Approved imports of elephant parts to the US rose to more than 300 last year — more than double the number during the president’s first time in office
Jack Denton, Nairobi
Monday May 25 2026, 3.15pm BST, The Times
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It is not just the kill. The real prize for big-game hunting tourists in Africa is the trophy: elephant-foot footstools, giraffe neck mounts or lion heads that prove a $50,000 shooting safari was money well spent.
Years of US endangered-species protections have made it difficult for hunters to furnish their trophy rooms with elephant parts, but conservationists say that may be changing.
President Trump appears to have relaxed rules on importing elephant-hunting trophies, encouraging the killing of the endangered animals across southern Africa.
The US approved more than 300 elephant trophy imports last year, more than double the permits issued during all of Trump’s first term, according to an analysis published this month by the Centre for Biological Diversity, a US non-profit organisation.
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“[This] is an extremely worrying indicator,” said Gillian Lyons, a managing director at the Humane World Action Fund, part of the group of organisations formerly known as the Humane Society.
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Trump was once an unlikely bedfellow of conservationists. While his sons are prodigious hunters —photographs from a trip to Zimbabwe in 2010 show Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump with prizes including an elephant and endangered leopard — the president has shown a distaste for hunting.
In 2017, the president called elephant hunting a “horror show” and that he would “be very hard pressed to change [his] mind” on the argument that encouraging trophy imports helps conservation. The president had been expected to significantly loosen restrictions on trophy imports during his first term but reversed course to a case-by-case basis.
The US reported only 114 elephant trophy imports in 2018, dwindling to four in 2019 and zero in 2020. “We saw this drastic decrease … and part of that is because of the president’s view,” said Tanya Sanerib, international legal director at the Centre for Biological Diversity.
But the second Trump administration had ushered in a dramatic reversal of the trend, Sanerib said.
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“When we shift presidential administrations, it takes a while for them to set new policy … but within less than a month from when President Trump was inaugurated the second time, they started issuing trophy import permits,” Sanerib said. She added that the Fish and Wildlife Service, the US agency that regulates the imports, did not have a director until August last year.
“It looks like either something has changed or [Trump] is totally unaware of what his administration is doing,” Sanerib said.
Groups such as Safari Club International are lobbying for trophy imports as well loosening other endangered-species protections and may have allies in the president’s sons. “There are absolutely ties between Don Jr, in particular, and Eric, to a certain extent, with trophy hunting in the US,” Sanerib said. “The trophy hunting industry, and folks who lobby for gun rights are very much tied together … they’re a really powerful lobby.”
The present rules centre on reforms from March 2024, issued under President Biden, that Humane World called an “effective ban” on elephant trophy imports. Even so, there were still more than 350 elephant trophy imports in 2024, a spike compared with other years during the Biden administration. According to experts, this was mostly due to hunters rushing trophies home before the new rules took effect.
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“[We have] reason to be deeply concerned that the Trump administration may be trying to quietly undermine those protections by rubber stamping requests for elephant trophy imports,” Lyons said.
One of the key elements of the Biden-era reforms was requiring “range countries”, where animals are hunted, to testify annually to the US that their elephant populations are biologically sustainable.
More than two thirds of last year’s elephant trophy imports were from Botswana, which is home to some 140,000 elephants, about a third of the total African population. In 2019 the country lifted a ban on elephant hunting, in part to address human-wildlife conflict, allowing about 0.3 per cent of them to be hunted each year, an equivalent of 430 elephants this year.
While this is a relatively small number, scientists have said that hunters want larger, older bull elephants with big tusks.
“Hunting 0.3 per cent of the population annually reduces the number of the oldest bulls … by 50 per cent compared to no hunting,” Elephants Without Borders, a conservation group based in Botswana, said in November. “Mature bulls play important roles in elephant populations … risks of overhunting are significant.”
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Hunters contribute only a fraction of overall tourism revenue in Botswana but are significant —and wealthy trophy hunters, about 75 per cent of whom are American, may also have outsize impact.
“Hunters work with various countries in Southern Africa to try to prop up and ensure there’s a continuity of trophy hunting opportunities,” Sanerib said.
She pointed to a swish annual meeting in Africa hosted by Safari Club International, where US officials often fly in to meet African counterparts under hunters’ watchful eyes. “They want to ensure there is open access for the wildlife that their members want to hunt,” Sanerib said.
Trump ‘encouraging elephant hunting’ with easing of trophy rules