We had booked another full bag safari for 2021 with Simon and Kate Rodger’s Safaris de Moçambique. This concession borders Lake Cahora Bassa in Mozambique. My 27-year-old daughter would be the shooter, and her PH would be Brian Ellement, son of the well-known elephant hunter Mark Ellement from Zimbabwe. My son and I had hunted elephant with Mark about 20 years previously on a very successful hunt – we took a 58 lb tusker. We had met Brian and his sister during that hunt when they were about 10 years old, and now Brian was pushing 30! Mark has since passed on and is deeply missed.
We started off driving relentlessly searching for fresh buff tracks. After countless miles of driving and following buffs on foot, we were looking for a big, hard-bossed bull. Day after day we followed tracks until we made contact with herds of Dagga Boy groups. We would carefully maneuver, keeping the wind in our faces, crawling, sneaking, and trying to stay out of sight. KK had borrowed a .375 H&H and I had a .416 Rigby for backup.
Our Cruiser sunk to the axle trying to cross a sand river
Darby Wright with .375 H&H that Kayleigh Wright used on safari, .416 Remington used by Darby Wright for backup & .500 Jeffries used by PH Brian Ellement
Finally, after looking over quite a few buffs, Brian whispered that there was a very nice bull in a group. We kept shifting constantly, trying to get into position for a clear shot. The buffs were on the move, feeding into the wind with heavy brush all around them. I stayed back a few yards as KK and Brian moved into position. I saw the sticks come up and it seemed like forever before the shot went off. I was trying to video with my phone camera, and at the shot I jerked the phone, not getting any of the action on video. KK said the shot felt good and that she had been aiming low on the shoulder. Soon we heard the death bellow coming from about 150 yards away. The trackers started smiling and laughing and everyone was elated! We found this magnificent bull and he was a beauty! That night there would be a ‘Dindine’ (local term for a party) which included a full-blown celebration with sundowners, hors d’oeuvres and buff-tail soup.
We had gotten word that an agitated bull hippo had been harrassing fisherman, and one man had been severely injured while tending his nets. We loaded our gear into the Land Cruiser and headed out early the next day across the million-acre concession to investigate the situation. PHs are often responsible for eliminating problem animals, and upon our arrival several local fisherman ran up to our truck and in their native tongue told our trackers what had happened. The injured fisherman had been taken to a clinic but they weren’t sure he was going to make it. Those tusks are capable of causing horrendous injuries. We were never able to locate this aggressive hippo, so we decided to hunt the huge vegetation-choked lagoon for a trophy hippo.
Kayleigh Wright with leopard
Enjoying a nice bush lunch while out hunting
Sunset at Main Camp
After much searching we were able to find two hippo bulls completely out of the water sunning on a small island. However, they saw us and entered the water, heads bobbing up and down. We were all sitting on the ground glassing, and Brian set up the short sticks and told KK which one to shoot when comfortable. The .375 barked. “Great shot!” said Brian. He had seen the 110 yard shot connect through his binos. A search party was sent out in a dugout canoe to tow in the hippo once it floated, and when near the shore, we used the Land Cruiser to pull the 6,000 lb beast from the water. All the meat was given to the fishing village, and the excited villagers were thankful for fresh protein.
KK had leopard on license, so we set out to shoot several impala rams for bait. At 350 dollars each, that’s some expensive cat food! We hung five baits in likely-looking areas and checked them every day. One bait site was within a mile of camp, and bait number three was heavily fed on with big paw prints around it. We needed a fresh impala bait. A blind was built, and KK and Brian entered it about 4:00 p.m. while I waited in camp.
At 8:30 the driver came to tell me he was sure they had got the leopard, so we headed straight to the blind. Brian and the trackers searched with flashlights. KK and I waied in the blind. Suddenly, “KK come see your leopard,” shouted Brian. WOW! Now everyone was fired up. This had been a fantastic leopard hunt! We had another ‘Dindine’, a cat celebration like none other.
Meantime, a buff ribcage, hide and hooves, a bunch of mummified impala carcasses from leftover recycled leopard baits, and a horrendously rank hippo leg left over from a previous lion safari, were all transformed into croc baits. It took a few days of wiring and chaining these baits in prime spots. The hippo leg was taken to a peninsula, and when we snuck in the following day to check for crocs, some dinosaur had broken the thick wiring and the chain which held the hippo leg! It was a windy day, so we decided to use our boat to search for a big croc.
We glassed a lot of shorelines and coves. At one point Brian got out of the boat and walked across a peninsula to take a look at the other side. He came running back to the boat, waving for us to grab the gun and sticks and make it quick! KK and Brian led, then they began belly-crawling for a closer shot. I could see the monster croc lying half in and half out of the water, quartering to the right. He was enormous with a huge head and wide body. Brian had KK on the short sticks and it didn’t take long for the .375 to go off. BOOM! The bullet entered forwards into the back of the skull, and after several insurance shots taken for good measure, it was over.
This was a huge old croc. The dindine celebration would last well into the night. Drinks and cold beers would be flowing! This Second Generation hunt was an especially memorable safari – hunting with Mark Ellement’s son Brian, and Kayleigh.
Those memories will last forever.
PH Brian Ellement with big vundu, CPR (Catch Photograph Release)
Darby Wright lives in New Braunfels, Texas. After 36 years of owning and running a Fire and Water Damage Restoration Company, he now enjoys his time off hunting and fishing in Costa Rica, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, Canada, Alaska, Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. He and his family are always ready for the next adventure.
January is the start of what many refer to as Convention Season. The time to wave the African hunting flag. Long flights, many shows, house parties, fund-raiser events and, of course, the major expos – the two big ones being DSC and SCI. It’s a proud time, an annual rendezvous with many familiar faces and, hopefully, meeting many more new ones. But for how long is this model “sustainable” – a word the industry seems quick to use in justifying its existence. The costs are prohibitive and favor the large vendors, or those selling highly priced items. I am not sure that if you were a standalone outfitter, like those of 40 years back, the original backbone of the shows, that you would make it now. Here’s an analogy: It was reported this past year that the wildebeest tended to remain in Tanzania – lack of good grazing so migrating elsewhere was not worth the move. Kenya saw fewer animal numbers. Could be a pure coincidence? Things are definitely changing.
One of Africa’s most colourful conservation personalities passed away on 2 January 2022 having lived a full life: “But what a life he had: in a career spanning more than half a century Leakey transformed himself from a fossil hunter, who became a bestselling author and television star – and made a seminal documentary on human evolution for the BBC – to a pioneering conservationist with the hide of a rhinoceros.”
The quotation above comes from Graham Boynton’s tribute in the Daily Mail where he also describes him as “The fearless fossil hunter who saved Africa’s living treasures: TV star, ladies’ man… and a swashbuckling adventurer who lost his legs in a plane crash. Richard Leakey – who has died at 77 – was like a real-life Wilbur Smith hero.”
Renowned Kenyan palaeontologists, Louis and Mary Leakey, had three sons who grew up in Nairobi, where they attended the private Duke of York School. Jonathan, the eldest, Richard, and Philip, the youngest, spent their holidays with their parents on paleontological digs around Lake Victoria and Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
Richard and his brothers lived in tents in the bush, became fluent in Swahili, and spent nearly all of their time with the black workers on their parents’ field expeditions. Philip was quoted as saying, “We were different. We grew up in an environment where our father was considered far more African than European. We were misfits among our white peers because we identified more with all Kenyans than they did.”
After leaving school, Richard started doing his own fossil-hunting, and in 1964, at the age of 19, he discovered a 1.4 million year old human jawbone on his first independent dig, at Lake Natron in Tanzania. He decided not to go to university and instead pursued palaeontology as an independent researcher. In 1968 he received a $25,000 National Geographic Society grant to work on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana. Three years later he achieved global prominence when his team unearthed a well-preserved 1.9 million year old skull of Homo habilis, an early hominid first discovered by his parents.
Graham Boynton: “In two books written with science writer Roger Lewin – Origins (1977) and People Of The Lake (1978) – Leakey argued that his discovery proved that Homo habilis evolved into Homo erectus, the direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, or modern human beings. His find saw him ending up on the cover of Time magazine and becoming something of a cult figure, the first pop paleo”.
Although the scientific establishment regarded him as an upstart, Leakey was undeterred. Origins became a best-seller that introduced ‘palaeoanthropology’ to a broad audience. In 1980 he produced The Making Of Mankind, a major BBC documentary about human evolution, viewed by millions of people.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Leakey cemented his standing as a Kenyan patriot, both as chairman of the East African Wildlife Society, and as head of the government-run Kenya Museums. His tenure at the EAWS came under criticism as poaching, particularly of elephants, started becoming a serious issue, and yet the Society made little or no effort to bring this growing crisis to the attention of the world. His critics said Leakey was too loyal to the Kenyan government to rock the boat.
Kenya’s President, Daniel Arap Moi, finally took action in 1986, by which time the elephant population had declines by 85% and tourism to his country started to dry up [it was widely alleged that members of the President’s family were deeply involved in the ivory business]. Moi appointed Leakey to take over the running of 52 parks by the organization that would in 1990 be consolidated as the Kenya Wildlife Service. By this time most of the parks were being decimated by poachers.
“That Leakey arrested the decline and set up an outstanding conservation and policing programme is now a matter of public record. How he did it – by turning the KWS into a paramilitary unit, hunting down the poaching gangs and introducing a highly controversial shoot-to-kill policy – reads like a 20th-century African thriller.” writes Boynton.
Leakey raised millions of dollars for the KWS both from foreign government grants and from the animal rights movement, who applauded his success in combatting the elephant poaching in Kenya. But he made a lot of enemies in the process, where he was seen as setting up his own empire or ‘parallel government’, and he also became involved in conflicts with Maasai leaders over wildlife issues. Outside Kenya, he annoyed the southern African conservation community, where wildlife utilisation policies and hunting were espoused by many governments.
The southern Africans were particularly outraged when Leakey staged a massive publicity stunt by burning at least three million US dollars’ worth of ivory and rhino horn, an event specifically aimed at prime-time television audiences in the USA. This act was followed by several more in different countries, often generously funded by the animal rights movement. The southern Africans said this sent a signal to Africans that their wildlife was of no financial value, whereas those countries in which wildlife utilization through game ranching, wildlife harvesting, and hunting were showing that wildlife could successfully compete with livestock and crop-farming, thus making biodiversity conservation more viable.
On June 2, 1993, Leakey and four passengers took off from Nairobi’s Wilson Airport for a trip to Lake Naivasha in his Cessna 206, a personal gift from a wealthy American businessman. The engine quit shortly after take-off, and the plane crashed into the bush. The passengers were unhurt but the engine crushed both Leakey’s legs below the knees. After unsuccessful treatment in a Nairobi hospital, he was flown to England, where both legs were amputated.
In October 1993 Leakey returned to Kenya on artificial limbs, to find that in his absence his adversaries had moved against him and KWS was in disarray. He had made enemies in government by his management style and by flaunting his wealth – because of generous donor funds, his KWS senior staff earned far more than other public servants, and this caused jealousy and an opportunity to put a knife into his back. After first resigning, then being re-appointed, Leakey finally turned his back on the KWS.
So was Richard Leakey a conservation hero or a zero? I met him at an elephant conference in Nairobi in 1990, and again a few years later in Cape Town. He was a nice enough fellow in public, but he could be quite guileful in choosing his words to suit his audience. He befriended Dr Robbie Robinson, then Head of the South African National Parks, and elephant culling in the Kruger National Park was stopped. Currently this flagship of South African conservation is fast approaching the inevitable situation of too many elephants, with the looming impact of biodiversity loss.
Kenya’s continued wildlife policies of non-utilization and a ban on hunting have created a rift in relations with the southern African states, and Kenya’s wildlife populations are currently in decline. In the time that Namibia’s wildlife increased from about half a million head to 2 million (from about 1970 to present day), Kenya’s wildlife declined from about 1.5 million to half a million. The animal rights movement is relentless in its attempts to belittle Namibia’s community conservation success story, which includes hunting in its suite of wildlife management policies. The animal rights movement lauded Richard Leakey and showered him with financial largesse. At the end of the day, the welfare of wildlife, biodiversity and rural communities will be a true measure of his legacy.
Dr John Ledger is a past Director of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, now a consultant, writer and teacher on the environment, energy and wildlife; he is a columnist for the African Hunting Gazette. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. John.Ledger@wol.co.za
Written by Lou Hallamore and Bruce Woods (Trophy Room Books, 2011, 238 pages.) Review by Ken Bailey
With few exceptions, African literature has generally been intended to allow the reader to live vicariously through the words and experiences of the author. As readers we’re inspired by thrilling tales of hunting adventure, and often it’s those stories that compel us to visit Africa for the first time. Once we go there, of course, we’re hooked, and African hunting literature helps quell our thirst for Africa until we can return.
Chui!: A Guide to Hunting the African Leopard is not like most African literature, but then, leopards are not like any other African game animal. There is a science to hunting leopards that is unrivalled by that of any other species. Leopard hunting is not a tracker’s game, as is the case for elephant, Cape buffalo, lion (often) and most of the antelope species. Certainly, finding and identifying tracks is part of the leopard hunting experience, but once you’ve identified a prospective leopard to hunt, it becomes a tactician’s game. A chess match of the man against beast variety. And there is arguably no better tactician hunting leopard today than Zimbabwe’s Lou Hallamore.
Leopard hunting is characterized by interminably long, often fruitless, waits over bait. It’s a game of patience, and for those accustomed to shooting two or three species a day, it can be an agonizing experience. In part, that’s because, as visiting hunters, most often with little or no previous leopard hunting experience, we really don’t understand the complexities of the strategies at play. And leopard hunting, as with almost any other activity, is a whole lot more interesting and enjoyable when you know what the hell is going on. In this regard, Chui! serves as a textbook and reference source that will help you understand the many nuances that are part of a leopard hunting game plan. That understanding, in turn, will help make leopard hunting infinitely more rewarding.
Hallamore has been hunting leopards for more than 40 years. That adds up to a lot of lessons, many, if not most, learned the hard way. In Chui! he reveals all the tricks, tactics and secrets he’s accumulated on the trail of leopards across those decades. For readers, and wannabe leopard hunters, this book offers a detailed education as to what you can expect when pursuing your leopard and, more importantly, why your PH is doing what he’s doing to help you go home with that cherished rug.
Individual chapters are dedicated to the importance of selecting the right bait, hanging it, locating and building a blind, blind techniques and equipment, PhD-level tactics for problem cats, dealing with wounded leopards, and how to handle the hide to ensure your trophy arrives home as you imagined it would. Nowhere else is this level of leopard hunting know-how found within the covers of one book, and reading it, and knowing it, will go a long way toward helping you become more than just the trigger man in the grand scheme. Becoming more engaged in the whole process goes a long way in getting through those inevitably long hours in the blind, and help you come to grips with what went wrong on those too-frequent occasions when leopard hunts aren’t successful.
Of course, no leopard book would be complete without at least a few harrowing tales of man-eating leopards and hunts gone wrong, and Hallamore and Woods include some decidedly hair-raising accounts. Chui! is also liberally illustrated with images and sketches that enhance the reading and learning experience.
If you’re interested in hunting Africa, undoubtedly a leopard is on your “must do” list of game. I can think of no better preparation for that experience than reading Chui! from cover to cover. And then reading it again. There will be test one day, and you’d best be prepared!
I was born in Queenstown in 1967 and grew up on the farm, Bowers Hope, in the Tarkastad district.
My father, Murray Price, pioneered the hunting business in the Eastern Cape, with the first clients arriving in 1963. As children we were to be seen and not heard, so we used to hide under the table to listen to all the hunting stories passed around between legendary hunters from across the globe. That must have been the early influence resulting in my hunting career!
I grew up in the field in the Eastern Cape, mainly on our fifth generation-owned land, with my father and various PHs and trackers who taught me through experience. I learnt many things in my career, and one of these was to be more patient during the hunt and to wait for the best trophy we could get.
I currently hunt in the Eastern Cape on our fifth generation-owned and conserved property, as well as on one of the largest hunting concessions in the Northern Cape where the pristine land has been rehabilitated and managed to be the ultimate hunting area in Southern Africa.
Other countries I have hunted were Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, and Cameroon. In my time I have been in some amusing situations. One I remember in particular was a gemsbok charge when I was with an F16 pilot who had been shot down over Bosnia and lived to tell the tale. The gemsbok was wounded and charged us, and the client ended up shooting it from two yards. We laughed over a beer later, picturing him surviving Bosnia and ending up being killed by a charging gemsbok – imagine the headlines! On another occasion, but not funny, was I nearly being taken out by a buffalo in the Charisa area close to camp.
A very special memory is of one of the most interesting and challenging hunts I have had, hunting with a family with an autistic child. Watching him grow and open up during the safari as he gained in confidence and an attachment to me, touched everyone deeply, especially the parents, seeing their child come alive.
Another memorable hunt was with a client who came on a 30-day safari to hunt the Big Five, having very had very little hunting experience. He was high on testosterone shots and various other drugs. After he ran out of marijuana, we ground up elephant dung in desperation and gave it to him to smoke as a joke! When he realised it wasn’t the real stuff, he completely lost it! But we had a good laugh about it later around the fire.
We also had our share of disasters. We had a group of elderly clients travel to us all the way from Canada, and upon arrival one of the ladies fell down a step and broke her hip. She had to be transported by ambulance to East London for surgery, and they ended up staying with us for a month recovering. They were very gracious about it, as it put an end to their safari.
And a close brush with death was in a recent buffalo hunt where the client wounded it and my son, Grant, finished it off as it was charging, and it landed on top of the cameraman!
My weapon of choice as back-up for dangerous or wounded game is the .458 and I recommend the .300
.300 Win Mag with 180 grain for plains game, and the .458 for dangerous game. And if clients want to improve their safari experience, I suggest they give themselves sufficient time beforehand and practice shooting off sticks as well as getting as fit as possible.
The best trophy animal one of my clients ever took was a 48 inch buffalo, though my favorite animal to hunt is the Vaal rhebok, as they are such beautiful, rare animals that always produce a challenging hunt in the mountains.
In my role as an editor and a writer, I get to read many interesting things, and some of them are so good that they need to be shared with others. Such is the case with a wonderful essay called ‘This Land of the Ligers’. Kartik Shanker is an evolutionary ecologist and professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is also the co-founder of Dakshin Foundation, a coastal and marine focused NGO, and founding editor of Current Conservation, a magazine bridging conservation and art.
This Land of the Ligers was published in the ACU Review, the initials standing for The Association of Commonwealth Universities, based in London. You can read the whole essay here: https://www.acu.ac.uk/the-acu-review/this-land-of-ligers/. Professor Shanker examines how romanticised ideals of the natural world overlook and undermine deep historical relationships with nature based on various forms of use. He touches on the issue of hunting, which will interest our readers. Dealing with ‘The Myth of Virgin Nature’, he writes:
“In north America, Henry David Thoreau’s portrayal of nature in Walden and his writings on ecology and environment led to the development of an idea of pristine wilderness. John Muir, the ‘father of national parks’ took these ideas into the state domain and campaigned for the establishment of national parks that would be free of human presence and influence.
“On a camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt deep in the heart of Yosemite, the latter referred to a sequoia forest as a ‘temple built by no hand of man, a temple grander than any human architect could by any possibility build’. No wonder then that this movement to create pristine natural areas should become nothing short of a religion by the 20th century – one that might be called ‘pristianity’.
“But landscapes such as Yosemite and Yellowstone were not in fact pristine. They were myths created in the 18th and 19th century by adventurers, naturalists and, later, that PR wing of pristianity: nature photographers. These landscapes had been peopled and modified by Native Americans for thousands of years. What the colonisers saw and admired were actually areas that had been used, burned, grazed, and occupied. But they saw them at a time when their own actions had extirpated or displaced those human populations.
“How deeply ironic then that the very idea of a conservation landscape derives from this false notion of virginity, created by the descendants of those responsible for the illusion. And how strange that a century later, we would continue to define conservation in this way across the world, as outsiders.”
Professor Shanker ponders about the currently strong belief in the ‘sanctity of species’, and shares his childhood memories of many visits to the zoo in Kolkata (then Calcutta), where hybrids born of lions and tigers were called ‘ligers’ and ‘tigons’ respectively. In his own field of expertise, the sea turtles, many species hybridise and produce fertile offspring in the wild. He says that the fundamentalist approach of some conservationists is perhaps best reflected in our confused ideas about our utilitarian relationship with nature.
“I have also often used the phrase ‘I love turtles’. Almost never is this interpreted to mean anything other than that I love watching them or that I conduct research on them or that I want to protect them for their own sake. Never would it be interpreted in ‘civilised’ society as meaning that I love turtle meat.”
We hear a lot about ‘animal rights’, and indeed this is one of the issues that is often used to demonise hunters. Professor Shanker observes that:
“But these rights often only extend to certain animals – typically birds and mammals, and sometimes extending to all vertebrates – depending on whom you are talking to. Among conservationists, it is not unusual to find rights conferred upon the animal that one ‘loves’, such as dogs, dolphins or elephants. The inherent irrationality is not dissimilar to the simultaneous existence of many monotheistic religions.”
“In Africa, western conservationists have driven the narrative of conservation for nearly a century. Kenya’s national parks were established by a British conservationist, and similar stories abound across the continent. What is galling is that, in addition to past atrocities, animal rights activists, compassionate conservationists, and others of their ilk continue to try and control conservation in distant and often low-income nations.
“Recently, the controversy surrounding trophy hunting has attracted much media attention. While there can be valid critiques with regard to which animals are hunted and whether revenues reach the people who need it, anti-hunting campaigns are often misinformed or intentionally misleading. Moreover, most of the opposition is actually about the killing itself. This is odd for many reasons. Hunting has been closely linked to human evolution, with animal protein regarded as an important driver of the increase in brain size. But the sports hunt may have had a role as well; in fact the hunting of large dangerous animals is believed to have been used to signal dominance of both individuals and societies.
“But evolutionary history apart, the right to use nature – through hunting or other means – is both philosophically justifiable as well as practically necessary. After all, biocentrism is itself a construct of human thought, and while those who subscribe to it are entitled to do so, foisting it upon a large diverse world is as colonial as any other form of oppression. And like other hierarchies, this cultural oppression disproportionately affects the vulnerable and marginalised.
“At a practical level, practices like trophy hunting can bring significant income to poorer communities across the global south. Traditional fishing and hunting offer sources of nutrition otherwise not accessible to those communities. Most importantly, what version of equity allows those in the west (or in cities) who have already destroyed their environments, and whose lives have enormous ecological footprints, to dictate that others cannot benefit from their resources in a manner that is ecologically sustainable?
“These deep, historical relationships with the natural world based on use – where nature can be simultaneously revered and eaten – form the most fundamental basis of sustainability and conservation. And yet, across the globe, these rich cultural practices are being eroded by the misadventure of modern conservation. In addition to the imposition on culture and economic growth, movements that create exclusionary spaces for nature seek to sever connections with nature for the wider world while preserving these privileges for an already dystopian urban elite. This constitutes an egregious failure of the ethics of equity and human rights, as well as a fatal error in the path to a more universal acceptance of environmental conservation.”
As 2021 draws to a close, and as the world continues to be constrained and complicated by the Covid-19 virus, we should be grateful to people like Professor Shanker for providing such valuable thinking to the relationship between humans and the other species with which we share this planet. Hopefully 2022 will see Africa opening up to international travellers once again, and hunters returning to conduct their ‘rich cultural practices.’
Dr John Ledger is a past Director of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, now a consultant, writer and teacher on the environment, energy and wildlife; he is a columnist for the African Hunting Gazette. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.John.Ledger@wol.co.za
