Provisional victory against Trump’s elephant killing plans

This video from the USA says about itself:

16 November 2017

Trump is making poachers great again. Ana Kasparian, Michael Shure, and Mark Thompson, hosts of The Young Turks, discuss.

“The Trump administration plans to allow hunters to bring trophies of elephants they killed in Zimbabwe and Zambia back to the United States, reversing a ban put in place by the Obama administration in 2014, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official confirmed for ABC News today.

Even though elephants are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act, a provision in the act allows the government to give permits to import such trophies if there is evidence that the hunting benefits conservation for that species.”*\

Read more here.

That was two days ago. But now …

From the Washington Post in the USA:

Trump puts hold on this week’s decision to again allow trophies from elephant hunts in Zimbabwe

by Juliet Eilperin and Darryl Fears

November 17 at 11:08 PM

President Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Friday night announced that the administration’s reversal of a ban on importation of elephant hunt trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia has been put on hold until further review. The sudden decision follows protests from animal rights groups and even some conservatives after the administration decided to reverse an Obama-era rule barring such imports. …

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had announced the policy shift just two days earlier, with officials signaling in a statement that they would expand efforts to promote trophy hunting as a form of conservation. …

African elephants are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, but the Interior Department agency said it had determined that large sums paid for permits to hunt the animals could actually help them “by putting much-needed revenue back into conservation.”

Under the Obama administration, elephant-hunting trophies were allowed in South Africa and Namibia but not in Zimbabwe because Fish and Wildlife decided in 2015 that the nation had failed to prove that its management of elephants enhanced the population. At the time, Zimbabwe could not confirm its elephant population in a way that was acceptable to U.S. officials and did not demonstrate an ability to implement laws to protect it. …

The change was to apply to elephants shot in Zimbabwe on or after Jan. 21, 2016, and to those legally permitted to be hunted before the end of next year.

The African elephant population in that country has fallen 6 percent in recent years, according to the Great Elephant Census project. It is relatively stable in Zambia, which has decided to renew hunting after having previously banned it because of several decades of sharp decline. …

The Fish and Wildlife Service has also been reviewing whether to allow elephant trophy imports from Tanzania, where poaching is rampant and the species has suffered a sharp decline in recent decades. …

Two of the department’s existing wildlife advisory bodies — the Advisory Council on Wildlife Trafficking and the Wildlife and Hunting Heritage Conservation Council — remain suspended as a result of a temporary freeze Zinke imposed earlier this year on all such panels. And the U.S. Task Force on Wildlife Trafficking, which was codified into law last year and is led by Interior as well as the Justice and State departments, has not been active since Trump took office.

“If you care about wildlife, how can you ignore wildlife trafficking?” said Bob Dreher, vice president for conservation at the Defenders of Wildlife, who served as Fish and Wildlife associate director from 2014 to 2016. …

A representative of the [Safari Club International, a hunting advocacy] group, along with several other hunting activists, joined Zinke in his office on his first day as he signed one secretarial order aimed at expanding hunting and fishing on federal lands and another reversing an Obama-era policy that would have phased out the use of lead ammunition and tackle in national wildlife refuges by 2022. …

While hunting has fostered conservation in the past, allowing it now could undermine efforts to curb the widespread poaching that underpins the global ivory trade, according to Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder and senior scientist at the Nairobi-based Save the Elephants.

Africans, he said in an interview Thursday, are “being told don’t kill elephants, and rich Americans are being allowed to come and do it. When you go back in history, it did do good, but now is absolutely not the time to be opening up hunting.”

In another potential policy reversal, Fish and Wildlife posted an online guide for hunters on how to import lion trophies. In 2016, after listing African lion populations as threatened or endangered depending on their location on the continent, the agency established specific requirements for allowing imports of their trophies. The Service also banned imports of trophies from lion populations kept in fenced enclosures to be hunted.

How to treat animal trophies Americans shoot overseas has been a contentious issue for years. The pelts of nearly four dozen polar bears that U.S. citizens shot in Canada in spring 2008 have remained stuck there after Fish and Wildlife declared the species as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Read more:

Overwhelmed U.S. port inspectors unable to keep up with the illegal wildlife trade

This hunter wanted a rare trophy — a rhino’s head

Zimbabwe was home to famous lion — that was hunted and killed

2013 Video Shows NRA’s Top Gun Botching Elephant Killing. Newly discovered footage shows chief executive Wayne LaPierre firing four shots at the animal before someone else takes over and finishes the kill: here.