“Non-ethical arguments against trophy hunting can mostly be remedied through scientific adaptive management.”

Management and conservation decisions are always made under uncertainty, and advances in conservation decision making are hampered by not fully including uncertainty in modeling studies (Langford et al. 2011). … The MSE framework has the potential to incorporate the decision making processes of multiple stakeholders into modeling of terrestrial wildlife management and explicitly to include uncertainty in both monitoring and implementation of conservation interventions (Bunnefeld et al. 2011).

Finally, errors in aging of hunted lions by professional trophy hunters may undermine the sustainability of the age-based quota setting strategies that are now widely used to manage lion trophy hunting. … The effect of aging errors was most detrimental to population persistence in the ≥ 6 and ≥ 7 year-old age thresholds that are frequently used to define suitably aged lions for hunting.

Around the world, many conservation and natural resource agencies advocate using adaptive management when deciding how to conserve wildlife and ecosystems in the face of uncertainty. … Any sustainable harvesting strategy must consist of conservative quotas, age-based harvesting, and systematic monitoring to address the inherent uncertainty that accompanies our understanding of demography in naturally sparse large carnivores [15].

Reforms are arguably preferable to trade bans because they would provide scope for the retention of financial and economic incentives for the retention of land for wildlife and for tolerance of lions, while reducing the negative impacts on lion populations.

I do believe, however, that a rule utilitarian approach could endorse the practice if various specific rules were effectively enforced: (a) trophy hunting must not jeopardize wildlife populations, alter natural selection and ecosystem functioning, or diminish native biodiversity; (b) trophy hunting must create equitable net conservation benefits to the local community that are not available through alternative ethical practices; (c) trophy hunting must not contribute to social inequality and injustice; (d) trophy hunting must consider animal welfare and minimize sentient animals' suffering and (e) trophy hunting must not cause public outrage and undermine public trust in conservation. … However, complying with all these rules seems formidable and makes the morality of trophy hunting questionable as a general practice.

I do believe, however, that a rule utilitarian approach could endorse the practice if various specific rules were effectively enforced: (a) trophy hunting must not jeopardize wildlife populations, alter natural selection and ecosystem functioning, or diminish native biodiversity; (b) trophy hunting must create equitable net conservation benefits to the local community that are not available through alternative ethical practices; (c) trophy hunting must not contribute to social inequality and injustice; (d) trophy hunting must consider animal welfare and minimize sentient animals' suffering and (e) trophy hunting must not cause public outrage and undermine public trust in conservation. … However, complying with all these rules seems formidable and makes the morality of trophy hunting questionable as a general practice.

Alternative options include replacing fixed quotas with adaptive quotas directly linked to monitoring of species populations like South Africa’s recent shift from fixed trophy quotas to 0.5% of the population for black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis) exports 31, maintaining socioeconomic benefits and population integrity 32.

Potential for over-exploitation juxtaposed with the benefits of sustainable use in conserving ecosystems underlines the need for clear, science-based evidence to demonstrate the sustainability of trophy hunting and mitigate against adverse effects on the conservation status of hunted populations.

Trophy hunting is a useful source of income for conservation. However, it remains contentious, not least because quotas for charismatic species in less-developed countries are often too high, contributing to population decline. … However, there is still no reliable method for setting quotas at a sustainable level. In this paper, we present such a method, which makes use of readily available data on the time needed to find and kill a lion, and demonstrate its efficacy through simulation.

Adaptive management should be practiced, based on: … Science and traditional and local knowledge; … Iterative, timely and transparent feedback derived from monitoring the use, environmen tal, socio-economic impacts, and the status of the resource being used; and

Most of the research related to trophy hunting in mammals and its associated trade-offs is conducted in isolation hence making it difficult to promote effective adaptive management.

The aim of current research was to provide a simple, robust and repeatable method of determining acceptable or unacceptable ages of trophy hunted lion, which would allow trends to be monitored and help to justify adaptive management of annual quotas.

Opponents of trophy hunting tend to argue from a moral and ethical perspective.11 Typically, they refer to social ethics (i.e. rich-poor disparities, trickle-down ideology, intra-generational justice, equality) and environmental ethics (inter-generational justice, inter-species justice, ecological sustainability).

These results suggest that sport hunting is linked with more favourable conservation status of mammal species and can be a component of sustainable wildlife management.

Enhancing the sustainability of uses of wild living resources involves an ongoing process of improved management of those resources; and d) Such management should be adaptive, incorporating monitoring and the ability to modify management to take account of risk and uncertainty.

This paper furthermore finds that there is evidence for the so called “trading on extinction” outcome in the trophy hunting scenario, with high trophy hunting prices resulting in profitability, but driving white rhino ultimately to extinction.

Trophy hunting is a popular wildlife management tool that has potential to contribute to species’ conservation [1, 2]. … However, when poorly managed (e.g. when young animals are targeted or quotas are too high), trophy hunting can cause social disruption [6], the inheritance of undesirable traits [7] and localized population declines [8,2].

The frequency at which these factors are monitored and analysed to inform the quota setting process as part of the adaptive management process is often low and not consistent [41, 46].

Trophy hunting critics counter that conservation and economic claims of benefit are overstated or poorly evidenced, and that moral and ethical concerns, corruption, and perverse incentives undermine any purported benefits (e.g., Ghasemi 2021). It is often the case that those opposed to hunting do so from a personal ethical or moral position, founded on animals’ rights (Bichel and Hart 2023).

Adaptive management should be practiced, based on: o Science and traditional and local knowledge; o Iterative, timely and transparent feedback derived from monitoring the use, environmental and socio-economic impacts, and the status of the resource being used; and o Adjusting management based on timely feedback from the monitoring procedures (Principle 4)

Currently, the trophy hunting industry is in a difficult position globally, receiving criticism concerning its ethical practicality and efficacy in wildlife conservation and community development [6].

Contrastingly, valid criticism of the trophy hunting industry centres on issues around animal welfare, disruption to age-sex structures of targeted populations, localised extinction events, and the failure of income to reach local communities 1,2. … We propose a trophy hunting certification scheme that leverages existing institutional frameworks and international networks for an enabling environment, and which builds on strong market demand for sustainable hunting practices. It also explicitly integrates monitoring of compliance and conservation outcomes and uses these monitoring outcomes to inform adaptation of the certification criteria over time (Fig. 1).

We considered 3 types of trophy harvesting: constant, proportional, and adaptive. … The comparison of harvesting strategies showed that the adaptive approach outperformed proportional harvesting by reducing variation in the quota when poaching occurred at an unknown level. … However, if the CV of monitoring >15%, this leads to potentially unacceptable interannual variation in quotas.

Rather than bans on trophy hunting, poor practices could be improved by sustained engagement with and support for responsible national agencies to improve governance frameworks and on-theground management.

There is a serious collective action problem here that suggests that governance reforms are incentive-incompatible with the very nature of trophy hunting.

Most of the research related to trophy hunting in mammals and its associated trade-offs is conducted in isolation hence making it difficult to promote effective adaptive management. … Although these issues are being researched nowadays, we argue that they are being done in isolation without integrating and synthesizing them for the purposes of adaptive management.

By contrast, clear evidence, transparently conveyed and clearly demarcated from the ingrained values of those involved (whether they support or reject trophy hunting), could help elucidate environmental, ethical, social, and economic dimensions of this controversial activity whose ultimate conservation effects remain poorly understood.

But more importantly, the consequen tialist argument misses the core concern we seek to raise, namely, that collecting bodies or body parts as “trophies” is an ethically inappropriate way to interact with individual ani mals, regardless of the beneficial outcomes that do or do not follow.

Recreational hunting is often regulated, with the intention of meeting certain ecological, social, ethical, and sustainability standards (at least in theory). … Sustainability can be promoted by establishing a fixed hunting quota, by regulating hunting effort temporally and/or spatially, or by limiting the proportion of the population that can be hunted.