Читать книгу Game Changer - Glen Martin - Страница 12

CHAPTER 4

From Automata to Sentient Beings

The animal rights movement originated in western Europe and its colonies, reaching back to the seventeenth century. In 1635, an ordinance was passed in Ireland that prohibited pulling the wool off sheep or attaching plows to horses’ tails, deeming such activities unnecessarily cruel. In 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony prohibited “Tirrany or Cruelty toward any bruite Creature which are usually kept for man’s use.” Under Oliver Cromwell, laws were passed in England that discouraged the blood sports dearly loved by the hoi polloi, including cockfights, dogfights and bullbaiting.

Such initial attempts to imbue animals with certain rights may seem tepid by today’s standards; indeed, these regulations mostly dealt with domesticated animals, creatures generally considered essential to human welfare. Wildlife, as a whole, was still considered vermin or proper subjects for hunting, either for the larder or as a gentleman’s pursuit. Still, tentative as these initial forays may seem, they were revolutionary in their own quiet way, in that they ran against the prevailing philosophical mode of the era. By habit, the common ruck viewed animals as property, food, or objects for amusement, scorn, or ire. Intellectuals generally accorded with Descartes, whose rigorous mechanism excluded animals as reasoning beings, categorizing them as biological automata.

But the nascent concept of animal rights gained credence when Rousseau published his Discourse on Inequality in 1754. Here, he argued that animals are integral to natural law—and hence have inherent rights—because they are sentient; they are capable of perception, of emotional response, and, most pertinently, of suffering. To Rousseau, the power of ratiocination doesn’t even enter into the argument. For Cartesians, to think is to be. For Rousseau, to feel is sufficient to establish a claim to the rights inherent to existence: “For it is clear that, being destitute of intelligence and liberty, [animals] cannot recognize . . . [natural] law: as they partake, however, in some measure of our nature, in consequence of the sensibility with which they are endowed, they ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes . . . this is less because they are rational than because they are sentient beings.”

Rousseau notwithstanding, the English and Irish established themselves as the most ardent champions of animal rights. Attempts in Parliament to pass laws forbidding bullbaiting and wanton cruelty to cattle and horses were quashed with much attending ridicule in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, but in 1822, Richard “Humanity Dick” Martin, the MP for Galway in Ireland, gained passage of the Ill Treatment of Horses and Cattle Bill, which forbade wanton cruelty to these large domesticated beasts. The act was strengthened by an amendment in 1835, which extended the cruelty ban to dogs, bears, and sheep and also proscribed bearbaiting and cockfighting; by another amendment in 1849, which increased the fines for animal abuse; and by a final adjustment in 1876, which placed limits on animal experimentation. Following the British lead, France and the United States also passed laws forbidding cruelty to animals.

But these early laws were hardly enforced with zealotry or obeyed with punctilio by the general population. In 1824, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was formed, which became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1840 under a charter granted by Queen Victoria. The goal was to enforce prosecution of violators of the animal cruelty laws and promote even tighter strictures. Since then, the animal rights movement has only waxed in power, spreading to all countries in the developed world. It sometimes took some bizarre turns: Animal rights, for example, were part of the Third Reich agenda in the years leading up to World War II. In 1934, tough hunting bans were passed in Nazi Germany, followed by laws regulating animal transport and restricting vivisection.

From the beginning, animal rights advocates generated fierce opposition. The RSPCA, in particular, has been vilified by its opponents since its earliest meetings. The rancor increased as the society made its influence felt, however nominally, in Britain’s colonies, including those in Africa. That most accomplished of satirists, Evelyn Waugh, savagely lampooned animal rights advocates in his acrid 1932 novel, Black Mischief. At one point in the book, Dame Mildred Porch, a leading light of the RSPCA, decides to investigate reports of animal cruelty in Anzania, an island nation that is a pastiche of Zanzibar, Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia.

Waugh portrays Dame Mildred as an arrant snob and a feckless, irredeemable busybody who cares far more about animals than human suffering. On arriving in country, she writes a letter to her husband, noting, “I have heard very disagreeable accounts of the hunting here. Apparently the natives dig deep pits into which the poor animals fall; they are then left in these traps for several days without food or water (imagine what that means in the jungle) and are then mercilessly butchered in cold blood.” Later, she notes in her dairy: “Condition of mules and dogs appalling, also children.” And still later: “Road to station blocked [due to] broken motor lorry. Natives living in it. Also two goats. Seemed well but cannot be healthy for them so near natives.”

Dame Mildred makes her way to the Anzanian capital of Debra-Dowa, where she is feted by the country’s young emperor, Seth. Determined to demonstrate Anzania’s modernity, Seth throws a banquet for Dame Mildred. But he misapprehends the name of her sponsoring organization, interpreting it as the English Society for Cruelty to Animals—an understandable mistake, given that animal cruelty is a fact of Anzanian life. He prints gilt-edged menus for the occasion, which include such offerings as Small Roasted Suckling Porks and Hot Sheep and Onions—dishes calculated to appeal to anyone with a predilection for hurting animals. Needless to say, Dame Mildred is deeply offended, and the scene dissolves into typical Waughian farce.

Of course, the RSPCA’s attempts at influencing animal welfare policy in Africa have hardly been so ham-handed; for the most part, their efforts are focused on programs aimed at improving conditions for domestic animals. One campaign involves the promotion of humane methods for dealing with dogs infected with rabies, a perennial threat to both canids and humans in Africa. As regards cattle, the organization implies that the situation is better in some ways in Africa than in Europe and the United States, noting with approval that pastoral lifestyles provide cattle with “a good standard of welfare.” In other words, the animals get to roam around almost at will on the range, enjoying the fresh air and sunshine—in virtually all ways, an existence superior to that of cattle consigned to the feedlots and factory dairies in the developed world. Still, the RSPCA notes African cows, sheep, camels, and goats suffer greatly in other ways, specifically when it comes to their transport and slaughter. The group is now prodding African nations to enforce the World Organization for Animal Health guidelines in their livestock sectors.

An exception to this general focus on domestic animals is the RSPCA’s work in Zambia, where it is attempting to reduce conflicts between elephants and villagers in the areas surrounding national parks. Working in partnership with the French NGO Awely, the RSPCA is promoting an “animal friendly” approach that involves crushing powerful chili peppers and macerating them in motor oil. This highly irritating admixture is then slathered on fence posts bordering the reserve lands—a highly effective means for keeping elephants in the parks and out of maize patches on adjacent private lands, claims the RSPCA. As part of the program, about two hundred farmers have been contracted to grow the requisite chilies.

(As an aside, anyone who has seen elephants interacting with fences in Africa must be excused if they take such rosy reportage with a grain of salt. Even fences constructed of structural steel posts and high-tensile, highly charged electrical wire are not proof against determined elephants, which typically drop large branches or even whole trees onto electric barriers to short them out. Chili pepper concentrate could certainly irritate them and may even confound them for a period of time, but effectively exclude them from lush maize and pumpkin patches? No.)

Like all promoters of significant social causes, the animal rights movement presents a broad spectrum of doctrines as well as an evolutionary trend: the newer groups tend to espouse a more activist agenda than the older groups. If the Royal and American Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals represent the conservative roots of the movement, groups such the Animal Liberation Front in the United States and Hunt Saboteurs in Britain are the more (depending on perspective) radical or progressive, advocating direct confrontation and even the destruction of private property to save individual animals. The animal rights cause is both more established and more influential in the United States and Europe than in Africa, but it is growing robustly on the African continent, particularly in Kenya and South Africa.

As in Europe and the United States, the melding of animal rights with conservation is a hallmark of these newer African environmental groups. Earthlife Africa, based in Johannesburg, is a typical example. It casts a very large net, supporting campaigns for animal rights, biodiversity, the reduction of toxics, carbon mitigation, the treatment of acid mine drainage, and the production of sustainable energy.

The most influential groups are more focused but still hew to a doctrine that equates animal liberation with conservation. The International Fund for Animal Welfare and Born Free are certainly the best known of these organizations, but despite the complaints of their critics, they are hardly the most aggressive. That claim would properly go to Animal Rights Africa, a South African group founded in 2008. Animal Rights Africa uses a logo of a lion’s paw print superimposed on a clenched fist and espouses a “total liberation” philosophy for animals that, while familiar to activists in the developed world, is new in Africa—and distinctly disturbing to the continent’s old-school conservationists.

The keynote speaker to the Animal Rights Africa inaugural event was Steven Best, an associate professor of humanities and philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso and a leader in the animal rights movement. Best combines animal liberation, environmentalism, and social progress into a syncretic philosophy that essentially demands equal rights for all living creatures. In his keynote speech, Best declaimed,

The interests of one species (Homo sapiens) are represented as millions go unrecognized except as resources to be preserved for human use. But in the last three decades a new social movement has emerged—animal liberation. Its power and potential has yet to be recognized, but it deserves equal representation in the politics of the twenty-first century. . . . Every year alone humans butcher seventy billion land and marine animals for food; millions more die in experimental laboratories, fur farms, hunting preserves, and countless other killing zones. . . . On a strategic level, the animal liberation movement is essential for the human and earth liberation movements. In numerous key ways, the domination of humans over animals underlies the domination of human over human and propels the environmental crisis. Moreover, the animal liberation movement is the most dynamic and fastest growing social movement of the day, and other liberation movements ignore, mock, or trivialize it at their peril.

In the coda to his speech, Best urges animal liberationists to link up with—and dominate—other progressive movements and intimates that Africa is ripe for such engagement: “The kind of alliance politics one finds in South Africa remains weak and abstract so long as animal liberation and vegan interests are excluded. . . . The animal liberation movement can no longer afford to be single-issue and isolationist but must link to other social justice and environmental movements. Each movement has much to learn from the other, and no movement can achieve its goals apart from the other. It is truly one struggle, one fight.”

But is it, in fact, truly one fight? From the perspective of traditional conservationists, vertebrate biologists, and habitat ecologists, clearly it is not: to these people, wildlife preservation and animal liberation are two distinct, even inimically opposed, issues. And there is also the matter of simple pragmatism: the disparity between what is “right” and what can work can be profound, particularly in Africa. For example, should the rights of elephants trump the rights of other wildlife species? This is a pressing question wherever elephants are found in Africa but particularly in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, a reserve that has been profoundly influenced by the continent’s nascent animal rights movement.

At more than seventy-three hundred square miles, Kruger is one of the largest game reserves in the world. It has more mammalian species than any other protected area in Africa, including the so-called Big Five: elephant, rhino (both species), lion, leopard, and Cape buffalo. But as vast as it is, Kruger is still limited in terms of its wildlife carrying capacity, especially in regard to elephants. If there are too many elephants—in Kruger or anywhere else—the land takes a beating. First, the trees are damaged from excessive browsing, and finally they disappear. The habitat literally changes, from forest to parkland and then to grassy savanna. The topsoil erodes. All the species that relied on these transitional habitats—from birds and forest antelopes to arboreal primates—disappear. An excessive number of elephants will eat everything, including themselves, out of a home.

As with most other African parks, Kruger is an island; the migration routes that had supported the region’s megafauna since the late Pleistocene are severed now, and the park is largely fenced. Progressively managed hunting preserves and tribal properties along Kruger’s borders have resulted in the removal of the wire in some areas, expanding available habitat to a degree. More significantly, a transfrontier pact has allowed fence removal between Kruger and Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park, essentially doubling the size of the protected habitat. Still, in general terms, Kruger’s elephants aren’t going anywhere. They have to stay in the Kruger-Limpopo biome; they have been denied those corridors that once allowed them to roam the continent as hunger, thirst, and will dictated. These strictures imply enforced limits on elephant numbers. The general consensus among biologists and game managers is that no more than eight thousand elephants should inhabit Kruger proper, and much of the park’s budget and management efforts over the past two decades have been devoted to trying to keep the herd to this figure.

In the past, the solution was easy: cull to the desired population. As previously discussed, experienced sharpshooters, mostly professional hunters and the game scouts they had personally trained, would identify family groups appropriate for removal and take them out in a minute or two of concentrated gunfire. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it even hunting; it was killing, and it sometimes emotionally damaged the men who had to do it. But culling was a long-established tradition in South Africa, and it worked. Eliminating entire family units rather than targeting individual animals from different groups kept the essential social structure of Kruger’s elephants intact, because it minimized stress on the population as a whole. Elephant herds are matriarchies. Each herd is controlled by a dominant cow, and each member has a place within the group. Killing individual animals (particularly the dominant matriarch) within a group invariably traumatizes the group as a whole, commonly resulting in the phenomenon of pachyderm “juvenile delinquents”: young males that act aggressively toward other elephants and are often inclined to attack humans or livestock.

But Kruger severely restricted culling beginning in 1989 as a result of international pressure—more from people enamored of elephants as a charismatic species than from scientists or mainline conservationists. In other words, animal rights advocates drove the change in policy. By 1995, culling was no longer actively pursued.

(As an aside, it should be noted that Kruger’s history of unexpected consequences in wildlife management is not dissimilar to other reserves on other continents where ambitious tinkering with the native fauna has been attempted. Gray wolves were mostly eliminated from Yellowstone National Park in the United States by the 1900s. As a result, the region’s elk population exploded, ultimately destroying much of the riparian vegetation and harming many species associated with Rocky Mountain riverine environments. But the elk population dropped after wolves were reintroduced to the park in the late twentieth century. Riparian flora rebounded, and with it beavers returned. These large aquatic rodents created extensive systems of dams and pools that attracted nesting waterfowl and other birds. In short, Yellowstone’s ecology was significantly enriched by reintroducing an apex predator long absent from the region.)

Unfortunately, all efforts to control Kruger’s elephants since the cessation of general culling have failed. Relocation and contraceptives have been tried. Both are expensive, extremely stressful on the animals, and, in the final analysis, ineffective. The elephant population swelled to almost 12,000 by 2004 and then to 15,500 by 2006. A new plan was refined between 2008 and 2010, dividing the park into discrete blocks. The scheme is, frankly, complicated. The basic idea is to manage each block separately for vegetative cycles—that is, to allow habitats to “degrade” or “recover” from elephant impacts at varying levels. This, ideally, will result in a wide range of niche habitats for varying species and minimize the need for elephant culling. But the plan may well be doomed simply because it has so many variables. Complex wildlife management schemes are difficult to implement successfully anywhere, all the more so on a huge preserve in Africa—even South Africa, which has well-developed infrastructure and a relatively responsive political system. Critics of the scheme abound. Some of the most incisive writing on the issue comes from Ron Thomson, a legendary former game warden.

Thomson worked as a ranger and warden in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for twenty-four years. During his duties, he killed five thousand elephants, eight hundred buffaloes, more than fifty lions—including six man-eaters—and two hundred hippos. He supervised a culling team that killed twenty-five hundred elephants at Gonarezhou National Park in the 1970s. These kinds of credentials, of course, don’t necessarily impress animal rights advocates. But Thomson’s work with black rhinos would certainly earn their plaudits. Thomson was an early pioneer in the live capture and translocation of rhinos. Over a seven-year period in the 1960s and 1970s, he led Rhodesia’s black rhino capture team, tranquilizing and moving 140 of the great beasts. Because a rhino stalk usually requires absolute silence, Thomson usually worked alone, armed only with a tranquilizer dart gun. Animal rightists may well disparage Thomson’s CV, but no one can dispute his deep and intimate knowledge of Africa’s game and the habitats they require to survive.

At this point, Thomson is thoroughly disenchanted with conservation policy across Africa. CITES, he feels, is an abject failure, especially when it comes to preventing the trade in elephant and rhino products. Poaching, he says, is driven by poverty—specifically the poverty in the communities surrounding the great parks. To stop poaching, the poverty must be alleviated, and that inevitably will involve the regulated taking of “surplus” animals within the parks.

Kruger’s new management plan is thus unworkable for a number of reasons, says Thomson. It treats elephants as discrete quanta—entities separate from elephants in other blocks, from the park as a whole, and from the surrounding countryside, including the villages full of poor hungry people on the border of the park. The idea that you can effectively manage Kruger’s elephants and improve biodiversity by juggling vegetative canopies—allowing elephants to devastate some blocks while culling to prescribed numbers in others—looks good on paper, Thomson avers on a Web site devoted to African game management and hunting issues, but applying the plan effectively will be next to impossible. Parts cannot be substituted for the whole; the forest cannot be ignored for the trees. And by the way, a lot of elephants will still be killed under the new plan:

In the new Kruger elephant management model it has already been decided that the northern and southern elephant management blocks will initially have their elephant populations reduced at the same rate at which they are now expanding. This will entail reducing each year’s standing population by 14 percent. The first 7 percent will take off the annual increment. The second 7 percent will represent the reduction. The number making up the 14 percent, therefore, will get smaller and smaller as the population size diminishes by 7 percent each year.

In those populations that are being culled, therefore, the population will be halved—and halved again repeatedly—every ten years. And in those populations that are not subject to culling, the populations will double their numbers every ten years. Ironically, the new elephant management plan for Kruger National Park—although it came about because of animal rights objections to the culling of elephants—will probably end up killing more elephants every year than was the case before.

The hard reality, then, is that elephants must be somehow controlled if Kruger is to maintain its biological richness. As Ian Parker noted, elephants are engines superbly designed for changing landscapes. If allowed to reproduce freely, they would change Kruger’s landscape right down to the hardpan, leveling every standing tree. And despite its threatened status, the African elephant is hardly a shy breeder: when not subject to culling, Kruger’s elephant population typically grows at 6 to 7 percent a year. Contraception and translocation, it is now known, are ineffective. Creating transnational parks to accommodate more elephants, as the International Fund for Animal Welfare and other groups advocate, is certainly a good idea, but opportunities are limited. Ultimately, effective elephant management must rely on a bullet. As Thomson observes, lethal force will remain the cornerstone of Kruger’s new elephant policy—a policy that was developed in direct and sincere response to protests from animal rights advocates. There is simply no alternative, except for a complete cessation to all culling and trophy hunting, habitat degradation notwithstanding. And this may well happen. For many people of good conscience, including some with extensive backgrounds in wildlife issues, the specter of shooting any elephant for any reason is too horrible to countenance—to contemplate, even. To them, the elephant is sentient—more than that, intelligent—and killing sentient and intelligent creatures is murder. Better, perhaps, that there are fewer elephants, worse habitat, less biodiversity, as long as there is no murder. It is thus not a matter of conservation; it is a matter of essential morality, of civilized behavior.

Certainly, organized resistance to hunting is growing, particularly in the United States and Europe. Trophy hunting, especially, is drawing concentrated fire. A 2004 white paper titled The Myth of Trophy Hunting as Conservation, submitted to the British environment minister Elliott Morley by the League against Cruel Sports, limns the battle lines in no uncertain terms. The report inveighs thunderously against sport hunting, dismissing as lies any claims that hunting can be effectively employed as a conservation tool. And while the paper acknowledges that trophy hunting inevitably will continue in Africa for the foreseeable future, it suggests another strategy—depriving hunters of a major incentive for killing charismatic game: “While it may not be possible in the short term to prevent hunters from travelling around the globe to kill endangered animals, it is possible to deny them the perverse pleasure of bringing back a stuffed, mounted trophy of their kill.”

Further, the report casts the argument as a conflict between good and evil, as a struggle between wealthy “pale males” (white hunters) and poor disenfranchised people of color who are the natural beneficiaries of ecotourism. Nor can there be any compromise, the report warns: “It is virtually impossible for these two groups to co-exist. The hunting industry, and the governments they have wooed, are battling against eco-tourism operators and local communities for control over the planet’s endangered species—and are often winning.”

At a certain point, vetting the arguments of both the pro-and anti-hunting camps feels utterly futile; to paraphrase Mark Twain, it becomes a matter of trying to separate the lies, the damn lies, and the statistics. More charitably, both groups can make compelling arguments for their respective positions on the consumptive use of game in Africa and elsewhere.

Only one group, however, can claim ascendance. Just as the hunting ethic was considered an integral component of the social contract in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so its obverse is now true. A general opposition to hunting now prevails in the urban centers of the developed world. This anti-hunting sentiment has combined with a larger sense that cruelty to animals in general, including simple neglect, is anathema to civilized people. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, between 1975 and 2006 the number of hunters in the United States (e.g., people who had purchased hunting licenses) declined from 19.1 million to 12.5 million. That figure is expected to plummet to 9.1 million by 2025. Some states—most notably those with large rural populations—have shown relatively slight drops, but the decline in others has been profound. In California, the decline was 38 percent; in Rhode Island, 59 percent. Some of this is due to expense (hunting is a relatively pricey activity), the loss of public-land hunting opportunities, and habitat loss. But the biggest driver appears to be a shift in the zeitgeist. Hunting is not considered au courant, especially among younger people. This is glaringly apparent in the American media. There are a great many TV shows dedicated to alternative and extreme sports—surfing, snowboarding, motocross, even street luge racing. The participants are young, fit, and attractive. And while there are some hunting and fishing shows on television—there’s even a channel or two devoted wholly to field sports—their presentation and production values are stodgy by comparison, and the hosts and participants are generally middle-aged, paunchy, and anything but sexy. In the most basic terms, the culture that really counts in America—youth culture—has moved decisively against hunting.

The same holds true for urban Africa. As the League against Cruel Sports claims, compromise of any significant degree is probably impossible for anti-hunting and pro-hunting groups. But the organization is wrong when it maintains hunters are winning. The hunters are not winning, including those in Africa. In Nairobi and Johannesburg, hunting is viewed as a colonial relic, something pursued by wealthy white men besotted with delusional fantasies of Hemingway, Ruark, and the Golden Age of the Safari. Even in countries where the hunting tradition is still relatively strong—Tanzania and Namibia, for example—the activity is viewed as a somewhat atavistic rural pursuit and, at best, a source of foreign currency. Hunting big game is not an aspiration of the people who really count in Africa—educated, upwardly mobile, professional urbanites. Thanks to the Internet and cellular technology, Africa is now integrated into world culture in a way that was unthinkable even a few years ago. By way of illustration: I visited Kenya’s Laikipia highlands in 2001. At that time, standard hardwired telephony had just made it to the region. Up to that point, ranchers had communicated by CB radio—or more often, by driving or flying to one another’s homes. I observed that the ranchers seemed somewhat flummoxed by the technology, which was then more than a century old, of course. When they picked up the phone, they had a tendency to say “over” after finishing their part of the conversation, as they would on a two-way radio.

Flash forward eight years. Cell phones are now ubiquitous across East Africa, including in Laikipia and the Maasai Mara. Everyone—city dwellers, ranchers, pastoralists—has at least one cell phone. They are calling, texting, Googling, reading news feeds. They are as exposed to the world—and to global popular culture—as anyone in Paris, London, or New York. Just as it has in the United States, this vastly enhanced access to media hasn’t necessarily raised the level of discourse: a lot of attention seems concentrated on scandal, sex, and crime.

Still, matters of more elevated import percolate through the new African media, including those related to wildlife conservation. The debate in Kenya over reintroducing big game hunting has drawn particular attention. In the countryside, the issue is strictly a matter of shillings and security: conversations with any pastoralist or farmer revolve around protection of livestock from predators, excluding elephants from crops, or the return in meat or money that game animals may yield. In Nairobi, however, the issue is both more complicated and familiar: it sounds a lot like the heated point and counterpoint you’d hear in any American or European city. In 2007, a Kenyan journalist opposed to hunting described it as bored and wealthy Arab royals and Americans potting away at big game while starving children looked on from mudand-wattle huts. While the issue is certainly more nuanced than that, this image contains enough truth to make for a powerful self-propagating message—an idea that is simple, clear, and easy to understand and communicate. Indeed, this portrayal of hunters as callous and blood-crazed neocolonials trying to insinuate themselves back into a country from which they were properly ejected during a war of liberation has resonated dramatically in urban Kenya. Kenyans may not be deeply invested in the doctrine of animal rights, but the injustices of white colonialism still rancor, and big game hunting remains the preeminent symbol of the colonial era.

Thus, the basic conversation on African conservation is changing, driven by new media and reflecting the changing concepts of environmentalism in the world at large. The “old” science-based approach to conservation—dispassionate, data-driven, focused on habitat and suites of species rather than on narratives that anthropomorphize individual animals—is under dire threat. Its adversary is a New Environmentalism founded on the “deep ecology” philosophy articulated a generation ago by the Norwegian mountaineer Arne Naess, but it diverges from Naess’s original doctrine of planetary health in that it focuses on a single component of ecological well-being—the inherent rights of the individual animal—to an inordinate degree. The New Environmentalism is thus more about social, even religious, trends than it is about science. This invests it with a power that science alone will never have, because it is grounded in the heart more than in the mind.

Africa is the ultimate battleground for these dueling conservation concepts. It still has enough wildlife to make the stakes worthwhile. Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, the only other regions with large populations of megafauna, are generally not in this battle. Animal rights groups maintain a presence there, but wildlife management is rigorously codified under federal, state, and provincial law and based on data, not morality. Though good cases can be made that wildlife policies in Alaska and Canada are significantly influenced by political pressure, nothing is likely to shift the argument decisively in favor of animal rights advocates. True, the clubbing of harp seal pups has diminished as a result of international outrage. But all the major terrestrial species—including brown bears, wolves, caribou, musk oxen, Dall sheep, mountain goats, even polar bears—are still hunted. The support for consumptive wildlife management is broad and deep. Hunting in Alaska and the Canadian North is largely considered a birthright.

But Africa is in a state of flux, and new doctrines are not reflexively spurned. Big game hunting has never been a favored activity for most indigenous Africans, with the exception of tribes such as the Wata and the San. Moreover, since it carries the indelible stain of white colonialism, hunting will always be controversial, even in situations in which it is a proven and effective conservation tool. Ecotourism, on the other hand, is appealing for the opposite reason: it has no ties to an oppressive past. In many cases—as will be discussed later—ecotourism can exert deleterious impacts on land and wildlife. And the revenues of many ecotourism enterprises are monopolized by foreign owners and government officials, with few benefits trickling down to local villagers. But as a brand, ecotourism is ascendant. It is allied with the New Environmentalism, with animal rights, with all that is modern, young, and appealing. Hunting labors under an onus imposed by its own name, by a history that appears drear and cruel, by the whiteness and age of its primary practitioners. In the future, poaching will continue in the African game lands; the same can’t be said of legal hunting.