Last November, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) lifted the Obama-era ban on the import of elephant and lion body parts from Zimbabwe and Zambia. It claimed trophy hunting helps conservation efforts.
After swift public outcry, desPOTUS tweeted that he would put the decision on hold. In a tweet, he referred to trophy hunting as a “horror show.” He said he would be “very hard-pressed” to see how trophy hunting helps conservation efforts.
According to a New York Times article, the motivation for his out-of-character reaction may have been more self-serving than rooted in compassion.
He did not know about his administration’s decision to lift the trophy ban until learning it from the news media and was annoyed to be criticized for a move he had no part in. So he made his displeasure known in the way he has so many other times this year, through his Twitter feed.
But tweets are not law. The ban has remained lifted since November and since then, African hunting safari websites have been busy advertising elephant and lion hunts in Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Today, however, the Humane Society of the United States reports that USFWS’s decision to lift the ban was officially invalidated.
Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit upheld the conservation mandate of the Endangered Species Act, supporting the need to rigorously analyze applications to import hunting trophies of species threatened with extinction.
This federal court order, coming only weeks after President Trump tweeted that he was reconsidering the agency’s decision to allow imports of elephant and lion trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia, means that those recent decisions by the agency are invalid.
Anna Frostic, managing attorney for wildlife litigation for The Humane Society of the United States, said, "The federal government must carefully consider the science demonstrating that trophy hunting negatively impacts the conservation of imperiled species. We strongly urge the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to take immediate action to rescind its unlawful decisions to liberalize elephant and lion trophy imports."
The Court also held that the agency must take public comment on any blanket decisions to allow or prohibit trophy imports based on individual countries management plans.
I’m not entirely clear on whether or not this means there is now a real-life hard stop on the imports, but this is a big step in the right direction.
From a MoveOn-Endangered Species Coalition email, you can sign and share this petition right now:
We will provide a way to make your public comment if the USFWS again pursues this misguided policy, but you can help today by sharing the petition to Secretary Zinke with 5 friends asking them to oppose the importation of trophies from elephants:
The elephant is our largest land mammal. African elephants have experienced devastating declines in their numbers because they are slaughtered for their tusks for the ivory trade. The ivory trade generates millions of dollars and fuels crime syndicates linked to extremist groups. Poachers kill 35,000 elephants every year, or about 96 elephants a day.