Voltaire famously wrote to Monsieur l'AbbÄ: "I detest what you write but would give my life to make it possible for you to write it."
I could never shoot an elephant, or any other animal, but I shall devote a Saturday column to the case for allowing others to do so. After reading Raymond Bonner's book "At the Hand of Man", I shall go further and say their hunting should be encouraged, as should the selling of ivory.
Ray Bonner and I are elephant enthusiasts. Most years I contrive a journey to some African waterhole. There I watch these majestic beasts act out evolution's first attempt at communal living. I see them wander the bush, "as if", in Karen Blixen's words, "they had an appointment at the end of the world". Africa has nothing to equal it.
Bonner's credentials are more substantial than mine. He has studied both elephants and elephant diplomacy in detail. He has gazed into the cesspit that is the world elephant lobby, and come away spitting with anger at its lies, faction fighting and patronising attitude to Africans. I shall choose my wildlife charities with more care in future.
Three years ago we could not open a newspaper or children's magazine and avoid heart-rending photographs of mutilated elephants, villainous poachers and bloodstained ivory. The pictures were always accompanied by appeals for money, never for an address in Africa. I was puzzled at the time to visit a game reserve and encounter fury at this publicity. Elephants in southern Africa were not dying out, let alone "endangered"; they were increasing. Competition for land and vegetation required their culling and management, paid for (up to a point) by the sale of shooting licences and ivory. Certainly numbers were falling in East Africa, through corruption and political ineptitude. But Botswana alone had twice as many elephants as Kenya, and its herd doubled in the 1980s.
The essence of Bonner's case is that Africans must be able to make money from elephants or they will wipe them out as Europeans once wiped out bears and wolves. Poor people who live among wild animals - rhinos, lions, gorillas - must have a financial interest in their survival. This means exploiting them in the same way that the British farm grouse or stags, not just getting occasional compensation for trampled crops. Nor is mass tourism the answer. As Bonner points out, the 20 Land-Rovers that now encircle every lion pride in Kenya destroy habitat, bring little revenue to local villages and turn the reserves into zoos. If elephants are to survive in anything like a natural state, Africans must want to protect them and the ecological diversity that goes with them.
Until 1988, says Bonner, every leading conservationist backed the "sustainable utilisation" of African wildlife, treating animals as part of the local economy. So did conservation groups such as the WWF and the African Wildlife Foundation.
The AWF, based in America, supported the agonising decision to shoot the last herd of 100 elephants in Rwanda in the late 1970s. The elephants were eating the forest in which Africa's most important colony of gorillas live. It was elephants or gorillas. Gorillas had to win.
In 1989 the tide turned. Elephant conservation across the world was suddenly overwhelmed by militant American "animals rights" groups using emotional publicity, much of it based on the political anarchy in East Africa. Conferences saw white zealots pitted against white zoologists (Africans were seldom involved). At the 1989 Lausanne conference, East Africans were browbeaten by American lobbyists into switching sides. The elephant was ludicrously declared "endangered", and the trade in ivory was banned. Southern African states bitterly opposed the ban but were forced into line. Zimbabwe was even threatened with the loss of American aid.
The motivation behind the ban was simple. Just as America's Irish policy has little to do with Ireland, so America's elephant policy has little to do with elephants, and everything to do with fundraising. Bonner reports an AWF official in 1988 complaining that consultants were "screaming" for endangered status for the elephant because of its phenomenal publicity value. Mangled tusks and fabricated statistics, cries of holocaust and genocide, threats of extinction in "ten short years" were turned into the most successful fundraising in conservation history. The elephant ousted pandas and whales as king of the "charismatic megaspecies".
International bureaucracies lack the accountability of domestic ones. Both the AWF and the once-moderate WWF were dragged by militants into what was a patently false campaign for an ivory ban. Bonner cites memos in which frantic officials conceded ground to extremists for fear of losing members and funds. Reluctant European affiliates were bludgeoned into following suit. African states and local conservationists fearful for their grants felt it politic to switch too.
The impact of the 1989 ivory ban was swift. The ivory price fell and Africa lost some $50 million in hard currency. It received not a cent in compensation. In Nairobi, Richard Leakey staged an "ivory burn" for President Arap Moi. Three million dollars, badly needed for Kenya's conservation programme, went up in publicity smoke. Here was Africa paying for the conscience of the West with a vengeance. I wonder how Britain would have reacted to a Zimbabwean demand for an ethical ban on all trade in grouse, furs or deerskin?
The power of Bonner's case comes both from his evident love of elephants and from his instances of how good management can stabilise numbers. At Kaokoveld in Namibia and Nyaminyami in Zimbabwe, poachers are literally turned gamekeepers. Africans are guaranteed the revenues from hunting and culling and come to recognise elephants not as enemies but as valuable to their economy. Money comes not from government but from the market, albeit a strictly controlled one.
One licensed hunter is reckoned to equal a hundred ordinary tourists in cash to local villages. The hunter not only pays to cull, he does far less damage to the local ecology and way of life. To ban the hunter and his ivory is to deny the Africans a livelihood that is theirs by right. The ivory ban was imposed on many African states flagrantly against their will and the interest of long-term conservation.
Bonner's book is full of morals. Lobbyists who ignore elementary economics defeat their own ends. Declaring the elephant endangered may yet endanger it. "Good cause" crusades, especially those directed at distant countries, are always vulnerable to perverted motives, and above all to the need for money. Accountable to no government or country, international philanthropists can become accountable only to their own bank balances.
I accept that some people find the killing of any animal for pleasure more than they can stomach, even if they buy the products of such animals. They find the killing of stags and game birds equally cruel. But we do permit animals to be killed for pleasure. To tell Africans, incomparably poorer than we are, that they may not earn money from such killing is insufferable hypocrisy. Elephants may belong to the world, but Africa is their custodian. If Africans choose to save them from extinction by managing their numbers, all strength to them.
