Amy Dickman, climate denier ally, obscures the truth about the trophy hunting debate
The UK’s trophy hunting import ban bill will not do more harm than good.
This is a response to Amy Dickman’s response to Sian Sullivan’s response to trophy hunting industry lobbying.
Amy Dickman is on the trophy hunting industry’s payroll. She is a paid consultant for Jamma International, a European ‘charity’ that considers trophy hunting a vital part of its for-profit investment strategy.
She called Sian Sullivan’s criticism of the trophy hunting industry’s lobbying efforts “at best overblown, and at worst misleading and arrogant.” She previously threatened legal action against Sullivan (and others) for portraying her in a way she did not like. Describing Sullivan’s criticism as “arrogant” took an astounding amount of arrogance on Dickman’s part.
Dickman’s latest response was another embarrassingly childish tirade and an effort to obscure the truth about the trophy hunting debate.
She whined that the campaign to ban trophy hunting imports “repeatedly” shared “demonstrable misinformation.” She ignored the demonstrable disinformation campaign that the trophy hunting industry waged against restrictions like import bans.
She was aware of the existence of the disinformation campaign and that she was the most featured person on its Let Africa Live Facebook page. She allowed the trophy hunting industry to use her image and words to spread falsehoods without pushback. She has yet to mention the disinformation campaign in any of her work.
Dickman complained that Jamma International, Resource Africa, and the Community Leaders Network were disrespected. She, of course, disregarded Sullivan’s point that Jamma International stated it planned to manage trophy hunting blocks with an expectation of a financial return on its proposed $10 million investment.
Resource Africa participated in an anti-environmental astroturfing movement in the 1990s. It likely wouldn’t enter today’s trophy hunting debate without Jamma International’s “generous financial support” of $1.2 million since 2021. The CLN, which Dickman said “represents millions of people who would be directly affected by the UK’s proposed ban,” is nothing more than an offshoot of Resource Africa.
It's unclear what evidence suggests the CLN represents “millions” of people other than its marketing material. It’s more accurate to claim that the CLN represents the financial interests of the Johanssons, the wealthy European family that profits from Jamma International.
She made a thinly veiled attempt to portray Sullivan akin to a climate denier for “dismissing the weight of scientific evidence around trophy hunting.” Yet Dickman appeared in the People section of the climate deniers Property and Environment Research Center.
Dickman ignored the evidence of PERC’s climate denial and tried to convince me that PERC wasn’t a climate denier in an email exchange. She cowardly had her bio removed from the PERC website after receiving criticism for it on social media. She has not publicly denounced PERC’s anti-science agenda.
Dickman collaborated with PERC research fellows on pro-trophy hunting articles. She is also the director of the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Unit, which researches militarization and trophy hunting on PERC’s behalf.
She described PERC research fellow Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes as a rhino expert despite him being an economist with a background in science denial. He was a research fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free market think tank known to espouse climate denial and tobacco disinformation, where right-wing science deniers informed his opinions on rhino conservation in the 1990s.
Many pieces of Dickman’s cherry-picked evidence for trophy hunting and against import bans were weak. Her denigration of Kenya’s trophy hunting ban lacked evidence and mirrored the trophy hunting disinformation campaign’s rhetoric.
She cited a researcher with close ties to the trophy hunting industry for her evidence against Botswana’s elephant hunting ban. The lead author for her claim against polar bear trophy import bans was oddly friendly with a well-known climate denier.
Her claim that import bans caused Tanzania’s abandoned trophy hunting blocks was unsubstantiated and contradicted the trophy hunting industry’s own opinion (as well as the research and opinion from an expert on Tanzania’s unsustainable lion trophy hunting). She claimed that a blanket import ban will likely “do more harm than good” similar to how the fossil fuel and tobacco industries demonized government regulations.
Dickman asserted that trophy hunting was rooted in colonialism but ultimately what many Africans wanted. We hear similar opinions from America’s right-wing extremists.
Candace Owens, a white supremacist sympathizer and trophy hunter, claimed that British colonization of Africa was a “net positive” and Africans wanted the slave trade. Owens’s defense of trophy hunting was not much different from Dickman’s.
Dickman made free market propagandists proud by stating that bans will not improve outcomes for people or wildlife. But bans are effective tools in wildlife conservation and elsewhere.
The 1989 CITES ivory ban reversed the African elephant decline. Tobacco smoking bans helped smokers quit and reduced tobacco use. The Montreal Protocol’s chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) ban healed the ozone layer and mitigated climate change impacts.
Dickman wants you to believe that the trophy hunting debate is about evidence versus emotion. She wants you to think science favors an industry full of climate denial and disinformation.
It’s incredible how dumb she thinks you are.
Thank you for this article and for exposing these connections and interests behind Dickman's pro-hunting propaganda and activism. It's shocking that the mainstream media and politicians have been taken in by her and give her a platform to disseminate so much disinformation and outrageous claims, while hiding behind the guise of science and objectivity.