The United States initially announced its intention to import elephant and lion remains from Zimbabwe and Zambia. Then President Trump had second thoughts — in a tweet.
Update, 18 November – United States President Donald Trump is reversing course: he wrote on his Twitter account that the decision on hunting trophies is being postponed until he has examined "all conservation data". The ban prohibiting the import of elephant remains from Zimbabwe, introduced by his predecessor Barack Obama, therefore remains in force, as does the ban on importing them from Zambia.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, to whom Trump refers in his tweet, stated that he had spoken with the President and agreed with him that conservation is a crucial issue, adding that for this reason the issuing of permits is "frozen" until the matter is examined more thoroughly. The statement refers solely to elephants.
Elephant feet to use as chairs, tails to hang on the wall, trunks to show off to friends. All of this sounds horrifying to every one of us, yet it risks coming back into fashion in the United States after the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced, at a forum on African wildlife, that the remains of elephants killed by American hunters in Zimbabwe and Zambia will once again be allowed to be imported into the United States. The permit will apply to all animals legally hunted from 21 January 2016 through to 31 December 2018. And that is not all: without making any public announcement, the department also issued new guidelines permitting the import of lion remains from the two countries — and from South Africa.
A department spokesperson justified the decision by stating that hunting can be incorporated into the two African states' elephant population management plans, "providing incentives to local communities to conserve the species and bringing in money useful to its conservation", through the fees paid by hunters. Strongly opposed was Wayne Pacelle, president of one of the most important American associations for the protection of animal rights, the Humane Society. "We can't have control over what happens overseas, but what we can control is a restriction on the imports of animal remains," Pacelle stated.
Read also: Donald Trump's sons kill dozens of animals — who would have thought it
Former US President Barack Obama had introduced a ban in 2014 on the import of elephant hunting trophies from Zimbabwe, following a drastic decline in the number of individuals. Between 2007 and 2014, the elephant population fell by 30 per cent across 15 African countries, according to data published the previous year by the Great Elephant Census. The animals that remain number just over 350,000 — at the start of the twentieth century there were millions — and are constantly threatened by poaching and illegal ivory trafficking. It comes as no surprise, then, that they are included in the United States Endangered Species Act.
The funds needed for the conservation of the species can be found through other means, for instance through sustainable tourism, an increasingly widespread practice through which people can discover landscapes and the species that inhabit them in a responsible and sustainable way. This is proof that the number of people who want to see elephants alive and in their natural habitat — not mounted on a wall — is far from small.
