It has been 10 months since a large number of familiar faces from the wildlife conservation scene within the UK descended on a pub in Archway, London for a very special occasion. I know, I’m a tad behind the times but I’m still playing catch-up from the void in time created by my PhD thesis submission. Those of us travelling to London were doing so for one reason, to attend the premiere of a film that had been made by Ryan Dalton, the host of the Into The Wild podcast (which I’m sure many of you have heard of). Beyond the Trigger wasn’t just another nature documentary. Dalton had travelled to Namibia with a specific goal in mind, to speak to local people and try to understand more about the positive and negative impacts of trophy hunting in the country. This is currently a contentious issue in the UK, with legislation currently in the works to ban the imports of animal trophies. Therefore, Dalton remained impartial throughout and let the experiences of the local people tell the story.
If I’m honest, before watching Beyond The Trigger I was fully opposed to trophy hunting. I’ve been to Africa and seen how strict the anti-poaching laws and campaigns are in Tanzania, and the local people that I met also discourage you from trophy hunting, as it isn’t morally acceptable. Some of those that I spoke to, saw trophy hunting and poaching to be just as bad as one another. It doesn’t help that those of us in the industrialised world tend to confuse these two actions anyway. However, my experiences and the views I heard were biased due to the geographic location I was in. East Africa is far more profitable as a hub for ecotourism, due to the mass migration of herbivores crossing the Serengeti and Masai Mara, and other such spectacles that have been the bread and butter of wildlife documentaries for decades. The same cannot be said for some countries in western and southern Africa. So they have to rely on sources of income from trophy hunting to support both the local economy, and conservation efforts. If we ban the imports of animal trophies, then those sources of income are going to disappear, but what is going to replace them?
Wildlife trade has always been a topic that has interested me, due to the impact it has one wild populations. One thing to remember is that not all trade is illegal, where do you think a large portion of your seafood come from (if you eat it), or where the wood came from that your furniture is made from? These are morally acceptable uses of wildlife because they are regulated, just like trophy hunting is in some countries. In Beyond The Trigger, Dalton helps to give a voice to some of the communities benefitting from trophy hunting, demonstrating that the funds don’t just help to fund conservation efforts, but also help people to access education, and other facilities or amenities that we take for granted. What this does then, is help to provide a viewpoint to those most reliant on trophy hunting, something which is often left out of debates in industrialised countries, who want to ban trophy hunting, purely because it is ‘bad’. If you went out and shot everything, I completely agree. However, everything is undertaken in a controlled manner, which legislators here in the UK, don’t seem to understand.
Aside from breaking down this neo-colonial view of trophy hunting being a ‘terrible thing and should be banned’, after the screening, we were also lucky enough to speak to some of the people Dalton had interacted with throughout Beyond The Trigger, even if the internet connection in Namibia was a little sketchy at times. This gave us all the unique opportunity to ask any questions that may have arisen throughout the screening, or ask for additional clarification. The combination of this premiere and the interaction with the Namibian people featured in the film meant that some of us may have gone into the screening thinking that trophy hunting was a terrible thing, but we came out questioning this view point, and saw the potential positives for rural communities in Africa that have limited sources of income available to them.
If you’d like to watch Beyond The Trigger, it is now available on YouTube, and it is embedded below for you to watch at your leisure. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter, once you’ve given it a watch.
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