This blog accompanies Raf De Bont’s BJHS article Eating game: proteins, international conservation and the rebranding of African wildlife, 1955–1965

The best way to save African wildlife is conceive of it as a source of food. This statement might seem counter-intuitive. Yet, rather suddenly, it became a mainstream idea in international conservation circles in the period around 1960. My article discusses how this approach of ‘conservation by slaughter’ – as one high-profile ecologist called it – managed to gain traction. Through the study of archival material, the article moves behind the scenes to explore what motivated conservationists to start endorsing the eating of animals such antelopes and elephants.

One explanation for the rise of ‘conservation by slaughter’ is of an institutional kind. The leading organization for global conservation in the mid-twentieth century was the International Union for the Protection of Nature, which, significantly, changed its name into International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) in 1956. This name-change was the result of a wider exercise in image building. Turning away from ‘old-fashioned’, ‘prohibitive’ and ‘sentimental’ preservation, a group rallying around the term conservation stylized itself as ‘modern’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘scientific’. The same group – including prominent members such as Julian Huxley, Frank Fraser Darling and Edgar Barton Worthington – stressed that their strand of modern conservation allowed for rational human interventions in nature. The sustainable ‘cropping’ of wildlife was one of the interventions that came to epitomize such a rational approach.

Alongside institutional changes, also scientific developments played a role. Men such as Huxley, Fraser Darling and Worthington embraced the then fashionable language of ecosystems ecology. As such, they reconceptualized animals as ‘convertors of energy’. In line with this thinking, they framed African wildlife as more ‘efficient’ producers of protein than imported cattle, claiming that the first were evolutionarily better adapted to local conditions than the latter. Cropping wildlife, thus, made sense in the light of the new scientific insights of the time.

Finally, the IUCN leadership assumed the economic rationale of ‘conservation by slaughter’ would benefit the protection of nature on a strategic level. A focus on feeding human populations carried the promise of fostering contacts with special agencies of the United Nations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization – in this way potentially strengthening IUCN’s shaky financial foundations. Most importantly, however, leading voices within IUCN believed the language of proteins would also appeal to the new leaders of soon-to-be-independent African countries. Fearful that decolonization might put an end to the colonial-era national park system as well as to the access of western ecologists to African nature, they thought it necessary to reframe their activities. Unlike earlier representations, they now sold wildlife conservation as ‘helping Africans to improve their living conditions at the nutritional level’.

Around 1960, the rhetoric of wildlife cropping could gain popularity because it served multiple purposes. These included the reorganization of the transnational network of conservation, the boosting of its scientific reputation, the restructuring of its institutional ties, and the continuation of the authoritative position of western ecologists in post-colonial Africa. In such a context, ‘conservation by slaughter’ suddenly seemed to make sense.

Read the full, open access, British Journal for the History of Science (BJHS) article

Main image: Shows the cover of ‘Africa’s Wildlife in Peril’, UNESCO Courier, Sept. 1961, issue 14. In the Courier Julian Huxley referred to African wildlife as a ‘World Asset’.  Image provided by the author.