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Home to the world’s largest elephant population, Botswana has already gifted 8,000 of the animals to Angola and offered another 500 to Mozambique. For the second time this year, Botswana has threatened to send thousands of elephants to Europe. In March, the southern African nation warned it would fill one of London’s parks with the animals. Now, the president has said his country will send 20,000 elephants to Germany. The warnings have been sparked by a diplomatic row as the UK and Germany mull the idea of stricter limits on the import of hunting trophies amid concerns over poaching. Why...

Media bias: Wikipedia has repeatedly removed reliably sourced information about how hunting endangered animals, when done properly, makes their populations get bigger Wikipedia has repeatedly removed the following reliably sourced information from its Trophy hunting article. (The deletion history can be seen here, here, here, and here.)In 2015, a Texas hunter who had won an auction paid $350,000 for legal permission to kill an endangered black rhinoceros in Namibia. The Washington Post wrote the following about the particular animal that was chosen for this kill: “The bull, Knowlton said, was a problem in his own herd. The animal was too old...

In the 1970s, Kenya had about six times as many elephants as Zimbabwe, and today Zimbabwe has three times more elephants than Kenya (see chart).  What happened that caused the dramatic reversal in elephant populations in the two African countries?  Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) explain in their excellent article "Shoot an Elephant, Save a Community": "Anti-hunting groups succeeded in getting Kenya to ban all hunting in 1977. Since then, its population of large wild animals has declined between 60 and 70 percent. The country’s elephant population declined from 167,000 in...

Conservationists who have a visceral emotional reaction to words like “carbon emissions” and “TransCanada” and “Rick Perry” rarely find themselves closely allied with President Trump’s opinions on the proper stewardship of the planet. Trump has consistently dismantled Obama-era environmental protections, using the common refrain that his administration desires to “better balance conservation strategies and policies with the equally legitimate need of creating jobs for hard-working American families.” So, some who’ve criticized Trump might have done a double take when they read one of his tweets Friday morning. The message effectively put the brakes on a new administration policy that would...

Full title: South African hunter WAS killed by a crocodile, DNA tests on human remains found inside a beast prove DNA tests of the carcass of a crocodile shot in Zimbabwe confirm that the reptile had eaten a missing South African hunter. Scott Van Zyl, 44, vanished last week after going on a hunting safari on the banks of the Limpopo river with a Zimbabwean tracker and a pack of dogs. The married father-of-two, whose company runs hunting trips for foreign clients, was believed he had been eaten by crocodiles and recent tests confirm it.

The Obama administration's decision to extend Endangered Species Act protections for two breeds of lions is a turning point for the lions now roaming Africa, advocacy groups say. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signaled in a document obtained by the Associated Press that it would classify the lion as threatened or endangered across its entire range in Africa. The agency has scheduled a noon conference call to discuss its findings. The Humane Society of the United States projects that American trophy hunters imported 5,647 lions in the past decade. The group's president and CEO, Wayne Pacelle, said he expects...

The National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association has announced the appointment of Dave Ehrig as chairman of the Longhunter Committee and the NMLRA Longhunter Muzzleloading Big Game Records Program. Since 1988, the NMLRA Longhunter Committee and staff have maintained a trophy measuring, scoring, and record-keeping program for North American big game animals taken with muzzleloading firearms. The fourth edition of The Longhunter Muzzleloading Big Game Record Book, which includes all qualifying animals taken since the program’s inception, was recently released. Mr. Ehrig is well known among muzzleloading enthusiasts and others in the black powder shooting industry. Known as "Pennsylvania’s Mr. Black...