and unproductive walls with big horns and sometimes females are females yeah that's what we focus on but the honda will just come in and with my experience in in rhinos over the past years with poaching every single case where there was poaching we lost two rhinos it's a cow and a calf right they they shot the calf a little child calf without horns even so poaching and hunting is two different things let's talk stats to explain the impact of trophy hunting versus poaching on rhino and namibia in the last decade a total of 12 rhino were used as trophies but in the last two years there have already been 105 cases of poached rhino in namibia that's almost 10 times the trophies but in a quarter of the time something i hear a lot and i've always questioned is people say with trophy hunting they always take the big and the best but that can't be no way it works no it's it's it i mean if it's big and it's still productive if you don't kill it you keep it because i mean that's that's a big breeding bull yeah yeah sometimes like with elephants i mean it will be a big bull but he is he is still productive and he still so you don't want to kill him you don't want to kill the population yeah the same with the rhinos i mean even if it's a big bull and he is still productive you see he is he's productive in the population that you don't do that did you go on the hunts with trophy hunting um no i i i haven't been i mean there was only one case in in the region but i haven't been to and um i don't think i want to i don't i think i understand that yeah i think i can go and show a guy okay yeah that's it and then yeah i will go for hunting on anti-lobe of something like that but you couldn't move right right we'd prefer not to with rhino so in namibia what are the rhino populations like and how have they changed over the years i mean we start especially in the northwest we start very low with plus 60 animals and over the years we have been as far as 200 plus animals and and now we are between 100 and 200 we flux there and you know it we had as you can see we had a very big drought for the past eight years and we had a very minimal survival of halves uh but i as you said yesterday you guys must have bring the rain and we witnessed the rain yes we received i mean big rain maybe it was like half a day the completely rain that we get for the year and i was like wow i think we will make it this year yeah the newcomers for the rhinos in our area i mean if it rains they really pop and do you think the rhinos increase and the success of that would have been able to happen if trophy hunting had been taken away with no replacement all those years ago um you know trophy hunting in namibia we we had one animal a year i think or five animals i think it doesn't impact the population at all no i mean it's it's nothing it's nothing do you think it's impacted the success of the conservation yeah i mean when it comes to other other trophy-hunted animals like elephants envelopes and things i mean the concise consequences were well off i mean yeah it's a big benefit trophy hunting is beneficial to the people i mean yeah that i will say i think that that's almost the full stop sentence yeah no matter who i talk to it's going to be and the thing is you had really control over your wildlife yeah if i mean the quotas are given outright and if the numbers if the game counts are right and you do the right thing trophy hunting or hunting is really not a big problem let's look at the wildlife or the animal ngos in the uk that are trying to ban trophy hunting um that advised our government very recently on our animal abroads bill if you had them here now and they said we want to ban it what what would you say to them all i will say to them is replace the funding and let's leave the animals to be there to survive but we can get the money to do the work because i mean to have so many animals on your land and if you can't control them one or other time i mean do you actually damage the population and i mean the only thing i can say here is if those people can give them money to protect these animals to keep the poachers away to make the youth aware of what we had and the benefits and also the sustainability yeah then i'll say it's fine i'm not gonna sound biased but i don't think they have the money that's that's why that's why we want to be sustainable and do it on the ground where we had it and we don't have to go in really yeah somebody that don't have money [Music] sounds simple when you hear it like that right want trophy hunting to stop then replace the income since filming this namibia saw the poaching of 22 black rhino it's a very real problem and one that needs policing but that costs money [Music] what surprised you about the last couple of days um i think i've said it a couple of times but it's just the sheer size of namibia eventually driving across land for two hours at a time and just going past and i don't mean this to sound in a boring way but the same the same the same the same the same and then when you find out that's just wild land i've never done that in a country before i've never had that chance to drive past wilderness and also seeing what signs of wildlife have been i think that's been the most surprising part so far today driving with simpson around taurus conservancy around that region we were walking around in bits that were elevated so you could really see to the end of the horizon and he's like yeah this is all we have to conserve all this and it was just like that jaw-dropping moment of like i thought i was busy you've got all this to conserve i think that's a bit that surprised me most so far [Music] another night of storms and another night of namibian people saying no look it's a british man who brought the rain but we were up bright and early and to quote willie nelson on the road again now something i feel isn't discussed enough is how we expect people to simply co-exist with wildlife that we want to save in our next conservancy cody house wildlife populations hit an all-time low in the 1990s due to human wildlife conflict however in 1998 when cody house was registered wildlife populations grew and stabilized unfortunately so did human wildlife conflict in fact they grew six fold in 2001 to 2010 but a way around this turn wildlife from a problem into a solution if people can use wildlife to draw in tourists including trophy hunting they will benefit from the income and therefore value wildlife and its presence i'm fabiano i was being born in this area which is called qualifiers conservancy now i'm serving ten years ten years yeah at the committee so being born and raised you must have a big passion like you must love this i love it i love it do you hear much kind of um wildlife conflict issues do they come up much for people like this past three years we don't have a severe drought the whole corner we didn't have rain so what happens there is we do have human wildlife conflict because the the predictors increase and the livestock decrease because when the animal dies the predators can consume it our community what they do is they keep their livestock to pay the school fishes and to buy food for themselves but if the lion come to your farm and destroy your lifestyle people get very very angry allowance their problem their problem in the area their problem and nowadays they are quiet because it's raining old lands old robots they like to come for easy prey then they will jump into the crowds kill them they'll and the livestock of the people and you are not having money either you have to sell those lands and if you have money then you can pay the community before they are lost if you take out of the trophy hunting the wildlife will increase and human wildlife conflict will increase right because if you have like if you have old lion which is a trophy lion if you don't take it off that line it will be very impossible for him to get a zebra that is prey will be a cow so he will go for the cow and then the human wildlife country will increase right yeah so that type of scenario so trophy hunting for us it generates generate money and it also gives a benefit smee to the community so it also balances our lives so it is a case of stopping the conflict really because the conflict is where also we start to lose the wildlife yeah if it goes down and it's more unregulated i guess yeah we do have a lot of elephants because people living in europe or overseas they say we must protect and nobody doesn't have a right to shoot it but now in our area in one night you can see 90 up to 150 elephants and these elephants usually destroy infrastructures gardens or all this stuff and the same community is requesting for the government please these nfls have increased could you please minimize them we don't say it just take them all all the elephants but please minimize to so that we can have manageable numbers we love our animals we like we like gun conservative conservation so we want to be with the elements on the sustainable way let me say if the old elephant pool dies just high so you know the value of that elephant pool you cannot just waste the money like that either you must sell him and get money and save the community you've now worked in this area in the conservancy for 10 years you must love wildlife i do and how big of a part has wildlife played in your life like me myself when i grow up uh if i saw kutu in those years i could just say i have this is the meat i have to eat but with this conservation i have changed because this same kudu can give me something back through photographic tourism yeah so that's why i have to protect it so that my generations can also see it and if in the same time even more people can get job so in the past people said okay this could we have to eat it but now this scenario has changed so the animal has gone from a single source to now a multiple source yeah from um just a enjoying to see to uh potential investment income as well yes um and is that down to conservancies having ownership of the wildlife yes and the managing yeah and obviously you i guess some people in england and europe may be confused with that and say then why does trophy hunting happen if if we love the wildlife then why do we trophy hunt how would you answer that the money generated from the trophy hunting it comes to the conservancy and then we gave back to the community and it also created jobs so the money which is the salary and the food rations which you get it will goes to more 10 to 20 peoples back in the community so it feeds right yeah so that that's very much important what would your reply be to organizations in england that are trying to ban trophy hunter and get rid of it if you could stand there and look at them and say something what would you say at my simple view i would have say they could not ban trophy hunting but they have to give us provisions like what they are doing is okay if you have 10 kudos keep eight and take two that will be advanceable for us yeah but if you say no i'd automatically know that put off trophy hunting humanoid left conflict would increase yeah yeah so it puts it more at risk yeah and that's a reason yeah okay thank you very much that was absolutely fantastic fabio thank you so much thank you appreciate it it's really nice i hope the minutes get easier as well being from england it's hard to wrap my tea drinking yorkshire pudding eating all weather hating head around selling animals like lions or elephants off to be hunted but the people i spoke to here made it crystal if we're to expect people to live alongside these animals and to tolerate conflicts then they need to see their lives as a priority on the landscape too back in the car i wanted to hear maxi's take on this for me it's an issue of of respecting each other as humans first you know so if you live in europe there's certain things as a human beings that you want to have you know around you so that you have a comfortable life so why would you like them to look after wildlife in a different way and you want to live in in any way in your way making your own decisions on their behalf we we understand that white life will belong to the world that we also need to understand in what circumstances these people live it's not easy to live with white life these animals are wild you hear from my stories they destroy people's livelihoods they kill people so just imagine if we put you exactly in the same scenario i'm sure you will also have exactly the same outcry yeah so it's exactly the same issue so i think we need each other um the concerns are genuine and we do appreciate those concerns but we should also not uh act very naively thinking that you know um yeah they are humans they should be living with with wildlife yeah yeah absolutely yeah it's a mark of respect yeah it's just it's just an issue of respect it's just respecting each other and try to come around and and then talk to each other and see how we can resolve these problems if we want to save these species no yeah absolutely [Music] remember earlier when i said we'd come back to discussing private communal land well here we are at durry lodge a piece of private communal land just outside of atasha national park a place used for photo and hunting tourism as well as a cattle ranch private communal land means there's a mutual agreement with other landowners in the area my aim here was to learn how this place worked in comparison to the conservancy model to do this we stayed with spoke with and learnt from the owners cindy and helmut bosov all right i'm cindy bosof um from namobia this is my husband [Laughter] [Music] the size of their land was mind-blowing even on the drive up to the lodges we saw it was open green and full of wildlife of all types from springbok vildebeast warthog waterbuck waterbirds and insects of many kinds how the hell did two people on their team manage a place like this i was pumped to learn more when i um initially came to namibia from cape town um at that stage born and raised in the city had no idea what any of this was about i was extremely anti-hunting um anti-killing anything and i you can mention everything it was just no and growing up here we would get lot not really lost but my you know this disappear from especially the the parents trying to just do our thing and and you learn to love nature you learn to see things differently you we have a different perspective of what nature is to the let's call it the the city folk it's a living being it's a it really is a special place if you understand it what is the main driving force of jury lodge in regards to funding if it comes to the finances of things if you put everything let's put it in thirds as we have the cattle industry the tourism industry and the hunting industry i think two-thirds would be the hunting yeah i mean the the trophy hunter brings into africa more money although they are by far the least tourists but the amount of money that they do spend doing a safari is so much more than the average person just traveling through the country that's a good point the helmet just made and one that i didn't even consider is each trophy hunter bringing in more money per person compared to groups of people for photo tourism okay well here's the deal that data ain't available for namibia but a similar study was done for tim bovati in south africa that concluded that 21 000 photographic tourists brought in 51 of tourism revenue while only 21 trophy hunters brought in 30 maybe the same could be for namibia and when we're looking at the climate crisis and air travel kind of makes you think when my dad bought this specific property the previous owner was a cattle rancher he had to sell because he was a cattle rancher he couldn't make it anymore there was no game on this property or hardly any the reason was the game animals they they interfere with the with the ranching i mean obviously they compete with grazing they compete with water sources so the the farmer or the the person that has to make some kind of a living off of the land can't have game if they can't utilize the source um so then when we started the the hunting industry and not the tourism industry we'd have to have ample numbers of games so what did we have to do we had to create this environment we had to create this sanctuary for wildlife and make it as as natural as possible for them to want to be here so if you think about the hunting aspect and what it's done for the animals just on my place i mean we had a couple of gemspok running around here and the odd kuru when we started now we have reintroduced eland we have reintroduced i mean everything from blue wildebeest black wildebeest um impalas zebra springboks everything we had to reintroduce those animals originally were here but they were extinct actually um but because of the demand for the for the animal for the hunting um we reintroduced them i mean this is not 20 years ago so they're doing pretty good now but talking about what would happen to the animals that i mean that in itself will explain it take take away the hunter and you are taking away the caretaker just to put it into a an average person's perspective forget about animals so you own a hotel and they say shells and they tell you we will supplement your income you don't need to run your hotel anymore are you going to keep up maintenance no exactly hundreds of thousands of u.s dollars we spent per year um just maintaining the farm i mean just the maintenance and i mean you wouldn't do that if you didn't need to yeah it's a lot of work i've heard from you because it's a lot of work it's a lot of varied work as well whilst at honduras we were able to freely explore and over the two days we wrapped up a decent species spotlist i still don't get what makes people want to come here and shoot things but the fact is wildlife is only here because they do it made me think about places back home in england does our wildlife currently have enough value to make people want it to flourish or does value need more focus when discussing ways to rewild areas [Music] we are not quoted we we can decide ourselves and that comes down to management if you're a bad manager you're going to run out of game and then you want to have clients and then so therefore the whole ripple effect but actually the government has a sort of a system in place for every trophy hunting client that i receive i can get it or have to apply for a trophy hunting permit on that permit every client is issued depending on the society status two species or one species or none depending on how many i have shot for the year so it is regulated to a certain extent by the government as well which i think is a good thing i mean you can't just over over utilize the area your trophy hunter is not allowed to just go out there and do whatever he likes to he's got a um he has a registered ph a professional hunter with him at all times and that professional hunter tells him that this is a good animal to take down you are allowed to take the shot until your ph does not tell you that you don't you don't do anything so there is a lot on in the background that a lot of people don't realize about when it gets to to that side of things for ourselves on our property we've got 500 or 600 games back in 500 or 600 inland at the moment so for me to say well i'm going to harvest 10 island during the course of the next year with the trophy hunters if i've got 600 cows you can imagine i'm kind of having like 500 calves every year so by harvesting just 10 you can see how this is going to multiply and grow so you have to manage these animals numbers because otherwise they are going to eat themselves death it's a difficult one to to really get somebody's mind wrapped around the fact that i'm killing something to benefit the rest it doesn't make sense but that is the fact i mean as like we talked last night we had that terrible drought in 2019 we i actually i had the toughest year of my life that year because i had to decrease my game population by about 50 percent now the only way possible for that is you have to shoot them now most people would go around say well they will die in any way or they're busy dying how could you shoot them but for me to take out 50 of my species meant that the other 50 could survive if i didn't do that all of them would have died so therefore being inhumane i was actually humane and that's the concept that people do not understand it's the bigger picture yeah yeah do you think it's kind of a thing of giving people ownership of wildlife to benefit from it is the way forward and how that works best and again if you if you look at the system we have in namibia i mean we are a model for the world of what wildlife management should be like um if you look at like you were asking earlier about our concessions yeah um in my opinion they are mismanaged but they are still managed better than some of the best states in in europe or in america in england yeah um they are really they are really well managed obviously there's things that you would want to change but you have to understand it is a government entity yeah um cindy helmet thank you so much for well hey let me be here and thanks so much for talking with me thank you pleasure it was time for us to leave honduras and time for once again ryan to be the one that opened the gate seriously it was always ryan's turn i've only got little arms on the drive to our last conservancy i had some ryan pondering time [Music] sup how you doing sorry to interrupt the film i know you're enjoying it but we'll get back to that in just a couple of minutes but first of all there's something i'd like to say before we get on to our last conservancy now since getting back from namibia i've noticed one thing i've discussed this topic so much with so many different people but the thing that keeps popping up is no matter who we talk to what we hear we in the western world always seem to manage to divert our attention away from what's being said and focus it on our own emotion for example watch this no need to ask you because obviously we do appreciate obviously the conservation side of things and obviously with financial for locals with meat and things like that what about these rich people that fly over there pay 50 000 pounds to go and get a trophy what's your view on that well add that to the fact that our governments seem to be way more focused on their reputation in banning trophy hunting imports into this country rather than the reasons for doing so and the potential consequences in many ways the uk has led the agenda on wildlife protection does my right honourable friend agree with me that we would enhance that reputation if like france the netherlands and australia we banned the import of so-called hunting trophies and the last bit the bit that really upsets me is that sometimes once it's all laid out on the table we simply just refuse to believe people but we really refute claims by trophy hunters that the fees that they pay um significantly uh help wildlife conservation or local communities the evidence for their claims really doesn't stack up when you look at it overall some wildlife ngos dispute the claim that trophy hunting is a vital source of income to certain communities and there is a valid method of conservation if we look at the planet as a whole or even just the continent of africa then there is some truth in this in many places trophy hunting is just one portion of an income with photo tourism and lodges sometimes making up a larger percentage however that ain't applicable everywhere and some conservancies in namibia rely almost entirely on trophy hunting to get by government blanket bans on trophy hunting or trophy imports could critically risk overlooking rural communities where large-scale and reliable alternative tourism just isn't an option i traveled to the erie rover poker conservancy on the edge of atasha national park here i spoke with community members and conservancy staff about the economic benefits they receive and what the impacts would be if hunting tourism was removed so thank you sigrid for meeting to chat with me how long have you worked here for the conservancy my name is siegfried milne i'm the chief president of europe conservancy so i've been working for i've been the chairperson for the conservancy for nine years how do you finance and make the money here at the conservancy what different methods do you use to make money here we we do have a different method of getting income to their conservancies normally trophy hunting is that the most important and then the other one is the the launches we need to build lodges so that we can have tourism for the lodge to get the income but for now our conservancy for now we are trying to get now lodges for the conservancy for now we don't have a lodge in our conservation the only source of income that we've got is only now trophy hunting source of income wow what do we have in the conservation wow with trophy hunting being everywhere offer poker's only source of tourism income i couldn't help but think of the youth and their future here i wondered how they feel about countries elsewhere putting their future at risk i'm kaideri walrow is my senior lady from namibia thank you so much for meeting me to talk i'd like to ask first of all how long have you lived in this area have you always lived here yes i grew up here i was born here and since my childhood yeah until year i'm not 22 years meaning to say i've been here for 22 years 22 years and for the youth in this conservancy what benefits do they receive from the conservancy oh the youth actually receive money from it especially when you are going to study we come back to the conservancy so as we are receiving visitors it's when we are getting money uh so we came here you want to go study further you don't have money you just come to the conservancy is they received more uh foreigners that's when they gain money now so if they receive foreigners then you will get enough money for your studies so if they don't then we get nothing to do yeah to go far for our education trophy hunting would you like to see that go change or stay as it is i just want you to grow to grow yes because uh trophy hands it's this way we mostly get money from so like especially uh from abroad those people sometimes they don't have animals that we have here so especially those those are the only animals that are attracting our visitors right so our own our country is also gaining money right so what we are talking about it's just money from our animals so without money we are going nowhere so we just need foreigners without animals foreigners are not coming anymore so am i right in saying that if it was taken away from this conservancy that would mean a very bad thing i that's why you see i'm just quiet for a while because if you talk about taking away hunting it's like you are saying you are killing us right so that's why we also want to eat maybe launches yes and now if you want to say no you want to take this what we are struggling with it now what will be there does it seem silly when you hear people in my country in england that want to ban trophy hunting do you think that sounds silly or do you think that's quite normal so because that's now the way of taking bread out of our mouth yeah so as i said that if we get you those people that are coming from abroad that's when we get money right so if now the trophy hunting it's no more then life is no more in namibia since we are living from those people that are coming from abroad and would you is there anything you would like i guess to give you an opportunity if the people or any big organizations in england were here now the people that want to stop it what would you directly say to them if you have that child they want i'll fight back they should not if you fight back as the youth we should grow we also have to create something for our conservancy to grow yeah now if you take it away where are we going yeah we're going nowhere so i cannot allow that to happen okay yeah thank you so much thank you it's brilliant [Music] the questions i've asked people have they've not found weird but also they're just telling me about their normal life [Music] i hope the easiest thing is just showing that you can't take something away from someone that they need without replacing it listening to the people that i've met from farmers from conservancy managers from organizations ceos um they've all said the same thing of that you sure if you don't want us to do this please help us replace it or please replace it yourself so i think that's i i hope at the end of this is that's going to be so clear and that people are going to understand that i think the thing that's going to be hardest is just to understand for people to understand that they just need to accept it [Music] i think we all have a challenge and the challenge is that we would like to make sure that we save spaces in the world but to save those pieces we have to make sure that there is a an understanding between us as as people from different countries and make sure that there's alternatives for those who live with white lives if those who live with wildlife don't have alternatives then we might have a problem on our hand that our species are going to disappear as fast we know that we have different approaches but we need to make sure that we probably talk to each other around these approaches and come up with really meaningful alternatives that will benefit not just wildlife but benefit both the habitat for white life and also people's livelihoods i think that's for me i see this as a as a real opportunity out there between the two groups that feel that for instance trophy hunting is not the way to go and i guess my last question is is 4 out of 10 what did you make out of oscars dancing earlier today 10 out of 10.

yes [Music] 10 out of 10. the guy was just so good i tell you can you see the way he's moving and he is continuing [Laughter] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

2022-10-30 12:21

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