Hunters’ money brings the kob home: how Karamoja got its antelope back after 60 years

In August 2026 the doors of a Uganda Wildlife Authority truck opened on the red earth of Pian Upe Wildlife Reserve, in the far north-east of Uganda, and the first Uganda kob to set foot in Karamoja in some 60 years came out at a run. They had been captured on the grasslands of Murchison Falls National Park and driven across the country to ground their kind had not grazed since the 1960s. Ade Langley, the outfitter who has run the hunting at Pian Upe since 2013, had spent seven years getting them there.

Nobody who manages land for game in Britain will need the moral of this story explained to them, because it is the one they live by: the people who shoot are the people who pay. John Rigby & Co, the London gunmaker whose ledgers still carry W.D.M. ‘Karamojo’ Bell’s name, gave a rifle. Dallas Safari Club (DSC) and its foundation built the auction lot and made up the shortfall. Karimojong Overland Safaris (KOS) gave a hunt. Gordy & Sons, Rigby’s Houston dealer, helped assemble the lot. And a woman from Indiana raised her paddle in Atlanta because her son liked the rifle.

Pian Upe is the wild country that made Bell’s name. He hunted here between about 1902 and 1907 with his .275 Rigby, feeding a safari of more than 100 men on the game of these plains. Beneath Mount Kadam, the plains are kob country once more.

The antelope on the coat of arms

The Uganda kob (Kobus kob thomasi) is the antelope on Uganda’s coat of arms, a reddish-brown animal of which a good male weighs around 90kg and carries lyre-shaped, heavily ridged horns. The subspecies is famous for its leks, traditional mating grounds on which territorial males hold small patches of ground while the females choose among them.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the subspecies as Least Concern, but the figure that matters to anyone who has managed a wild population is a different one: about 98% of the kob that remain live inside national parks and reserves. The animal has been wiped out of Kenya and Tanzania altogether, and the principal threat is poaching. A docile antelope that holds its ground is easy meat for a snare.

At Murchison Falls they saw the population the Pian Upe animals would be drawn from. “Huge herds,” Mary says. “So many kob.” They also saw what the kob are up against. Their guides found and pulled 10 or 12 wire snares out of the ground in front of them, and one of the animals they looked at carried the marks of one. “They pulled out 10 or 12 of them, right there,” she says. “It made the project feel more urgent.”

The Bell rifle did not come to Uganda. It stays in Indiana, in a cabinet alongside several other Rigbys the family owns. “That one was an unusual one,” Mary says. “We thought it would be a good one for the collection.”

Why Rigby

Rigby is 250 years old, and Marc Newton is clear about the responsibilities that come with the age and the name. “Many of Rigby’s patrons over the years were the founding fathers of conservation as we know it,” he says. “When Simon told me about an area in Karamoja linked to Bell, one of Rigby’s most famous customers, I said this sounds amazing. This is the kind of project where you get real satisfaction from seeing traction with the money. Whilst Rigby is a commercial enterprise, it is equally a British institution. A great deal of responsibility comes with that.”

“Rigby actually believes in it. We put our money where our mouth is,” he says. “Frankly, how can I look anyone in the face at a convention and sell them a rifle to go and hunt African wildlife if Rigby is not also going to play its part in supporting that wildlife? It all goes hand in glove.”

What comes next

Prince Albrecht zu Oettingen-Spielberg died unexpectedly in November 2025, aged 74. A physicist who led his house for five decades, he was known at home for his devotion to forestry and to the wildlife of his own woods. He hosted the campfire from which all of this grew, and he did not live to see the kob come home. His son Franz-Albrecht, who sat at that fire, has.

The new herd will be left undisturbed for at least five years while it establishes itself beneath Mount Kadam. If it thrives, a strictly limited, sustainably managed quota may one day follow, and the circle that every keeper and shoot owner understands will close: hunters’ money bringing back a huntable population that pays for its own protection.

Langley is already talking about buffalo.

“The biggest thing about it, for me, is that it is hunters’ money doing this,” he says. “That fact needs to get out there.”

Somewhere on the plains of Pian Upe, around 200 kob are learning the lie of new ground. A little over a century ago, a Scot with a rifle on his shoulder would have known exactly what he was looking at.