Trophy hunting generates revenue that can fund conservation, but its welfare costs — stress, injury, and death of individual animals — require careful ethical and empirical evaluation.
The welfare case against trophy hunting is straightforward: it kills and injures sentient animals for recreational purposes. The conservation case is more complex: in some contexts, hunting revenue demonstrably funds anti-poaching, habitat maintenance, and community development that benefits far more animals than are shot. However, the evidence for this net conservation benefit is context-dependent and often contested. Wounding rates — the proportion of shot animals that escape injured rather than being cleanly killed — represent a significant and underacknowledged welfare harm that occurs even when hunts are operating as intended.