Not surprisingly, many people in the developed world despair at the thought of these intelligent, highly social animals being killed for hunters' trophy rooms even if it's in the cause of feeding Africa's poor. Yet, as Africans themselves point out, they, not North Americans or Europeans, have to live alongside the 10,000-pound animals, and elephants are less endearing when they're eating your crops or stepping on your children. Indeed, countless U.S. suburbanites may be able to sympathize. Studies done by state wildlife agencies show that when deer populations reach about 30 animals per square mile, a majority of homeowners tend to drop their reservations about killing wildlife so as to preserve their gardens, fend off collisions with their automobiles, and reduce the threat of contracting Lyme disease. The difference between Africa and the United States, Thomson reflects, is that the people who live around Africa's national parks are making $300 a year and nothing will bring in cash better than selling wildlife for trophies. A recent Ford Foundation study backed up his contention. It revealed that trophy hunting remains one of the most reliable income generators for local communities -- one that often exceeds the revenues provided by photo tourism. In Zimbabwe, for instance, the CAMPFIRE program (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) returned $15.9 million to local communities between 1989 and 1999 by allowing them to manage their own wildlife for trophy hunting. A similar program in Namibia's Kalahari Desert, named LIFE (Living in a Finite Environment), has been funded by USAID and the World Wildlife Fund. LIFE is presently enabling the Ju/'hoansi San (formerly called Bushmen) to manage wildlife in their own homeland.

Such rural empowerment programs that include hunting -- at least in tribal lands bordering national park wildlife reserves -- raise few eyebrows among hands-on African conservationists who believe they must balance the needs of wildlife against those of impoverished people. They are also widely supported by the beneficiaries themselves. One fisherman, Mutembo Nyathi, expressed the views of several other Zimbabweans with whom I spoke when he told me that because elephants seasonally raid his village, he had never "attached much value to wildlife." The CAMPFIRE program took out the troublesome animals but, unlike the days when park rangers did the shooting, the money generated by the local safari concessionaire had built a school closer to his village, so his children didn't have to walk so far through countryside occupied by leopards, and had also provided clean drinking water via a well. Before, his family members had gotten water straight from the Zambezi River and, like many other people in his village, suffered a variety of gastrointestinal illnesses.

Yet programs such as CAMPFIRE are opposed by animal rights organizations. One of the most vocal has been the Humane Society of the United States. Its president and CEO, Wayne Pacelle, has said that African nations, as sovereign states, have the right to determine if wildlife will be hunted within their boundaries. Having the United States abet this hunting with financial aid ($6.5 million as of 1999) is another matter. "Our general principle," he told me, "is that we don't support using Americans' hard-earned tax dollars for killing threatened species for trophies."

Ron Thomson retorts that the species frequently hunted -- lions, cape buffalo and elephants -- are hardly threatened, their populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands. In the meantime, in a seeming double standard, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has begun to claim victory in the recovery of grizzly bears and is suggesting that they be removed from the endangered species list -- opening them to hunting -- when only about 1,000 of them exist in the northern Rockies.

Why shouldn't Africa do business in a similar way? asks Thomson. By protecting animals in sacrosanct national parks and not allowing rural people to profit from them, the continent is heading toward a wildlife catastrophe. "We need to let wildlife uplift people. Elephants are not sacred. You tell me why we should favor 40-year-old elephants over 5,000-year-old baobab trees. We should be managing biomes -- floral and faunal entities -- not single species."

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