My Lords, consider the tale of two African countries. In the late 1970s, as we have just heard, Kenya banned the hunting of elephants and the sale of tusks and saw an upsurge of poaching to such a degree that elephants were almost wiped out in that country. At almost exactly the same time, Zimbabwe—or Rhodesia, as it still was for a couple more years—made elephants the property of whoever’s land they were roaming on, with the result that there was an upsurge in numbers because, as Aristotle teaches, that which no one owns, no one will care for.
It can take an effort of will in a country like this to imagine what it is like to live next to some of these large mammals. We encounter them even before we go to school. They are presented to us in the first books that we see as toddlers, smiling, colourful and anthropomorphised. Then we come across them later as teenagers in documentaries, endangered, handsome and gracious—but of course that is not exactly how they seem when they are next door to you. A lion might carry off a child. An elephant will trample crops and possibly push over your dwelling. Rhinos and hippos are more dangerous still. Even the giraffe, which looks so graceful when we see it on television, competes for scarce water resources with local herders.
So, if we want to preserve these animals and their habitats, we have to give local people an incentive to treat them as a renewable resource—in other words, to give them an incentive financially by being able, in a licensed and qualified way, to sell tusks, hides and, yes, hunting licences.
When South Africa decided to do something about the decline of white rhinos, it became almost the only place in the world where numbers stopped falling; 80% of white rhinos, which were nearly extinct in the rest of Africa, are now found in South Africa because it used trophy hunting and the revenue therefrom as a way of incentivising local people to become custodians—each to become a gamekeeper, if you like.
Last year I had the great privilege of spending some time visiting the northern parts of Pakistan, with beautiful, austere landscapes where there is an unusual mountain goat called the markhor, which has amazing screwdriver horns like a drill. It is a most magnificent animal. In the 20th century it was this close to extinction, with fewer than 500 left. The Pakistani authorities then began to auction a very small number of hunting licences, three or four a year. They now fetch immense sums: $500,000, or upwards of that in some cases. That money is reserved for the local communities. The people in those communities then make damn sure that no one comes near any of those animals, except the elderly post-reproductive ones that are marked for hunting. People who previously had no incentive to look after the numbers have, if you like, all become rangers in a way that overstretched Governments are not able to do. We made it everybody’s business.
This, it seems to me, is a question which pits aesthetics against intellect. It pits how we feel about something, our sentiment, against what we think is most in the interests of endangered species. Like my noble friend Lord Swire, I do not particularly like the image of American dentists squatting by fallen lions. Maybe it is that we all have a problem, on some deep psychological level, with dentists—I do not know. But it is not fundamentally for us in this House to consider the aesthetics; it is for us to consider the effects. Above all, surely that is why we are here: as a check on the radicalism of the popularly elected Chamber. It is exactly our job to think about the effects rather than simply about the headlines.
There is a difference between saying, “I disapprove of this thing”, or even “I find this thing unspeakably ugly”, and saying, “Therefore this thing should be banned”. That is not just a semantic difference. The difference between those two things contains the entirety of what we mean by a free society.
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