This article was first published on the Daily Maverick on 2 July 2025
Instead of mourning the animals killed by trophy hunters – which in many ways owe their existence, like it or not, to the hunting industry – we would suggest tears should instead be shed for Josephi, his widow Elphina and their son, Success.
Many people in the West know Cecil the Lion, but who can name an African killed by a lion or another species of dangerous megafauna in the decade since Cecil’s demise?
Our guess is not many, and that speaks volumes to the chasm that divides Africa and the affluent West on polarising wildlife issues such as trophy hunting that were unleashed by the Cecil saga.
In the eyes of many Africans, affluent folk in the North often seem to have more empathy for the continent’s wildlife than they do for its people, especially the rural poor who have to live in the terrifying shadow of large animal attack – a precarious existence that no middle-class resident of London, New York or Toronto would wish on their kith and kin.
These cultural fault lines were brutally exposed when Cecil was felled by an American trophy hunter on 2 July 2015 outside Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park.
Cecil’s biography was well known to a handful of dedicated researchers, as he was the subject of a study by the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). Cecil had a satellite tracking collar that would emit signals every two hours, providing his GPS coordinates.
According to WildCRU, Cecil was one of 65 lions killed by trophy hunters in the area from 1999 to 2015, 45 of which were equipped with radio collars. Two other satellite-collared lions with human nicknames were also killed by hunters in the same area in 2015.
But Cecil was popular with visitors to Hwange and park officials, and Zimbabwe launched a probe into the hunt. This, in turn, launched the affair, aided and abetted by social media, into orbit.
As the uproar in the West spread, US dentist Walter Palmer was eventually named as Cecil’s killer, and that placed him in the crosshairs of public indignation.
Jimmy Kimmel
American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, on 28 July 2015, made an impassioned commentary about the incident, choking back tears as he assured Africans that “not all Americans are like this jack hole” — the jack hole in question being Palmer, whose dental practice was already being besieged by protesters.
But in Africa, the response was pointedly different, and Kimmel’s tears – over a lion – provoked incredulity.
Asked by reporters for comment on the unfolding drama, Zimbabwe’s acting information minister at the time, Prisca Mupfumira, snapped: “What lion?”
A few days after Kimmel’s emotional outburst, Goodwell Nzou, a Zimbabwean doctoral student studying molecular medicine in the United States, had an opinion piece published in The New York Times titled, In Zimbabwe, We Don’t Cry for Lions.
American outrage over the incident, he wrote, had provoked “… the starkest cultural contradiction I’d experienced during my five years’ studying in the United States”.
“Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being ‘beloved’ or a ‘local favourite’ was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from The Lion King?” Nzou asked.
“When I was nine years old, a solitary lion prowled villages near my home. After it killed a few chickens, some goats and finally a cow, we were warned to walk to school in groups and stop playing outside … The lion sucked the life out of the village: No one socialised by fires at night; no one dared stroll over to a neighbour’s homestead.
“We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.”
In response, Nzou received death threats, underscoring his point in a chilling and telling manner.
The floodgates
Jimmy Kimmel’s Cecil outburst opened the floodgates. The global media jumped on the story, pushing trophy hunting to the front page. David Macdonald, then head of WildCRU, said that “in terms of attracting global attention, it [Cecil] was the largest story in the history of wildlife conservation”.
In the UK, pre-Cecil, trophy hunting had barely registered in print media. When it was covered, stories frequently highlighted the complexities of the issue. Discussion of the conservation benefits hunter revenue brought was commonplace, albeit often alongside a general sense of disapproval. After Cecil, the tone moved sharply towards condemnation. This coincided with increasing NGO and campaign-led calls for hunting bans, with Cecil as the inevitable focus.
Calls to ban trophy hunting from nations like the UK ring hollow for many living in countries such as Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The hypocrisy is glaring. The UK has a thriving trophy hunting industry focused on deer, the heads of which adorn many a country pub, hotel and stately home. And these trophies can also be exported.
Meanwhile, the UK is anything but a conservation success story, in stark contrast to the successes of African nations with trophy hunting as part of their conservation strategy.
A 2017 study titled “Relative efforts of countries to conserve world’s megafauna” should be required reading for those calling for bans on trophy hunting. The top five countries were Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania, Bhutan and Zimbabwe. Four of the top five are southern African nations. All four are major trophy hunting destinations. The UK was 123rd.
Such facts are usually ignored by domestic politicians. Or, worse, spun to suggest the UK can manage wildlife responsibility while other nations cannot. Understandably, accusations of neocolonialism have become a fixture of public discourse on trophy hunting.
Nonetheless, there remains considerable political traction to ban the import of hunting trophies from species that are, regardless of their actual status, “close to extinction”. Evil trophy hunter, goes the media-friendly and seemingly intuitive story, are driving elephants, lions and other charismatic species to the brink. Just so they put a head on their wall. Trapped within this narrative, the easiest way to save wildlife seems obvious. Condemn the cruel and senseless practice of trophy hunting to the dustbin of history.
It is precisely this thinking that has led to proposed bans, in various stages of legislative development, in the UK, numerous countries in Europe, Australia and the US. Such global political will is backed by assumptions of popularity.
Misinformation and naivety
But what seems like a quick and easy conservation and political win is shot through with misinformation and naivety. In the Second Reading of a failed UK-based Bill to ban trophy imports at the end of 2022, analysis by a team of scientists led by Oxford University indicated that around three-quarters of verifiable statements made by MPs speaking in support of the Bill were demonstrably false. For more than a third of those MPs, every verifiable statement they made was false.
What is more, the public is far from overwhelmingly supportive, as is usually claimed. One of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s specialist groups, Sustainable Use and Livelihoods commissioned a survey of the UK public on the topic and found that, if a ban were to increase overall threats to wildlife conservation (as is very likely to be the case), only 42% supported them, and only 39% supported bans if they negatively affected marginalised communities (which they would).
The idea that more than 80% of the UK public supports bans is based on a highly leading, flawed survey undertaken by the NGO Ban Trophy Hunting. Politicians would do well to actually read such surveys – they might then realise how they are being played.
Ban Trophy Hunting – and several other NGOs – know that Cecil remains a gold mine. Prominent on its site is a red headline – “REMEMBER CECIL” – clearly displayed as the 10th anniversary of his death looms – and below, there is a tab to donate.
Cecil has been dead for a decade, but the vultures are still circling the memory of his carcass. Revealingly, there is no similar site asking people to remember Africans killed by big animals.
Trophy hunting vs extinction threat
Trophy hunting is a complex aspect of conservation, and nowhere more so than in southern Africa, where much of the northern hemisphere’s disapproval, and in many cases disgust, is directed. While unregulated or poorly managed hunting can lead to local declines, a recent analysis found that there were no species for which trophy hunting was considered a threat.
The same analysis found that for a number of species, including black rhino and lion, regulated hunting provides clear conservation benefits by producing revenue and incentivising communities to live alongside wildlife that may pose a threat to them and their livestock.
If you track the spoor of the scientific literature, there are no objective, peer-reviewed articles in any reputable journal that we are aware of that make a direct link between trophy hunting and the threat of extinction. “Studies” that make this link are usually commissioned by animal rights organisations with a transparent agenda.
When science and facts are not on your side, raw emotion works.
Conservation without money is just conversation. Lions and elephants are irresistible to photo tourists, but a very different prospect to live alongside. Without providing real incentives to communities and respecting their rights to a sustainable livelihood without reliance on the whims of overseas aid, habitat is lost and wildlife suffers.
Safari tourism may be a thriving business post-pandemic, but Africa is vast and the landscape mixed. For every Serengeti migration honeypot, there are thousands of square miles of featureless bush, unsuitable for those on a one-week trip of a lifetime, anxious to tick off the Big Five before sundowners. In many such areas, hunting remains a vital lifeline for people and habitat.
In response to calls for bans, more than 130 scientists and conservationists signed a joint letter to the journal Science, outlining why “trophy hunting bans imperil biodiversity”.
Community leaders from across southern Africa have written open letters to UK politicians calling on them to stop legislation that will harm conservation efforts and community livelihoods. The ghost of Cecil, it seems, roars far louder than the stark reality of real-world conservation challenges.
The human victims
We have been unable to find comprehensive, up-to-date data on the number of humans killed in Africa in attacks by big, dangerous animals in the decade since Cecil died, but it is safe to say that it numbers in the thousands.
In Zimbabwe, the national parks organisation Zimparks recently said that in the first quarter (Q1) of 2025, human fatalities from such attacks rose 20% to 18 compared with the same period in the previous year.
It also said its data showed that over the past five years, 300 people had been killed in wildlife encounters – an average of 60 a year. And that is just a five-year timeframe restricted to Zimbabwe.
These victims are often – unlike Cecil – faceless and nameless outside of their rural communities, where they have friends and family who grieve their loss and live in fear of the next attack. But outside their close circle, it is as if such horrifying incidents are simply the natural order of things in Africa, with Africans themselves simply the extras on the set of some Tarzan movie.
The rural Africans who have to live alongside dangerous megafauna rank among the poorest of the poor, and their poverty is both a cause and effect of this precarious existence – a terrifying socioeconomic realm that can be described as living below the faunal poverty line.
This state of affairs can also be usefully viewed through the prism of inequality. The rural poor in Africa are expected to share space with potentially menacing megafauna, a scenario that no middle-class suburbanite – including those who see red over trophy hunting – would tolerate.
This is one of the many ways in which poverty makes you prey.
Among the thousands of human victims in Africa since Cecil was felled, spare a thought for 27-year-old Josephi Kapalamula of Malawi and his family.
Josephi was among the first of 10 victims to date killed by elephants in the wake of an ill-conceived translocation of 263 of the animals to Kasungu National Park in Malawi from Liwonde National Park in the country’s south in June and July of 2022. This has transformed the landscape around the park in Malawi and neighbouring Zambia into one of fear and loathing for the subsistence farmers who toil there.
Josephi’s wife, Elphina, was pregnant when he was killed by elephants in July 2022. When Ed spoke to her in June 2024, her 17-month-old son, Success, was strapped to her back, a child who will never meet his father.
“My husband heard that there were elephants, so he went to see them. The elephants
Ed Stoddard is a regular Daily Maverick writer. Adam Hart is Professor of Science Communication at the University of Gloucestershire. He works on conservation ecology in southern Africa and is co-author of the award-winning book, Trophy Hunting, and the author of The Deadly Balance, which explores our complex relationships with predators.
