The resistance is party practical (will it work/help?) and partly aesthetic.  The aesthetic resistance is similar to those who would deny that removing trees can be good for forest health.

The practical resistance is quite a reasonable concern, and I agree, it comes down to economics.  Will the additional money raised be enough to:
Raise the standard of living of locals enough that they can stop hunting the wildlife for food.
Have enough left over to hire additional rangers, to shoot the @!&!$ sport poachers.

I fail to see how this is different from the way hunting fees contribute to the maintenence of state game lands in the USA, although it's not a subject I know much about.  

I don't personally like the way hunters take credit for supporting wildlife when they are actually interested in killing wildlife.  It is ethically perverted, but what can be done?  Open season on poachers, with the hunted poacher's wealth going to a conservation fund.  Just trying to come up with ideas here...  Whoa, I just read the previous comment.  Maybe this idea is more popular than I thought.

The debate is happening in some Russian towns in the north about lifting the ban on polar bear hunting.  

I highly doubt that allowing legal hunting will reduce poaching. I think this is just a case of the wealthy trophy hunting industry trying to greenwash their activity.  I think solutions include more dollars to enforcement and higher prices for non-consumptive tourists and more of an effort to get them to come.

When it comes to big predators like bears and lions, species that breed very slowly and are highly sensitive to environmental change, I just don't think they can afford to have members of the healthy adult population be killed by trophy hunters.  Especially when there's no guarantee that legal trophy hunting will actually reduce poaching.

  Seems to me all one has to do is put photo safaris on the same basis as hunting ones. A fee per animal "shot".  Do the same things the same way, only with a camera.

Nice thing about hunting safaris is they're  a win/win/win.  The client gets the experience and trophy, locals and hunter get hire fees and meat, Game turns from a nuisance and hazard to an asset worth far more than a quick meal and a few bucks for parts. People protect assets.

Another issue is as human populations grow they, and their needs impinge upon game species. herbivores soon learn planted crops are far more tasty and nutritious than natural browse.  They compete with domestic cattle for grass. Predators and scavengers follow the food. >MW

millwright

  All accounts by caribou hunters lately increasingly contain mention of Polar bears in and around spike camps. Is self-defense "poaching" ?  Polar bears are essentially pure predator/scavengers with little impulse/opportunity to "browse" except as opportunity offers. Say at Churchill's garbage dump.

I would completely discount native populations' traditional sustenance hunting of these anomals until I find evidence their improved technology and access has changed their hunting habits/take in the population.  >MW
 

millwright

Interesting to see that the debate has well spread into Kenya now. Hopefully the Kenyans will discover the approach that works best for them, and surely the humble people in other parts of the world will support them in their approach, whatever it may be.

Kenya must however, avoid trying to impose it's views on other peoples. Unfortunately, Kenya (backed by Mali) has a new proposal for CITES that would prohibit legal trade in ivory, apparently to fight illegal trade in ivory (?). This proposal fails to take their neighboring African states' interests into consideration.

amc89,

Have the existing bans on trade stamped out illegal hunting of wildlife?

The logic behind a blanket ban is to eliminate the trade in "legal" ivory, which exceeds the actual legal ivory harvest by a couple of orders of magnitude.  A better method would be to institute a supply chain tracking system for legal ivory, and assume that anyone without the proper paperwork is trading illegally.  Of course, that requires money for enforcement.  On the other hand, so does a blanket ban.

I don't think it's a good idea, either, but that's the logic behind it.  It's not completely stupid.

If you raise the price of shooting photos rather than bullets, you are just encouraging more bullets and few photos.

 What we can NOT afford to do is encourage people to take airplanes for holidays in Africa--climate and habitat destruction/disruption threaten thousands of species entire, rather than just individuals.  People who fly in jets to view animals in the wild are helping to destroy what they claim to treasure.

What is most needed is to figure out a way to make it so that people in poor countries have an incentive to ensure survival of these species in the wild.  Rather than encouraging hunting or phototourism, how about the rich countries in the north pay poor countries in the south an annual fee for services provided that is tied to the audited wild populations, with a kicker added when populations are increasing.  

I can't think of a single country in the south that hasn't been put into debt bondage and forced to sell their assets out to the rich by the real axis of evil (World Bank/IMF/WTO).  Read John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" for some insight into how it's done.

How about we start a gradual process of forgiving a significant percentage of all those debts in the poor countries every year so they don't HAVE to care what the ivory traders or the trophy hunters want.  I'm sure that the people of Kenya do NOT want these animals to disappear either, any more than the people of New England wanted the whales to go away.  (Luckily, the oceans were large and the technology was primitive then, so enough whales survived to limp into the oil age.  Land animals are not so lucky.)

"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."

It is not clear how the discussion of ban-removal can proceed sensibly, whether in Kenya or in Chukotka or anywhere else, until it is clearly understood who the people are who are doing the poaching (or however we wish to refer to the illegal killing of wild animals).  There are all sorts of motives for killing wild animals, and the people who kill them stand in all sorts of relationships to them, and therefore, strictly speaking, should be classified into different groups.

E.g., members of armed factions in the Democratic Republic of Congo kill animals for bushmeat for reasons rather different than those of local residents who kill them to put their meat for sale in local markets.  And both of these classes of poachers are very different from the separate but perhaps related East-Asia-based networks dealing in ivory, on the one hand, and in animal parts for the Chinese traditional medicines industry, on the other.

(It is interesting how these East Asians seem to have taken to heart the well-known fortune cookie oracle of John Maynard Keynes, "In the long run we are all dead."  It apparently matters nothing to them that many kinds of animals will no longer be alive in a matter of decades; they want their money now.)

(GreenEngineer refers to an entirely different class, "sport poachers."  But I do not know who they are supposed to be.)

For now, preliminary to this sort of international study and classification, I like very much the suggestions that JMG gave, as part of "being realistic."  But I wish he/she could explain this enigmatic sentence:
<<
I'm sure that the people of Kenya do NOT want these animals to disappear either, any more than the people of New England wanted the whales to go away.
>>
Frankly, I am quite in the dark about the attitudes of either the Kenyans of today or the New Englanders of the past.  And I wonder how JMG can be so "sure."

In the very first comment in this thread, GreenEngineer wrote:
<<
The resistance is partly practical (will it work/help?) and partly aesthetic.
>>

He is apparently talking about the resistance of certain environmentalists to the suggestion of the ban-removal.  I suspect he is mostly right.  But it needs to be added that there are very solid ethical reasons as well for disliking the idea of relegalized hunting.  And it is not impossible that at least some environmentalists have those reasons in mind.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Canis:  two answers to that.

First, because, though I'm often in error, I'm rarely in doubt.

But, second, because I look to what people do as a guide to what they think--

Kenya grappling with poaching, tourism, and ivory tells me that they want to stop the first, continue the second, and are unsure about the whether the third helps or hurts the first two.  From their behaviors to date, nothing suggests that they would prefer that their charismatic megafauna disappear; in fact, that would elimanate all poaching (though probably most tourism too).

Similarly, the New Englanders spent more and more money outfitting ships to find whales on longer and longer voyages in more and more dangerous seas, to harvest a resource that was essential to their economy.  From that, we can infer that they wanted whales to exist, so that they could be used.  

If they didn't value whales for their utility, or if they wanted to hunt whales to extinction, they could have accomplished this far more efficiently by leaving the kills in the sea and dispensing with all the at-sea rendering and continuing on with the hunt sort of the at-sea analogue to the slaughter of the bison on the North American plains).

"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."