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, directed by Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz

THE hunter crouched over his fallen prey. The lion slowly expired. The hunter held its paw – and blubbed. “It’s absolutely magnificent,” he croaked, wiping away his tears, before assembling a smile and posing for a snap in front of the giant cat.

Strange people, hunters. This one, a rich Texas sheep farmer called Philip Glass, was on the fourth leg of his quest to kill and carry home specimens of each of the African “big five” game species: elephants, lions, leopards, buffaloes and rhinos. He had only a rhino to go.

The scene wrapped up Trophy, a troubling and revealing feature-length documentary about white hunters in Africa – men who are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for their kill. And about white African landowners who prepare and stock the killing fields – in the name of conservation. Men who argue that selling a licence to kill to the highest bidder is the best way to save the continent’s megafauna.

Along with Glass’s safari, the film showcases , the South African owner of the world’s largest rhino ranch. He has invested his real-estate fortune in an operation that owns 4 per cent of surviving rhinos and breeds 200 more each year – all to be de-horned.

You may be horrified at this. Either at the slaughter, or at the monetising of wildlife. Perhaps both. But the trophy-hunting business is booming. According to research by of the University of Zimbabwe’s Tropical Resource Ecology Programme, there is now more land in sub-Saharan Africa set aside for trophy hunting than for national parks. An area as large as France, Germany, Italy and the UK put together – just for killing stuff.

“Landowners argue that licensed hunting is the best way to save the continent’s megafauna”

Put another way, without the hunters and their money, wildlife in Africa would have only half as much space to itself.

South Africa has something like two million animals on 5000 private game ranches. So the film is full of slightly overweight blokes in shorts and big SUVs.

The ranchers are assertive about the virtue of their trade. “No animal has gone extinct while farmers are breeding and making money out of them. Not one,” says Hume. “If it pays, it stays.” The hunters are somewhat sheepish. As well they might be. On the evidence here, their task involves precious little stalking of animals or bushcraft, and next to no risk. Often, they just drive up and shoot. One almost forgot to put his beer down first.

There are some other voices, including from the animal rights group . But there are big gaps in this story.

For one thing, in their desire to counterpoint animal rights people and the trophy-hunting business, the film-makers have sidelined black faces and black voices. A few hunt helpers and local villagers have walk-on parts. But poor black people are mostly shadowy villains, the off-stage “poachers” ready to supply markets for rhino horn and elephant ivory, and with little concern if they shoot the last animals or not.

We see some gruesome examples of their handiwork. And an elephant poacher’s wife in Zimbabwe is held by game wardens in a darkened room, where she is threatened with death if she doesn’t produce her husband’s gun. Her young sons are told that “there is no future in the bush”. Maybe the poachers have a different story to tell.

It is something of a miracle that Africa’s megafauna survive. Other continents lost most of theirs long ago. Only Africans found a way of living with them. And yet Africans are written out of the story of wildlife conservation. Instead, we get as powerful a case as I have heard for the “commodification” of wildlife, as the only likely route to its salvation.

On the evidence of the film, the money that hunters could channel into conservation and restocking the land is impressive. At a convention in Las Vegas, 20,000 visitors crowd in. Men like Glass pay up to $350,000 at auction for the right to shoot a rhino. Elephants or lions cost $50,000, leopards $20,000 and buffaloes a snip at $9000. “That money will all go back into conservation,” says the head of SCI.

Trophy hunting is an extreme form of what critics call neoliberal conservation. In their effort to make nature “economically visible”, some conservation groups add a dollar sign, recasting nature as “natural capital” and the environment as a provider of “ecological services”. at the University of Cambridge, a long-standing critic of this Faustian bargain, calls it “sleeping with the enemy”. Lindsey dismisses this. He argues that land set aside for hunting is often better for wildlife conservation than national parks frequented by camera-toting tourists. “Trophy hunters pay higher fees than conventional tourists,” he says. “So revenues can be generated from lower volumes of people, resulting in potentially lower environmental impacts.” Hunters are also willing to go to troubled countries that regular tourists shy away from.

“He was initiated into hunting by his father who gave him a gun and told him to go kill something”

The trouble, he says, is that local people who live near wildlife – and risk being killed by it – “rarely benefit adequately from trophy hunting”. So instead of becoming stakeholders in the enterprise, they often become its enemies. Poachers, even. A shame then that this issue of sharing the spoils, which surely goes to the heart of the sustainability of trophy conservation, is largely unmentioned in the movie.

Instead, we have a narrative in which the economics of conservation sits uneasily with something more visceral. Glass, fresh from blubbing over his lion, confesses to camera that he was initiated into hunting by his father who took him out at night, stopped the car, gave him a gun and challenged him to go kill something. Dad, he said, “would get a big kick” out of knowing his son had just killed a lion.

Maybe this upbringing explained those tears, and also the almost unwatchable moment when Glass shot “his” elephant. The animal was on its side but still alive, trunk flailing, while Glass enjoyed a cigarette.

Why do Americans like him go hunting in Africa? Well, with most of the bison gone back home, that is where the big animals are. And there is the romantic example set a century ago by US president Theodore Roosevelt, who combined conservation and killing on an epic scale. While in office, he helped build America’s network of national parks, but once out of office, he went on a year-long killing spree across East Africa with his son Kermit – a safari through what he called a “Pleistocene landscape”.

On the trip, he shot more than a thousand animals, which he sent home to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and chronicled the journey in his book African Game Trails, which remains in print 108 years later.

But if the spirit of Roosevelt lives on among today’s hunters, then a fierce animal-rights backlash also seeks to claim ownership of the wild. In an odd way, both the hunters and their adversaries are in a similar game of animal appropriation, whether through their money or their ethics. Neither want to give the animals back to the wild.

How else to explain the furore two-and-a-half years ago, when a US dentist paid $50,000 to kill a lion in Zimbabwe, and ended up bagging Cecil. Walter Palmer’s crime was not to kill a lion. That happens all the time. It was to kill a lion which had strayed from a national park, and which was well-known to scientists, who had even given him a name. It was theft.

As this film underlines, we are all, in our various ways, intent on privatising the Pleistocene.

This article appeared in print under the headline “In for the kill”