Photography exhibition shows brutality of trophy hunting industry

This year Jaschinski’s photos from the Colorado warehouse—as well as pictures she captured in the “dead shed” at London’s Heathrow Airport—are on display in Europe to help Humane Society International and the Humane Society of the United States end trophy hunting of threatened species.

With threatened and endangered wildlife populations rapidly declining due to habitat loss, poaching and climate change, species can’t afford the additional harm trophy hunting does to the animal shot, the animal’s family group and the ecosystem, says Sarah Veatch, HSI director of wildlife policy.

Beyond that, Veatch says, trophy hunting is cruel, with animals chased by dogs, lured with bait, shot from vehicles and targeted with bows or handguns that wound rather than kill. Many experience prolonged suffering. Shot five times by trophy hunters, an elephant in South Africa in September 2023 wandered wounded into a non-hunting zone before being chased by a helicopter back into the hunting area where he was shot an additional three times.

“There’s zero concern for the animals’ welfare,” Veatch says. “It’s a commercial industry built on the exploitation of animals.”

Turning the tide on trophy imports

In January, with the crucial support of HSI, Belgium approved a groundbreaking ban on the import of trophies from many endangered and threatened species. In March, HSI exhibited Jaschinski’s pictures at the Italian Parliament, building momentum for two HSI-backed bills to ban trophy imports and exports in that country. A similar exhibition took place in July in Poland, and HSI hopes to show the photos elsewhere in Europe, as trophy ban proposals are considered by the governments of Poland, Germany, France and Spain.

Two HSI-supported bills banning imports of hunting trophies to the U.K. were introduced in Parliament last year, with government backing, and there are plans to introduce a third bill. In December of 2023, Italy's national airline, ITA Airways, announced it would not transport hunting trophies, joining more than 20 transport companies in Europe with similar policies.

Only a relatively small number of hunters kill animals for the primary purpose of displaying their body parts. An even smaller number of those travel internationally to kill threatened and endangered species, which costs tens of thousands of dollars per trip.

Globally, between 2015 and 2019, this tiny minority of hunters imported trophies representing almost 94,000 mammals listed under the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) treaty. Around 15,000 of the trophies went to the EU. Three quarters—or around 71,000—went to the U.S., where the Endangered Species Act requires the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to deny the import of trophies from certain vulnerable wildlife listed as threatened or endangered unless it can be shown that hunting these animals benefits the species in the wild (by providing money for anti-poaching patrols, for example).

HSI and the HSUS have petitioned and sued the USFWS to list leopards as endangered and giraffes as threatened or endangered to restrict trophy imports of these animals under the ESA. The HSUS is also preparing to counter a Safari Club International lawsuit against a new ESA rule that requires trophy importers and countries where hunting is permitted to provide stronger evidence that trophy hunting benefits elephants in the wild.

It doesn’t, says Audrey Delsink, wildlife director of HSI/Africa. Instead, she says, trophy hunting harms the gene pool, disrupts social groups and increases human-elephant conflict by targeting the small number of mature, dominant bulls key to maintaining social order and ensuring group survival.

One particularly cruel form of trophy hunting—captive or “canned” hunting, popular in South Africa for lions and in parts of the U.S. for a number of exotic species—clearly doesn’t help animals in the wild. In South Africa, lions are bred on farms and grow up around humans, with visitors paying to pet them as cubs and walk with them after they get older. Then, they’re released into enclosures to be “hunted” as trophies or for a lion bone market for traditional use. HSI/Africa has been working since 2016 to shut down these operations, which now number about 350, with more than 7,800 lions. In what Delsink calls a “turning point,” the South African government recently declared that this practice has no conservation benefit and hurts the country’s tourism reputation, promising to phase out and eventually end the industry.

Ending an era of cruelty

More than a century ago, when colonial powers ruled Africa and sanctioned the killing of its wildlife by wealthy white men, Owen Letcher wrote a celebration of trophy hunting titled The Bonds of Africa.

Letcher killed many buffalo, rhinoceroses and antelope, two elephants, a leopard, a giraffe, a juvenile female lion (by accident) and, likely, a full-grown lioness who ran off wounded into the bush. Letcher lamented the destruction of the wild but was resigned to its extinction. “The day will come,” he wrote, “when [the rhinoceroses], like all the members of the primeval world, will disappear before the mad, onward rush of civilization.”

The era Letcher inhabited is over. These days, when people are struggling to save species, there is no justification for a colonial relic like trophy hunting. No one should be able to buy the right to kill threatened and endangered animals.

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