And while we are at it.... I'd rather see a local hunter paid to manage the populations of animals in their own county where money is few and far between.
I very, very much doubt the money filters down to the villagers. But if anyone has any info that says contrary I'd buy it I'm sure....
This type of "hunting" isn't something I personally want to be involved with or like, but I have family members who have gone on African safari hunts like this.
My aunt shot a zebra and now has a zebra rug. They prepared the best cut for her to eat at the place, and the rest of the zebra meat went to the local village for people to eat. My uncle shot some water buffalo and different gazelles. Same thing.
Without hunting preserves, you have incredibly poor communities of people without a lot of resources. The temptation to become poachers is really strong. If you can kill an elephant, cut off its tusks, and feed your family for 6 months is there really much of a decision to make?
There's also the option of them killing off/driving away all the native animals,
especially lions and other predators, so that they can raise cattle instead. Because people got to eat.
With hunting preserves they can maintain populations of native species, including predators, because they're getting money from maintaining the preserve. Instead of becoming poachers, the wildlife is an asset to protect and they can get jobs as hunting guides, or protecting the animals from poachers.
And when the herd is being professionally managed, they can select which animals are "harvested" and which are left. I saw an article about a huge male rhino someone paid a lot of money to kill as a trophy. People freaked out about it, but the rhino had gotten really aggressive and actually killed other rhinos, including a pregnant female. It was better for the health of the herd for him to be killed. And since someone was wiling to pay a lot of money to do it legally, that benefited the local economy a lot more than paying money
to a local hunter to do it.
As far as them being threatened, legalized regulated hunting actually helps tremendously in species recovery. It opens up vast swaths of private land as viable habitat where they will be protected from poachers. When hunting of white rhinos was legalized there was a dramatic jump in population.
Is there such evidence? According to a 2005 paper by Nigel Leader-Williams and colleagues in the Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy the answer is yes. Leader-Williams describes how the legalization of white rhinoceros hunting in South Africa motivated private landowners to reintroduce the species onto their lands. As a result, the country saw an increase in white rhinos from fewer than one hundred individuals to more than 11,000, even while a limited number were killed as trophies.
http://conservationmagazine.org/2014/01/can-trophy-hunting-reconciled-conservation/