The values behind calculating the value of trophy hunting.

Naidoo et al. (2016) assessed benefits from hunting and tourism in Namibia from 1998 to 2013 at 77 communal conservancies, which provide community-based wildlife conservation. They found that hunting and tourism each generates roughly the same economic value and that if trophy hunting were banned, some conservancies would be unable to cover their operating costs. As a result, the authors concluded that trophy hunting provides a benefit to conservation. We find problems with both their methods, which rely on opaque assumptions about the value of trophy-hunted meat and their conclusions about trophy hunting’s relationship to conservation in Namibia. Both their methods and conclusions rest on narrow (and in some aspects unclear) assumptions about values. Furthermore, conservation decisions are not and should not be driven by economic benefits alone. According to Naidoo et al.’s results, hunting and tourism produce almost equal total benefits in 2013— around US$3 million. Their finding that “direct benefits from hunting are of roughly similar magnitude to those from tourism for communal conservancies in Namibia” rests on assumptions about the indirect value of the meat provided “to the community at large.” Total value was calculated by aggregating 3 data sets: fees paid to conservancy management committees; salaries of community members employed in the tourism or hunting industry; and nonfinancial benefits. This last category was their means of adding the assumed valued of meat from hunting. The authors state that the value of meat represents 32% of the US$5.41 million total value of hunting from 2011 to 2013 (i.e., US$1.73 million). This value assigned to the meat seems to account for the large discrepancy between the nonfinancial benefits of tourism versus hunting (around US$0.75 million) shown in their figure 1(d). The value of trophy hunting, particularly that it is more economically valuable than tourism, relies en-