Trump called elephant hunts a ‘horror show’. But now he’s ending trophy ban on tusks and other body parts
Son Donald Trump Jnr posed with the severed tail of an elephant he killed on an African safari in 2011
The Trump administration will allow Americans to bring tusks and other elephant body parts back to this country as trophies, in a pivot away from the support President Donald Trump voiced for an Obama-era trophy ban after outcry last year.
The decision, announced quietly last week in a March 1 memorandum from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, withdrew previous rulings on trophy hunting and said it would allow sport hunters to receive permits for the trophy items on a “case-by-case basis.”
After US Fish and Wildlife Service announced a repeal of the ban on the importation of elephant-hunt trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia, wide public outcry prompted Trump and Ryan Zinke, the secretary of the Department of the Interior which houses the wildlife agency, to put the repeal on hold until further review.
Elephants aren’t meant to be trophies, they’re meant to roam free
Trump later called elephant hunting a “horror show,” and said that it would be very difficult for anyone to change his mind.