JOHANNESBURG - The respected International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), based in Switzerland, has reported that hunting, and in particular trophy hunting, has no place in conservation, the Campaign Against Canned Hunting said on Saturday.

The hunting industry had been very successful in foisting the hunting narrative onto the conservation community, the campaign said in a statement.

Using "stalking horses", such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the hunting fraternity had persuaded most of the global conservation structures that hunting was a tool of conservation.

In particular, "the hunting fraternity had infiltrated" the IUCN and ensured that the pre-eminent scientific authority made no decisions that impacted adversely upon hunting privileges, the statement said.

"Now, for the first time, a careful, comprehensive report by the IUCN ethics committee, an eminent international group of distinguished scientists, has reported that hunting, and in particular trophy hunting, has no place in conservation. Hunting agencies which currently control the narrative in IUCN should logically therefore be thrown out of the IUCN."

The reasoning of the committee was impeccable. The report pointed out that the primary aim of conservation was to preserve the integrity and diversity of nature. In order to achieve that primary goal, any use of natural resources and wildlife must be sustainable. Notice that the doctrine of sustainable use was subsidiary to the primary purpose of conservation.

The scientists analysed the effect of trophy hunting upon the environment and concluded that it was not sustainable and, even if it were, it failed to preserve the diversity of nature. "Hunting is therefore a form of farming of wildlife and it has nothing whatever to do with conservation," the campaign statement said.