“My view is that the US trade [in hippo parts] is largely a byproduct of other reasons for killing,” says Crawford Allan, a wildlife commerce professional with the World Wildlife Fund. In Africa, he says, “nobody wastes anything. So if you kill an animal because it’s a danger to your community, then you eat the meat, you sell the skin, you sell the teeth, you sell the skull to taxidermy collectors.” Hippo components like tooth and pores and skin, he says, aren’t value sufficient to native hunters to offer an essential cause for killing them.
Other specialists echo this opinion. Lewison cites the instance of Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the place the hippo inhabitants declined from virtually 30,000 in the mid-Nineteen Seventies to fewer than 1,000 by 2005. The animals have been killed throughout civil unrest and warfare “when everyone was starving. And they ate them.”
Lewison acknowledges that hippo components are typically discovered in seizures of trafficked wildlife merchandise, however she says that they kind a tiny a part of the unlawful wildlife commerce, which is sustained by way more beneficial merchandise, like elephant ivory and rhino horn.
An evaluation of official commerce numbers by HSI and its collaborators confirmed that, of the hippo merchandise imported to the US between 2008 and 2019, 2,074 have been looking trophies. (Other nations legally imported roughly 2,000 extra hippo trophies throughout the identical interval). However, a commerce database compiled by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora reveals that just about all of the trophies and different hippo components tabulated by the HSI got here from nations with massive, apparently well-managed hippo populations. Neither HSI nor the Center for Biological Diversity supplied any knowledge that linked looking trophies or different legally traded components to hippo declines.
Paul Scholte, an Ethiopia-based member of the Hippo Specialist Group, says that regulated trophy looking can have conservation advantages. With native colleagues, he performed and revealed surveys of hippo populations in northern Cameroon that present declines in government-run conservation areas and both secure or growing populations in areas leased by non-public trophy-hunting outfitters.
“The factor that explains if a population of hippo is stable or not is a year-round presence of protection—of rangers or scouts,” Scholte says, explaining that authorities rangers don’t patrol throughout a lot of the wet season, when shifting round is tough. Trophy-hunting firms, nevertheless, have the funding and motivation to repeatedly defend their concession areas from the poachers and unlawful gold miners who kill hippos in that area.
Hippo specialists say the give attention to the components commerce is a distraction from extra essential points and that it escalates friction between African nations. They level out that southern and jap African nations—which have bigger and better-managed conservation areas—usually host safer hippo populations than do nations in Central and West Africa, the place many populations are getting ready to extirpation.
These various circumstances result in completely different views on conservation coverage: West and Central African authorities usually favor wildlife commerce bans, which they consider would discourage poaching of their extraordinarily susceptible populations, whereas most nations in southern Africa and a few in East Africa argue that their populations are massive sufficient to maintain looking and industrial commerce, which fund wildlife conservation.