Can hunting be conservation? Hunters and Amazon protectors on the same question
October 5, 2026 · 12 min read
Paul Rosolie defends local hunting and diets against what he calls colonialist conservation and also confronts elephant poaching, Luke Bryan explains why hunting matters, and Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride discuss predators, hunting and wildlife management. The comparison shows where hunting protects wildlife and where it destroys it, a distinction that outsiders often miss.
The rules, numbers and steps worth keeping in front of you.
- Three questions for any hunt: what is being hunted, where does the money go, and is the animal wild?
- Hunting can pay for wildlife when the game is abundant, the take is on a quota and the fees fund protection.
- Rosolie's example: a South African reserve funds rhino and elephant protection with buffalo and zebra hunts. Nobody pays $30,000 to photograph a buffalo, but hunters do.
- In the United States the money comes through tags and the Pittman-Robertson Act; biologists set the numbers and every kill is registered against a tag (Rogan).
- Where predators are gone, hunters remove the old and the sick and keep herds from outgrowing their range.
- Poaching for parts is not hunting: Rosolie puts African elephants at about 2 percent of their historical numbers.
- A tame lion released from a pen fails the hunters' own test.
- Subsistence hunting by forest peoples is not what clears the Amazon; beef, crops, logging roads and gold mining are (Rosolie).
- Predators are the open dispute: Rogan and Bryan want grizzlies and wolves managed by hunting; Eric Goode works to bring them back.
- These conversations give mostly the hunters' side of the predator question, and the Wyoming grizzly figures are third-hand.
- Other tools work too: buying land, paying loggers more to be rangers, ecotourism, crocodile farming.
- Bryan's standard: eat what you kill and treat it with respect.
This is the short form. The full insight has every expert's reasoning, their own words and the sources.