U.S. World Wildlife Fund president Kathryn Fuller didn't just rattle the Clinton administration with her May 12 declaration of opposition to any "first step toward the resumption of commercial whaling." More significant was her statement that, "Even if commercial whaling could be sustainable, it cannot be justified," a welcome marked departure from 35 years of WWF policy, which essentially has endorsed any use of wildlife that even promised to be sustainable.
The most influential of all animal and habitat protection groups internationally, WWF has been problematic since 1961, when founder Sir Peter Scott, a trophy hunter, recruited the leadership elite from among fellow hunters who feared that African independence would lead to the rapid loss of target species. The elite included longtime WWF International president Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, who escaped punishment for allegedly overshooting bird quotas in Italy in the early 1970s to resign, finally, in 1987, after being implicated in a Dutch bribery scandal. Bernhard was succeeded by another of the founding elite, Prince Philip, long the honorary head of the British chapter. One of the world's most prolific tiger-killers when tigers were abundant, Philip showed his allegiance to conservation ethics that Christmas by leading his sons Charles, Andrew, and Edward in killing 10,000 pigeons, 7,000 pheasants, 300 partridges, and several hundred ducks, geese, and rabbits all captive-raised in a six-week vacation bloodbath. This slightly exceeded Philip's previous record of 15,500 captive birds killed during a five-week spree.
Early WWF U.S. chapter presidents included C.R. "Pink" Gutermuth, who doubled as president of the National Rifle Association, and Francis L. Kellogg, a notorious trophy hunter. The attitude of WWF in those days was characterized by support for seal-clubbing off the east coast of Canada, benefit fur auctions (only halted in 1988), and Bernhardt's formation of the 1001 Club, a group of billionaire patrons. A 1988 probe of the 1001 Club by the magazine Private Eye found that the members "by and large owe their fortunes to activities completely at odds with preserving wildlife habitat." The most notorious member was Mobuto Sese Soto, who ruled Zaire from 1965 until mid-1993. Under Mobuto, Zaire protected about 84,000 elephants on spacious reserves. Then, as two decades of reckless spending and blatant corruption brought on the national crisis that finally toppled Mobuto, poachers slew about 60% of the elephants in just five years while Mobuto and supporters reputedly stashed the take in Swiss banks.
Despite or perhaps because of such fancy patronage, WWF meanwhile spent so much of its income on direct mail fundraising that in 1990 it failed to meet the National Charities Information Bureau requirement that it spend at least 60% on program service. Simultaneously WWF was severely embarrassed by a leaked internal study that documented 20 years of massive waste. Nearly every major WWF project had failed. Even pandas, the WWF symbol species, were near extinction. WWF had bribed Chinese officials to preserve panda habitat by allowing them to use donated funds for such projects as building a hydroelectric dam which only brought demands for still bigger bribes.
WWF turned down the heat by officially turning from a so-called "preservationist" philosophy, which in WWF practice meant only the privileged were allowed to kill endangered wildlife, to endorsement of "sustainable use" interpreted to mean killing animals for the most profitable use possible at the fastest rate each species can withstand.
The WWF doctrine has huge influence. Just a month ago Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy director Andrew Rowan found a single difference in the responses of zoo and humane representatives to 12 hypothetical ethical problems he posed at the White Oak conference on zoos and animal protection. Most agreed that hunting is both ethically and pragmatically dubious as an alleged tool of wildlife management. Yet, endorsing the WWF view, the zoo people were virtually all willing to tolerate trophy hunting as a way to make wildlife lucrative for poor nations, and presumably therefore worth protecting.
The case for "sustainable use" holds accurately enough that poor nations usually can't or won't protect wildlife without both economic means and an economic incentive; notes that trophy hunters pay much more for a head than tourists do for a snapshot; and asserts that trophy hunters, armed with guns and bribes, will go places and take risks that most tourists won't. One might counter that since potential tourists are much more plentiful than trophy hunters, and since tourism creates more jobs than trophy hunting, even though tourists spend less per capita, a wise conservation strategy would help poor nations to create the political stability and economic infrastructure that would attract more tourists, and would oppose activity, including both poaching and trophy hunting, that contributes to instability by heightening the concentration of wealth and privilege with the well-positioned few instead of the desperately needy many.
Instead, the sustainable use doctrine asserts that since hunting is going on, and will go on anyway, legally or not, better to regulate it and make a buck than to merely spend bucks trying to control poaching, as the wildlife traffickers continually jack up the price for bootlegged animal parts and corrupt officials accept ever larger bribes to ignore poachers who often are better equipped than their national armies or in many cases are themselves renegade army units, with strong clandestine ties to government leaders.
Currently, "sustainable users" point out, hunting is restricted, at least on paper, across much of Africa and Asia. Yet poachers are annihilating elephants, rhinos, and tigers wherever they can, to supply the Asiatic demand for aphrodisiacs and traditional medicines derived from their ivory, horns, bones, and genitals. The demand increases as growth of the leading Asian economies comes faster than the absorption of modern medical knowledge, while ruthless mercantilism shoves aside Buddhist and Hindu teachings which stress human kinship to other species. Because the only current source of the most coveted animal parts is the international black market, and because prices climb as supplies become scarcer, cartels such as the notorious Poon or Pong family of Hong Kong not only promote poaching, but allegedly seek the extinction of the target species, at least in the wild, to guarantee the lasting value of their animal part stockpiles.
Species conservation programs should cash in, the "sustainable users" contend, by helping poor nations to manage wildlife reserves like huge game farms, combining canned hunts for culled animals with the legal sale of their remains. This would supposedly undercut poaching in the marketplace.
"Sustainable use" is attractive to free marketers who don't know their wildlife history but there is no evidence that legal traffic in wildlife parts can preserve species. On the contrary, legal ivory traffic provided the cover that nearly wiped out elephants in much of Africa before 1989, when the ivory trading ban adopted by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species curtailed poaching by giving customs officials worldwide the ability to interdict ivory shipments, regardless of purported origin.
The elephant episode duplicated the disastrous attempted international regulation of commercial whaling, begun with the formation of the International Whaling Commission in 1946: by 1986, when the current whaling moratorium began, every species of whale was severely depleted and some were near extinction because of ruthless poaching that used the legal quotas for cover. Russian whaling authorities disclosed recently that some Soviet vessels killed from 10 to 30 times as many whales as they admitted killing and killed hundreds of some species which were completely off limits.
Even in the closely regulated climate of the U.S. and Canada, the "sustainable use" theory doesn't work, as flagrant poaching continues to masquerade behind legal hunting and game farming. The high rate of poaching in North America also belies the claim, made in support of "sustainable use" in Africa, that the presence of hunters deters poachers. "Sustainable users" contend the mandatory employment of guides will discourage hunters from becoming poachers but that hasn't worked in Maine, Alaska, or Alberta, where veteran guides have lately been caught running poaching rings after many years of simultaneously catering to both wealthy trophy hunters and the Asian wildlife parts market. Hunters and parts traffickers in effect subsidize each other, with corrupt guides as brokers.
Truth is, those who commit crimes against wildlife will exploit any opportunity. "Sustainable use" is a one-way ticket to extinction because bloodlust and greed, once accepted as legitimate conduct, cannot be appeased or restrained by mere regulation.
The political argument against "sustainable use" is equally rooted. "Sustainable users" hope to convince poor Africans and Asians that they should not kill wildlife to collect the equivalent of several years' wages, while rich Europeans and Americans kill the same animals for fun a new and dangerous idea to people whose own killing is mostly from need, especially when coupled with the idea that thrill-killing has a higher rationale.
"Sustainable users" argue that giving poor Africans and Asians a collective economic stock in wildlife will lead to the development of a collective ethic, whereby poachers will become pariahs. This ignores the history of collectivism wherever it has been attempted, from the failed USSR to Africa's own overgrazed grasslands. It also overlooks the poachers' own collective ethic (perhaps a higher ethic in that it excludes mere thrill-killing). They already use the animals they kill for what they perceive as the common good, the good of their families. Having no faith in corrupt governments that purport to protect wildlife, but in fact sell animals to the highest bidder, they see no reason why they should not poach animals now, before others do and take the profits.
Finally, Africa in particular already suffers too much from the idea that whoever has the most money and firepower is above morality. The example of the Great White Hunter who receives special privileges because he has money reinforces the notion of the Big Man who is above the law because he commands a well-armed tribe.
The "sustainable use" doctrine could be applied to other Third World problems. For instance, the same newly rich and ethically alienated Asian men who buy aphrodisiacs made from wildlife parts are also the chief patrons of the increasingly notorious brothels of the poorest regions of Southeast Asia, where up to 400,000 children a year are bought from illiterate parents in remote villages and held for enforced prostitution until, diseased and often cruelly injured, they are cast out and replaced at the advanced age of perhaps 15. One hopes "sustainable users" would not also endorse financing schools and orphanages by letting well-heeled pedophiles rape selected children even though child prostitution is reportedly a $3.77-billion-a-year business in Taiwan alone, twice the size of the U.S. retail fur trade at its peak.
Some may respond that the ethics of human welfare should not be the same as those of species conservation. Yet the leaders of the Rwandan massacres in April and May rationalized their deeds with "sustainable use" rhetoric. Hutus didn't massacre Tutsis, reporters were told; they merely culled them. Then, Juliana Mukankwaya explained to Mark Fritz of the Associated Press, she and other women of their village bludgeoned the orphaned children as a purported act of mercy.
WWF is not responsible for the deaths of half a million civilians in Rwanda, nor for the ongoing tribal strife elsewhere in Africa. Nor is WWF to blame for perversions of conservation rhetoric, any more than humane societies are to blame for Mukankwaya's warped notion of euthanasia.
Yet WWF is culpable for advancing the view that thrill-killing can be excused for a price. We hope Fuller's apparent turn away from "sustainable use" means WWF is ready to take a different direction.