Harare - “Will any American tourist every come here again?” asked a worker in a booking agency in Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, after a second US hunter was named on Sunday by the Parks and Wildlife Management Authority for shooting a lion on a hunt near the Hwange National Park in April this year.
Many in the fragile tourism industry fear bookings will fall, particularly in western Zimbabwe where hunting is a significant local employer, and has been relatively stable, although elephant hunters have largely moved to South Africa since the US banned the import of elephant trophies last year.
New Environment Minister Oppah Muchinguri said she would seek extradition of the American dentist Walter Palmer, who shot the lion Cecil with a bow and arrow on July 1 during a hunt near the park, for which he paid about R700 000.
She also said all bow and arrow hunting was banned, and she suspended hunting of leopard, lion and elephant, except when the parks authority was more closely involved and its staff members were included in each of those hunts.
“We have already had a cancellation from an American client in our hunting operation,” said the hunter/owner of a small hunting company. “More will follow and we are all damn nervous. What is legal now?”
Another hunter, who feared that hunting in Zimbabwe was now on its last legs, said: “Some of us have been through the data in connection with the hunt in which Palmer was involved, and it all looks okay according to the present legislation. Now we will all be too scared to offer lion, and there are plenty of lion in this part of Zimbabwe.”
The Zimbabwe government allows 50 lion to be hunted every year.
There is also confusion within the Parks and Wildlife Management Authority about the charges laid against the two Zimbabweans involved in Palmer’s hunt.
“I don’t understand what is going on here,” said one senior official at head office in Harare, who said he was familiar with the current legislation.
“I don’t know why the two of them have been charged.”
Theo Bronkhorst has been charged with organising Palmer’s “illegal” hunt, and Honest Ndlovu, who occupies land where Cecil was shot, is still to be charged but may turn State witness in a trial due to begin in the Hwange Magistrate’s Court, about 300km north of Bulawayo, on Wednesday
Another hunter, Headman Sibanda, was arrested at the weekend for organising a hunt in which US citizen Jan Casmir Sieski shot a lion.
l Delta Air Lines banned shipments of lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros and buffalo trophies on its aircraft on Monday amid international outrage over Cecil’s death.
The No 2 US passenger carrier is the only American airline to fly directly between the US and Johannesburg.
Delta said the ban was effective immediately.
Mercury Foreign Service