Undercover journalist slams trophy hunting 

A Mirror newspaper journalist has published an attack on companies that provide hunting opportunities in Africa after posing as a potential customer at The Stalking Show.

In an attempt to further the tabloid’s publicly stated anti-trophy hunting campaign, Nada Farhoud, the paper’s environment editor, went undercover at the two day event in Staffordshire which chiefly focuses on deer stalking and management.

In the article Ms Farhoud mentions numerous hunting providers and their employees by name, referring to one company as “notorious” as well as classing hunting trophies as something for: “hunters who crave a gruesome souvenir and bragging rights.”

Attempts to ban so-called trophy hunting have been called neo-colonialist by several southern African nations and last year there were marches in Botswana protesting the ban proposed by the Labour party.

Professor Amy Dickman, director of WildCRU, a top conservation research unit based at the University of Oxford conducted a study last year that found that legal hunting for trophies was not a major threat to any of the 73 species imported to the UK between 2000-2021.

Conversely, the study showed that legal trophy hunting brought numerous benefits including protecting wildlands from conversion to agriculture, providing resources to prevent poaching, income and employment for Indigenous communities, and enhanced population growth for threatened species.

Prof. Dickman said: “Other threats, notably unregulated hunting, poaching, and retaliatory killing, are much greater for most species imported to the UK as hunting trophies.”

Author and firearms expert Diggory Hadoke told ST: “This article is campaigning badly dressed-up as journalism and is the latest in a sustained attack on sport hunting by the Mirror. In classic tabloid style, it misrepresents all the people, businesses and practices mentioned using a lazy heap of pejorative and subjective language to give the false impression to the reader that all hunting is evil and those involved are somehow borderline criminal.

“It isn’t a serious critique of the industry, the sport or the conservation initiatives funded by hunting in a sustainable manner. It is regrettable that such badly written drivel gets so many column inches but all we can do is push back with evidence, facts and logical argument.

“We will never win over the dedicated hunting haters but we are winning the argument with many of the more sober and rational actors and commentators in the academic and broader conservation fields.