Stan · Hunting Journals

Context · Honestly set down

The framework behind these journals.

This site documents regulated, legal conservation hunting in Namibia and Zimbabwe between 2012 and 2015. Before reading the journals themselves, the context below sets out who owns the land, what the quotas are, where the money goes — and the disagreements that remain about all three.

Nyae Nyae Conservancy

Nyae Nyae — formerly "Bushmanland" — covers roughly 900,000 hectares in north-east Namibia, on the Botswana border. In 1998 it was the first communal conservancy formally gazetted in Namibia, built on the n!ore (clan-territory) system of the Ju/'hoansi San community. That gazetting put ownership of the wildlife — and the right to set how it is used — with the community itself, not with national government or private operators.

The conservancy sits in a near-continuous block of managed wildlife land: Khaudum National Park to the north, Na-Jaqna and Ondjou conservancies further out, and across the fence, Botswana's enormous Kavango–Zambezi transfrontier conservation area. Elephants move through the whole system; the concession counts roughly 2,500–3,000 resident elephants in any given season.

Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM)

Namibia's CBNRM programme is the mechanism by which communal conservancies like Nyae Nyae earn from wildlife. Revenue is generated through two principal channels: joint-venture photographic tourism, and regulated trophy hunting concessions. Between 2013 and 2024 Namibian communal conservancies earned N$292 million from hunting alone — more than they earned from photographic tourism over the same period, according to NACSO and Namibian government figures.

That revenue funds community game guards, fire management, annual game counts, anti-poaching patrols, and — through dividend payments and in-kind meat distribution — the Ju/'hoansi households themselves. During the safaris documented on this site, meat from every bull and every plains-game animal was distributed to the local villages. On one occasion our driver noted that some villages had not received meat in almost a year.

CITES and the national quota

The African elephant populations of Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa were transferred to CITES Appendix II in 1997, recognising that those populations are not under the extinction pressure that affects elephants elsewhere on the continent. International trade — including export of hunting trophies — is permitted under permit, with strict documentation.

Since 2012, Namibia has set a national trophy elephant quota of 90 animals per year. The country's government estimates this as roughly 0.5% of Namibia's total elephant population, and concessions are instructed to take old bulls — typically thirty years or more, past breeding prime. Concessions that exceed their quota lose it the following season.

For the concession documented here, the Nyae Nyae allocation was six trophy elephant permits per year.

The legal framework

Hunting in Namibia is governed primarily by the Nature Conservation Ordinance (4 of 1974), amended several times since independence in 1990. Elephants are designated "specially protected game", meaning every hunt requires a specific permit, every kill is recorded on that permit, and every trophy is accompanied by a CITES export certificate naming the individual animal. A professional hunter (PH) licensed by the Namibian Ministry of Environment is required in the field for all dangerous-game hunts. None of the journals on this site describe a hunt conducted outside this framework.

What this is not

It is worth saying, plainly, what regulated conservation hunting is not:

  • It is not poaching: poaching is illegal taking, outside any quota, without permit, typically of any elephant regardless of age or sex, usually for illicit ivory trade.
  • It is not a "park": Nyae Nyae is not a national park. Under national-park rules, no hunting is permitted.
  • It is not a canned hunt: these were free-roaming bulls in a 900,000-hectare concession, pursued on foot, with days and sometimes weeks between sightings of a mature target animal.

The tensions that remain

A site like this would be dishonest if it presented CBNRM as a simple success. It is not. Peer-reviewed research — in particular Welch (2017) in Conservation and Society, and the 2019 Mongabay investigation — has documented real stresses on the Ju/'hoansi of Nyae Nyae: unequal bargaining power with outfitters, low wages for community staff, meat distribution problems caused by the wide dispersal of San settlements, and a general lack of alternative livelihood options. A 2024 parliamentary report warned that Namibian conservancies over-rely on trophy hunting revenue and remain vulnerable to external bans and shifting international policy.

Those problems are not solved by the journals on this site. They are noted here because any honest record of a CBNRM hunt should note them.

Sources and further reading