HUNTING STORIES FOR AFRICA
50 Years of Hunting Experiences in 19 African Countries

RESERVE YOUR COPY

It started all those years ago with my wife, Jane’s, small and very basic point and press Olympus 35mm camera. No-one else had one so I took it on our first hunts together. Initially, there were four of us, all South African meat hunters – the late Derek Carstens, Philip Pascal, now living in Australia for the past many years, John Oosthuizen, now a very experienced and highly respected PH and me.

In time, my companions would ask for copies of my grainy, poorly lit, paper photos, often taken into the sun and I would stick them on paper for them accompanied by brief, hand written comments. Still later, when I had graduated to sharing a secretary with another young lawyer, our secretary, Bryony, would type out the captions which often grew to an entire page.

And then Derek and I went on an 18 day safari of a lifetime to Zimbabwe with John Oosthuizen and Lou Hallamore as our PHs. During the course of that truly wonderful hunt, Derek shot and I finally killed, the then world record Nile crocodile, a 16 foot 4 inch monster, on the Gwaai River, not far from where it emptied into Lake Kariba.

I put together a complete photo album of the safari for each of us and, when Derek read what I had written about the croc hunt, he suggested I submit it to a magazine for possible publication. I called it, Croc Around the Rock, and sent it off to Man Magnum, the original South African hunting magazine and Safari, the SCI magazine. Both wanted to publish it but, as the latter could not tell me when they proposed to do so and Magnum was going to put it in the next issue being September, 1988, it was a no brainer and I have been writing magazine articles ever since.

And so began a long relationship with Ron Anger, the owner and editor of Magnum, which set my feet firmly on the writer’s path. He taught me everything I know today about writing hunting stories and his careful and thoughtful editing made my stories so much better. They almost made me read like a real writer and I have much to thank him for even if he always changed the titles of my stories, much to my initial frustration, until it became a standing joke between the two of us.

At the time, Magnum’s circulation hovered around 25 000 a month but today I would guess it is closer to half that and it has been many years since I submitted a story to them because of the refusal of the current editor to take a firm stand against the unnatural, genetic manipulation of wild animals to produce those with exaggerated horn lengths and strange colour variations or the disgusting canned killings, initially of lions, but then of other game as well, both initiatives which have done so much to damage the reputation of South Africa as a hunting destination for bona fide, fair chase hunters.

In due course, I started to write for other magazines like The Financial Mail, Finance Week, Fairlady, Farmers Weekly and many others, including one story in National Geographic, numerous articles in the online newspaper, the Daily Maverick, until a new editor refused to allow rebuttals of the tripe written by animal extremists like Pinnok and Michler. I also wrote regularly for African Outfitter, which recently closed its doors after being persecuted for months by the breeders and killers which the current editor of Magnum would not condemn. I also wrote for the German magazine, Jagen Weltweit, until the editor said he was no longer interested in my stories as I had stopped hunting in my 70th year, as if this meant I suddenly had nothing of interest to write about hunting and conservation.

Another three of these magazines, which had bought many of my stories, also ceased to be outlets almost entirely because I did not see eye to eye with their publishers. One, because he arbitrarily cut the amount paid for my stories without even having the decency to discuss it with me first and, the other, because he apologized to a government department for an entirely true and accurate article on cheetah hunting in Namibia (again without discussing this with me beforehand), and the third, well, let me tell you about it.

After the Cecil debacle, when every hunting organization my friends and I knew, ran around like headless chickens in the face of the tsunami of world wide, negative publicity happily and cleverly fanned into a massive, raging, runaway fire by animal extremists, it became clear to the businessmen amongst us that we hunters needed, if you’ll excuse the pun, to fight fire with fire. We needed to develop and implement a professional public relations strategy into which all hunting organisations could buy. One which showed the benefits of hunting led biodiversity conservation, on the one hand, and the likely demise of such conservation in African were it to be stopped for any reason, on the other hand.

We started with the South African Hunters and Game Conservation Association which, with some plus 40 000 members, was by far the biggest and wealthiest hunting body in Africa. Over 18 months, actively encouraged by the participation of the President and CEO of SA Hunters, we established the Fair Chase Guild as an independent association within SA Hunters, whose goal was to promote hunting pursuant to a well thought out strategic plan to be implemented by a professional PR firm.

Membership was entirely voluntary as was any contribution a member might choose to make to help fund the R1,5 million annual budget and there were already 30 or so members lined up each prepared to contribute R1 000 per month towards this cause. We were on our way and the formation of the Guild was announced by the President of SA Hunters at the gala dinner preceding their Annual General Meeting the following day.

Imagine my total, gob smacked surprise then, when in April the following year, the President called me to say that the previous week at a meeting of the chairmen of the various branches of SA Hunters, they had decided summarily to terminate the Guild’s association. No-one from the Guild had been notified that this was on the agenda of the meeting, let alone been given an opportunity to address it. Nor did anyone query whether this body had the authority to take such a decision on behalf of the entire association.

As one of the founders of the Guild I felt this was a massive vote of no confidence in me and my fellow founders and, therefore, had no alternative but to resign as a member of SA Hunters and returned the Bataleur Award, the highest honour SA Hunters could bestow on a member and which had been given to me the previous year. Funnily enough, and I did not know what to make of it, SA Hunters refused to accept the returned trophy and sent it back. Not knowing what to do with it, I threw it away.

Neither the President nor CEO nor any of the executive directors of SA Hunters who had been intimately involved, supported and encouraged the formation of the Guild, resigned.

Months later, a senior member of a branch explained to me that certain branch chairmen were concerned that, given their “controversial” hunting methods, if they joined the Guild, these might be exposed to their acute embarrassment as key to membership of the Guild was a written undertaking to abide by the published, common sense Fair Chase Rules of the Guild. Alternatively, they were worried that, if they did not join the Guild, then people might draw adverse conclusions from this fact. In other words, a lose/lose situation for them. So, purely on the basis of their miserable, personal egos and “controversial” hunting methods, a worthwhile venture designed to accurately and truthfully promote hunting and the hunting led conservation for which SA Hunters supposedly stood, was killed.

I admit, I can frequently be irritable and grumpy but hardly ever lose my temper. This, however, made me properly angry. That these self-serving, short-sighted, nasty men could sacrifice the worthy and important aims of the Guild on the altars of their personal egos for such base reasons and neither the executives of SA Hunters nor their board of directors had the gumption to stand up to them, completely deflated me. What hope was there for hunting in the long term in Africa?

To be honest, I gave up. I stopped hunting, stopped writing, cancelled my membership of all South African hunting associations, cancelled my subscriptions to South African hunting magazines and emigrated.

Fast forward some six or so years and I receive a call from the new editor of SA Hunter’s official magazine. Would I please consider writing a regular column for their magazine as I had done in the past. He had complete editorial independence he said and, while he knew of the reasons behind my parting company with the association, he could assure me that I would be able to write what I liked. Oh, OK, I replied, my first article will be about the reasons behind the demise of the Fair Chase Guild. Oh, no, came the hasty reply, if I published that I would be fired. Enough said!

The pandemic saved me. I had the time to walk on my own in the beautiful, empty Chiltern Hills which surrounded our home in the UK. I had time to think and regain my perspective in relative peace. I began to work on Hunting the African Buffalo – Nature’s Debt Collector – All Six Subspecies and, afterwards, on Hunting the Hippotrages – Sable, Roan & Oryx – Africa’s Glamour Game. They were both big books. Both over 425 pages, 100 000 words and 700 colour photos each. Just choosing the photos, checking the photo correction and placement in the book took three months of ball-breaking, eye-straining labour.

When I completed the production of the last book, I was done. No more books, no more writing!

Even before concentrating on book production and cutting back on writing magazine articles, I could see that outlets for my articles and stories were drying up. The magazines were under pressure and I could not see this trend of reducing circulations, followed by magazine closures, reversing. Advertising was seen by too many magazines to be king and key to the success of a magazine, on the one hand, accompanied by brutal cost cutting, on the other hand. Magazine after magazine fired or retrenched the oldest, most experienced and relatively expensive journalists and replaced them with novices, with the result that content suffered a drastic reduction in quality and readability. To add insult to injury, the substance and length of the content followed suit and, in some plus hundred page hunting magazines, there was often less than 30 pages of real content. It was as if content had become an irritating necessity designed merely to separate one advert from the next and the content itself was more often than not, poorly written, boring and mundane. Yet another “I came, I saw, I killed” article often by writers with little or no experience of their subject matter. Like the breathless prose of the amateur hunter who wrote about a canned lioness hunt in South Africa’s Free State Province – where free range lions had not existed for decades – as he shot the drugged animal from the back of a truck in a small paddock, surrounded by heavily armed, so-called professional hunters that, and I paraphrase his words, “The safety of my hunting companions depended on my next shot!” What a ridiculous statement! What a terrible advert for fair chase hunting. What a total lack of any form of hunting ethics. The crassness of the writer was only outdone by the insensitivity and stupidity of the buffoon who published it.

This is what had partly played a role in me switching from writing for magazines to writing, editing and producing books. At least there, I and my friends could write more freely and meaningfully. Or at least that is what we tried to do and, if I can toot our horns a little, eight published books later there are clearly many who agree, especially as the books are expensive and many of them are sold out.

In the past, my articles were often 3 000 to 4 000 words long and Ron Anger at Magnum would sometimes publish them in two parts in consecutive issues. No-one will do this today and I could not and did not want to produce the increasingly shorter articles editors asked for. First 2 500 words then 2 000 and now 1 200 and even 500 words have become fashionable amongst some editors. I mean, what can you say in 1 200 words other than the usual I came, I saw stuff. So, with that in mind, while I will continue to offer my material to magazines I admired, I decided to expand the blogs on my website.

First question. After not having hunted since my 70th year, do I still have anything to say nearly six years later? Imagine then my surprise when a story popped, unannounced, into my head in September, 2021, just weeks after I had closed the door to further books and articles. The first one arrived all but complete and took me a couple of hours to write down, check and edit, compared to the normal four to six days. Then another arrived and another. Altogether 15 brand new stories emerged before we left to visit our daughter and son-in-law in upstate Washington by April, 2022 and a further 25 have followed since.

As the months rolled by the stories became less and less compete and, towards the end, I would be given only a picture or a few words and would have to tease the rest of the story out. For example, a quote from one of the most influential mathematicians, the German, Carl Friedrich Gauss, jumped out at me from the Economist I was reading, “It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment”, and reminded me of the fun of planning hunts and suggested that maybe, just maybe, another story might be lurking, given the pleasure that I and many of my friends enjoyed in planning and preparing for a hunt, some of which took up to two years.

One of my good friends used to say that the preparation and anticipation was the best part because, as soon as the hunt started, it was over in the blink of an eye!

But there was one common denominator in the new stories; they were unlike anything I had written before and I must thank Karrie Kolesar, the then editor of the excellent Dallas Safari Club magazine, Game Trails, for encouraging me to keep on producing them. I remember her saying that, when she began one of my stories, she never knew where it was going to end up and the unexpected twists and turns intrigued her.

So, instead of trying to find another home for my stories other than Game Trails, I decided to post them at the rate of one a month on my website. And the result is this book, which would not have been possible without the help of my uber capable and competent daughter-in-law, Eileen Sarah Flack nee Osborne. It will contain some of the stories on my blog, some from Africa Outfitter, some from Game Trails, some which have not been published anywhere and all of which have been re-edited by me.

This latest and really last book has embarrassed me more than a little as I made the same promise after completing the Buffalo Book. I said the same thing again after completing the Hippotrage Book, so this is the third time I am making the same statement (third time lucky) and, believe me, at the age of 76, it probably really is the last book I will produce, not least because I am sure my daughter-in-law, who is entirely responsible for the book’s production, will kill me if I send her another one.

We are hoping to complete the production of the book in 2025 but, in the meantime, will stop the monthly publication of short stories on my blog so we can concentrate on book production. Initially, we were only going to print 50 copies for family and close friends, more because I wanted a repository for the stories other than just on my laptop and in the cloud but, the more people I talk to, the greater seems to be the interest. So, as of this moment we are thinking of printing about 300 copies. It will be a simpler book than its predecessors, limited to say five or six predominantly landscape photos per story, on semi-gloss paper, at as reasonable a cost as possible.

If you are interested – no commitment you understand – please RESERVE YOUR COPY here as it will help us settle on the number to be printed.