What the Ban on Elephant Trophies Means
Days after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a decision to lift the ban on elephant trophy imports from Zimbabwe and Zambia, President Donald Trump has announced he plans to reverse course.
President Donald Trump tweeted Friday night that he was keeping the ban on importing game trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia, reversing his administration’s announcement two days earlier that the bans would be lifted. The issuing of import permits for elephant trophies from those two countries has now been put on hold, says Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke.
When the decision to lift the ban was announced on Wednesday at a Safari Club International event in Tanzania, it was met with an avalanche of criticism. Several years earlier, under President Barack Obama, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service banned the import of elephant trophies from certain countries because the service found that the hunts did not contribute to the