“In my opinion, trade within the US [in hippo parts] it is basically a by-product of other reasons for killing,” says Crawford Allan, wildlife trade expert on the World Wildlife Fund. He says that in Africa “nobody wastes anything. So in case you kill an animal since it’s a threat to your community, you eat the meat, you sell the skin, you sell the teeth, you sell the skull to taxidermy collectors.” He says hippopotamus parts similar to teeth and skin usually are not price enough to local hunters to be a legitimate reason to kill them.
This opinion is confirmed by other experts. Lewison cites the instance of Virunga National Park within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the hippopotamus population declined from nearly 30,000 within the mid-Seventies. And they ate them.”
Lewison acknowledges that parts of hippos are sometimes present in confiscations of smuggled wildlife products, but says they’re a small a part of the illegal wildlife trade that’s sustained by rather more worthwhile products similar to ivory and rhino horn.
Some evaluation official trade data from HSI and its associates showed that of the hippo products imported into the US between 2008 and 2019, 2,074 were hunting trophies. (Other nations legally imported about 2,000 more hippo trophies throughout the same period.) However, trade Database compiled by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora reveals that virtually all the trophies and other hippo parts tabulated by the HSI got here from countries with large, apparently well-managed hippo populations. Neither the HSI nor the Center for Biodiversity provided any data linking hunting trophies or other legally traded parts to the decline in hippo numbers.
Paul Scholte, a member of the Ethiopian Hippo Specialist Group, says regulated trophy hunting may gain advantage conservation. Together with local colleagues, he has conducted and published studies of hippo populations in northern Cameroon that show declines in government-managed protected areas and stable or increasing populations in areas leased by private suppliers of trophy hunting equipment.
“The factor that explains whether the hippopotamus population is stable or not is the year-round presence of security – rangers or scouts,” says Scholte, explaining that government rangers usually are not on patrol for much of the rainy season, when movement is difficult. Trophy hunting corporations, nonetheless, have the funds and incentive to repeatedly protect their concession areas from poachers and illegal gold miners who’re killing hippos in the world.
Hippo experts say the deal with the parts trade diverts attention from more vital issues and escalates friction between African countries. They indicate that South and East African countries which have larger and higher managed conservation areas generally have safer hippo populations than Central and West African countries, where many populations are on the point of extinction.
These different circumstances result in different views on conservation policy: West and Central African authorities generally favor a wildlife trade ban, which they imagine would discourage poaching of their highly vulnerable populations, while most countries in South Africa and a few in East Africa claims their populations are large enough to support the hunting and industrial trade that fund wildlife conservation.
