African Hunter Published Books Hunter's Guide to Bowhunting the African Way | Page 9

bush in pursuit of their quarry. Extrapolate this kind of equation out
by substituting every sport hunter with seven non-consumptive
tourists, and it is clear that in a very short time, the bush and those
pristine environments visited by hunters would collapse and blow
away in a dust bowl. Look at the pressure inflicted on the Serengeti
in East Africa!
While sport hunting is accepted to be the most cost effective and
the least damaging to the environment, there are many smaller type
ranches who operate non-consumptive safaris, but which do not lend
themselves to the disturbance typically caused by discharging
weapons. These may be 6000 acres or less in extent, or parcels of
“wild” land within, or run in conjunction with traditional farming
practices. In the context of this discussion, I refer to these properties
as “farms”. On such farms, rifle hunting forces animals to become
skittish and (quickly) wary of approaching vehicles and humans,
making photographic safaris almost impossible. They are also
generally unable to sustain the high concentrations of game needed
to support a full-on hunting operation with ever larger trophies
expected by rifle hunters.
Along with this dilemma is the fact that specialised hunting such as
bird shooting and bow hunting are vastly under-utilised, badly
marketed or widely misunderstood on the African continent especially north of the Limpopo. In South Africa, where game is less
prolific at the southern tip of the continent, bird shooting has become
as much a tradition as it is in Europe and South America. They have
evolved to