To glory in killing a lion or giraffe is disgusting, but it's not clear that a ban would aid conservation | Editorial

To glory in killing a lion or giraffe is disgusting, but it's not clear that a ban would aid conservation"How is that fun?" asked US talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel in a segment about trophy hunting aired after Cecil, a well-known lion tagged by researchers, was killed in Zimbabwe by Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer in 2015. Kimmel choked up as he asked viewers to donate to Oxford University's conservation research programme, and his shame and bafflement are widely shared. Killing large, endangered mammals, posing next to their corpses and removing body parts as trophies all strike many people as disgusting and wrong.This week, photographs of another American, Tess Thompson Talley, and a giraffe she shot last year in South Africa went viral. Like Zimbabwe, South Africa licenses trophy hunting, a business worth around $200m a year, with hunts taking place on private ranches and tourists, most of them American men, paying $10,000-$50,000 for the privilege. Records from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) show around 1.7m trophies legally exported in the decade to 2016, 200,000 of them from endangered species. Continue reading...