Craggy men in khaki vests prowled the carpeted convention hall, escorted by women in leopard print blouses and snakeskin jackets.
Videotaped rifle shots crackled from the 1,100 exhibit booths where hunt guides played kill films in mesmerizing loops.
For four days last month, the sprawling Reno-Sparks Convention Center became a glittering shrine to the blood sport of the super-rich — big game hunters who crisscross the globe to make trophies out of lions, leopards and other exotic animals.
Visitors to the 33rd annual convention of Safari Club International entertained sales pitches for $25,000 tours of African game preserves and $4,000 weekends at Texas trophy ranches.
They clustered around the booth of hunt guide Mark Sullivan, where three TV monitors played his hot-selling DVDs: “Death by the Ton,” “Death at My Feet” and “Shot to Death.”
A lean, mustachioed 56-year-old with a quiet, intense voice, Sullivan recounted the decisive act of will that transformed him from an office-bound small businessman into a professional huntsman with a film crew pitching Nitro Express Safaris.
“I realized at 41 I had a choice: to follow my childhood dream,” Sullivan said. “I ventured to Tanzania and East Africa, and literally overnight became a professional hunter. I knew not one word of the local dialect. I didn’t hear my wife’s voice for 5 1/2 months.”
Sullivan reflected on the popularity of his blood-on-the-shoes hunting method — and the disdain it earns from some of his fellow exhibitors.
“I am the most hated professional hunter the world over,” Sullivan said. “Professional hunters hate Mark Sullivan because I do what they don’t have the balls to do. I am the only one that willingly walks up to the rogue hippo and great old buffalo and gives them the choice of how they want to die in battle, rather than shooting them to oblivion from safety. I honor these great and noble warriors, offering my life in exchange for what I believe.”
“What I am doing in my manner is elevating the sport of hunting to its highest level. Killing makes me sick, but hunting is the greatest adventure left on earth,” Sullivan said.
And Sullivan in turn heaped scorn on the private Texas and Florida game ranches advertising in the booths around him quick trophy kills.
“These businesses on display here, where you pay $20,000 for a lion hand-raised as a pup — this great and noble creature, raised in pens and fed every day in an artificial environment, then trucked out in a cage and released into an enclosure for the gallant client who will claim him as a trophy and enter him in the record book — I think it’s deplorable,” Sullivan said.
But on display in Reno were a hundred ways to slay your trophy cat.
Gleaming rifles from London’s Holland & Holland gunsmith — carved from precious Turkish walnut and inlaid with intricate chase scenes — fetched up to $200,000.
Arrayed like chess pieces across glass countertops were bullets designed to drop an elephant. Coffee tables perched on tusks were adorned with bronze water hole scenes.
From loudspeakers, public-service announcements alerted Safari Club members to seminars on “Trophy Room Design and Function” and “Protecting Your Hunting Rights in State Legislatures.”
Snow-white polar bears reared on their stuffed hind legs. Mounted deer and moose heads lined the walls, their antlers scrolling toward the bright floodlights, their glass eyes gazing past the teeming selling fields below.
Price lists showed how much a client might pay to bag a lion, ibex or elephant. Some brochures estimated how many points each animal might earn in the Safari Club record book.
“We have a five-star place, excellent lodging, a full-time chef, swimming pool, hot tub, bar,” said exhibitor Dennis Erskine, who manages Clear Springs Ranch, a Bandera, Texas, resort that offers “year-around hunting of trophy exotics.”
At Erskine’s booth, a promotional video showed a black buck grazing in the leafy preserve. With a sudden, tearing sound, the animal was struck by a powerful bullet that flipped it hooves-up in the air. The words “instant replay” flashed on the screen, and the kill was shown again. The “instant replay” sign reappeared and the buck spun for a third time.
Clear Springs promotional materials say the ranch is “well-stocked with top quality animals that will make the [Safari Club] record books.” Clients can select from the elusive Central African bongo antelope (starting price $20,000), the Nubian ibex goat ($8,500), the rare Pere David’s deer ($8,000), shiny-furred sable ($7,500), the kudu antelope with its spiraling horns ($7,500), elk ($6,500), the towering Dama gazelle ($6,500), the muscular gemsbok with its spearlike horns ($6,000), red deer ($6,000), addax desert antelope ($4,500), scimitar-horned oryx ($4,500), tawny Thompson gazelle ($4,500), sandy-colored aoudad sheep ($3,200) and spotted axis deer ($2,200).
`A convenience issue’
“It’s like driving through Africa,” said Erskine, a former rodeo cowboy with decades of experience as a hunter and guide. “A lot of people don’t want to fly 20 hours to Africa to hunt. It’s a convenience issue.”
The 33-year-old Safari Club — which is structured as a network of non-profits, lobbying organizations and tax-exempt charities — finances an influential political operation that works to ease endangered species laws restricting the importing of exotic animals slain overseas.
The Safari Club’s Reno convention celebrated the nobility of the creatures who ended up in the club’s thick record book. Members held morning prayer sessions and lingered before paintings extolling the majesty of nature. A Sportsmen Against Hunger booth urged club members to “share nature’s bounty — give game meat and you could win one of 50 Sako 75 rifles.”
Amid lengthy evening ceremonies at the nearby Reno Hilton, members heard a speech from former Secretary of State James A. Baker III that was closed to the press by club officials. Club chapter leaders accepted trophies for conservation and wildlife management.
But from every corner of the giant hall came reminders of the club’s driving theme: the competition to bag exotic animals and register the photos in the Safari Club record book. At the Saturday night ceremony, the club’s International Hunting Award was presented to an Alaska guide credited with taking animals from 259 species.
Safari Club officials call trophy hunting a valuable conservation tool that provides economic and political support for ecological programs. Big game hunters pay top dollar for tours, creating hundreds of jobs and pumping millions of dollars into U.S. and Third World economies. The taxes and fees hunters pay when they purchase equipment, lodging, transportation and guide services can be used by government agencies to manage and conserve the remaining wildlife, club officials say.
“There are many ways to give value to animals, and hunting is one of those,” said Rick Parsons, a Safari Club director. “To put it simply, if the animal is worth something to people, people will have an incentive to assure its survival.”
Environmental concerns
Among the roughly 46,000 club members and the estimated 15 million other Americans who hunt on a regular basis are many keen environmentalists who fight for clean water, open land and the preservation of threatened species.
But something more complex than the adoration of nature drew the well-heeled conventioneers in Reno. At the booth for Usangu Safaris Ltd./Tawico, which guides hunters through Tanzania, a video played a rapid-fire collage of successful trophy hunts. In one scene, a leopard gnaws a meaty hunk of bait secured to the fork of a tree. The big animal watches the camera furtively, its golden eyes flashing. Then comes the pop of a gun. The creature jolts, splays and tumbles from its last meal.
Usangu’s Tanzanian owners argue that they are restoring the African big cat population by using hunt profits to enhance game preserves.
The lion needs safari hunting if it is going to survive, said 30-year-old Zahir Mulla, marketing director, professional hunter and co-owner of the family-owned firm.
“The villagers see the animals have value, the poachers get jobs as trackers, and so they become their own police,” Mulla said.
The Mulla family — who also run gemstone, mining and tea-farming businesses — successfully bid for concessions from the Tanzanian government that allow them to harvest quotas of big game from government wildlife preserves, Mulla said. In exchange, the firm patrols the preserves to keep poachers out, and the hunters pay trophy fees to the government, which churns the money into game preserves, Mulla said. The Usangu firm also must use some of its hunt revenue for local funding.
The video cuts to a lion kill followed by a familiar tableaux: A smiling hunter leans his rifle on the noble animal’s broad, lifeless ribcage, and crouches for the record book photo. The client’s smile deepens as he strokes the big cat’s furry ears.
– – –
Safari Club has an audience with reluctant hunter Bush
President Bush arrived in a pickup truck, dressed in jeans and boots. For nearly two hours on an April day last year, he hosted officials from Safari Club International and other gun and hunting lobbyists in a private gathering at his Crawford ranch.
From an unpublished White House transcript obtained by the Tribune, a portrait emerges of the president as a leader eager to share the levers of government with the hunting lobbyists — but something of a reluctant hunter himself.
“We’ve got a bunch of turkeys on the ranch,” Bush said. “I’d rather look at them than shoot them, because I want them here. I encourage my neighbors to shoot them so that they feel this is a refuge,” Bush joked to laughter from his guests, according to the transcript.
The president’s guests are not identified by name in the 19-page White House transcript, which is marked “INTERNAL.” On the day of the meeting last year, the White House released a partial list of the groups represented, which the White House called “wildlife conservation organizations.” Besides the Safari Club, the groups included the National Rifle Association and hunting lobbyists Ducks Unlimited, Quail Unlimited and the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, among others.
A few months before the April 20, 2004, Crawford gathering, on New Year’s Day, Bush had gone quail hunting in southern Texas with his father, former President George H.W. Bush — perhaps the Safari Club’s most celebrated member.
The Crawford transcript suggests that the quail-hunting event came in response to an earlier private gathering with the hunt lobbyists in December 2003.
“Mr. President, back at the December meeting, we asked you to make a public statement in support of hunting because of what it means to our collective conservation efforts,” one unnamed guest told Bush.
“Yes, I did, I went out there,” the president responded.
“And we just wanted to say, thank you for going quail hunting with your dad,” the lobbyist said.
Bush didn’t skip a beat.
“I was conserving quail — I didn’t hit very many,” he said to laughter. “I’m not that good a shot, but it was great. Thank you for saying that.”
Advice from the top
Bush told his guests that if they were unsatisfied with federal officials and policies, they should contact his principal environmental adviser, James L. Connaughton, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality and was present at the Crawford gathering. The council coordinates federal environmental efforts.
If government agencies get “stuck,” the president said, “hopefully part of this relationship is to get Connaughton on the phone and tell him it’s stuck and you expect something different to take place.
“I’m telling you, we want there to be joint access. And if you find that the access is not to your liking, we need to know it. Because the truth of the matter is, the president has got a lot on his plate. (Laughter.) Which is good. But that’s the reason I have a staff. And that’s the reason we reach out to people of like philosophy.”
A hunting lobbyist brought up efforts to set aside land for public dove hunting, and indicated that his group had run into resistance from regional officials at the Fish & Wildlife Service. “Where do we go from there?” the lobbyist asked.
“Connaughton,” Bush snapped, to laughter from the group.
“Take it upstairs and let it start coming back down again,” the president advised. “We need to know that, and we need to get the [Cabinet] secretaries on it.”
Bush added: “I know we’ve got problems in Fish and Wildlife. I just want you to know, and I told [Interior Secretary] Gale Norton, I said, `Look, when we pick the Fish & Wildlife people, I want somebody who likes to fish and hunt, somebody who understands the way most Americans feel.”
Financing politics
The wealthy members of Safari Club International, who hunt exotic animals for trophies, protect their controversial hobby by financing an influential political operation. Since the 1998 election cycle, the Safari Club has given some $590,000 to Republican candidates and $92,000 to Democrats, and made its swank Washington office available as a fundraising haven for Republican lawmakers such as Sens. Trent Lott of Mississippi and Richard Shelby of Alabama, according to a club newsletter.
President Bush appointed one of Safari Club’s top lobbyists as deputy director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service — which plays a lead role in enforcing the Endangered Species Act.
During the free-flowing conversation, which touched on wetlands policy, development of gas resources on federal land and conservation easement tax provisions, Bush defended his environmental policies, which have been criticized for favoring industry over public interests.
Bush called his approach “conservationist,” in contrast to a “preservationist” philosophy, which he said allowed the unfettered growth of wildlife.
An example, Bush said, was his so-called “Healthy Forests” initiative, which has been criticized as a giveaway to the timber industry: “Healthy Forests was a strategic decision of my administration to encourage the thinning of as much national forest as possible to prevent catastrophic fire,” the president said.
“Policy that does not thin a sick tree encourages destruction of enormous asset base. And yet, trying to get that [“Healthy Forests” program] through was tough because there’s a lot of people who believe, `Just let it sit there.’ To me, that’s the difference between a preservationist and a conservationist.”
Bush responded to a question suggesting that even more trees could be harvested by saying the implementation of his forestry-management program was “up to Ann and Gale” — then-Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman and Interior Secretary Norton: “And if what you’re telling me is the tactics are aiming too low, I need to know that, because I want as much land as possible done.”
As Bush’s Crawford ranch meeting with the hunt and gun lobbyists came to a close, an unnamed representative from the Safari Club made a comment:
“Mr. President, you mentioned it was an election year. I just want you to know that Safari Club International supports you 110 percent.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that,” Bush said.
The club representative continued: “And I know there’s a lot of preservationist/environmental groups out there posing as conservation groups of late. And I think this group’s challenge, when they see that, to respond to them articles and them editorials to tell the other side.”
Bush said: “I really appreciate that. It’s ugly. I’ve done some good things on the environment, real good.”
“You have,” said a guest, as another chimed in: “You sure have.”
— David Jackson
