The 15^th Conference of the Parties of CITES was held in Doha in March. The results from the hunting community perspective were mixed. On the positive side, the U.S. proposal to Uplist polar bear to Appendix I was soundly defeated as it should have been. Kenya’s proposal that no country make any further proposal to downlist or trade ivory in any form whatsoever for 20 years was withdrawn after Kenya first tried to make it apply to all countries for eight years and that was rejected. A definition of “hunting trophies” was adopted by consensus which includes “manufactured” items made from the animal taken sport-hunting, which is contrary to the USF&WS’ regulation adopted in August, 2007. The Parties also agreed that when there is a problem with export permit validation/endorsement the Parties should cooperatively attempt to work it out. Again, this is contrary to new USF&WS regulations of August 2007.

On the negative side, the Tanzania and Zambia proposals to downlist their elephant to Appendix II with an “annotation” that limited trade to a few narrow purposes, one of which was trophy trade, failed to get the required two-thirds vote. The U.S. proposal to downlist the bobcat was also defeated.

Credit must be given to the Wild Sheep Foundation and IPHA for providing extra funding. Also, credit is due to Osprey Film Company and Hunter Proud for their DVD Tembo: Use or Lose that we jointly produced and circulated before the CoP.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 8:39 am and is filed under John Jackson Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.