The Professional Hunter's Ten Commandments
By Russ Gould
Bayaka orchestra
A Bayaka family.
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Well-known Zimbabwean guide Garth Thompson wrote “The Guide’s Guide to Guiding” some years back. It’s the definitive handbook on how to run a safari and how not to, and should be required reading for anyone in the business - here Russ Gould shares his thoughts on the topic.
Allow the client the option of calling the hunt off at your cost - full refund of deposit and airfare - if you can't deliver what you sold. Once he is on the ground, your only honourable course of action is to let him name his discount. Pre-baiting is another tricky matter. If you promise to pre-bait, then make sure you have a leopard on bait when the client gets there. Horn shrinkage is another common malady with inexperienced as well as experienced PH’s. Don't exaggerate, especially if you have established that inches are important to your client. In matters related to hunting, it's much better to under-promise and over-deliver.
3. Wear the Client's Shoes, Not Your Own
There are many pressures on the PH in the course of a hunt. His own need to make a living, the need to manage quota over the course of a season, the need to please the local District Council, and the need to preserve a relationship with the outfit that owns the concession. It's very easy to run the hunt in such a way that these other concerns are served well, while compromising your client's wishes and needs. I have encountered situations where clients were kept away from certain areas in the hunting concession, to preserve the really good trophies for some more important client. Or a mediocre trophy may be taken to run up the tab. An opportunity to take an elephant is skipped in favour of pursuing buffalo because the Council wants buffalo meat for an event of some sort, despite the fact that the client is really keen to take his first elephant. A half day is lost because the PH decided to curry favour with the District Council by offering his services as a taxi driver. Never mind that there are only two days left and the client has yet to shoot his buffalo. What your client says about you and the hunt depends as much on how you treat him as it does on what he shoots or does not shoot. One thing most clients have in common is the expectation that if billed for seven days hunting, the client will actually get seven days of hunting. Hard to disagree with. But the client's idea of a day's hunting is often not the same as the PH's. Some clients expect a full day's hunt for a full day's pay. You must not assume that he is OK with a four hour siesta after lunch, unless he requests it. Many clients, used to hunting in the USA where the first and last hour of the day are the “golden hours”, expect to be in the field cocked and locked at first light. You should always be waiting for the client, not the other way round. The client should be the last one on the Cruiser in the morning, not you. You should be up before him, and go to bed after he does. Fiddle with your Cruiser while your client is having breakfast, not while he is sitting on the hunting seat waiting to leave camp. This applies from the moment the client gets off the plane. Nothing unsettles a client more than arriving in a foreign country and discovering that nobody is there to greet him. I once received a phone call in the middle of the night, from clients who were stranded at the Windhoek airport. After calling the PH association to organize someone to fetch them, the PH casually showed up an hour late with a lame excuse. No matter how many errands you have to run while you are in town, get yourself to the airport early.
4. Avoid Surprises, And Explain Them If You Can't
Some of the more egregious surprises I have encountered include other hunters showing up in camp with no explanation offered to the client; a no-show by a hired PH causing a delay in the start of a hunt; a change of camp or PH at the last moment; and extra hotel nights at the client's expense prior to starting the hunt. On a recent hunt, on no less than the client's birthday, we heard shots in the morning while pursuing an elephant bull in the jess. That afternoon, we encountered a local hunter and his two sons hunting “our” area. It turned out that they had shot the very same elephant that the client was pursuing, and now these hunters were cruising the roads looking for buffalo. To add insult to injury, the PH decided to call it a day at 4 pm. When we arrived in camp, four other hunters occupied the only chairs, drinking the few cold beers that would fit in the battery-powered cooler. None of this was explained to the client, who retired to his tent in a funk, making copious notes in his journal. Don't make the client read your mind – what is obvious to you may not be obvious to him.
5. Pay Attention to Little Details, They Make a Huge Difference
Clients are happier the more their needs are catered to. Some will drink and eat anything, but most have particular dietary preferences. A big one is filtered coffee. Is this so hard to provide? And then there is decaf. Not everyone lives on stimulants. How about soap in the shower? A mosquito net over the bed? Is this asking too much? Cold beer and a cooler that is actually cool and filled with the preferred soft drinks goes a long way toward good feelings and a happy client. A hammock under a shady tree is a treat, when the alternative is a boiling tent for an afternoon nap. On a recent bird hunt, we specifically requested standard shotgun loads of 32 grams. We were shooting vintage guns which must be treated with respect. The PH ignored that request and provided 36 gram loads.
Two of the party suffered cracked stocks and one could not extract his shells without resorting to a cleaning rod. On the same hunt, different property, the PH decided he had plenty of shotgun ammo and had allowed the prior party to use up a good amount of the ammo he had laid in specifically for our party. We ran out of ammo and were unable to do as much wing-shooting as we had planned. Remember, clients sit in that airline torture chamber for nearly 40 hours because of the fun they anticipate they will have when they get to their hunt destination. So make it fun for them!
6. Keep Your Cool, Even If the Client Loses His
Of all the advice offered here, this is probably the hardest to follow. Some clients are impossibly difficult. In a tense situation, tempers can flare. If you can't keep your cool, then this is not the business for you. A shouting match between you and your client is going to ruin the rest of the hunt, as well as your reputation. On a recent problematic safari, I made it clear to the operator that my client was not happy, and that he was a participant in a popular internet forum where several people were awaiting his report regarding the hunt.
I wanted him to understand that we had to turn the situation around. This had the opposite effect. With an angry tone, he told me that if we were not happy, we should pack up and leave, right now! A perfect example of how not to handle an unhappy situation.
 |  Sell what you can deliver. This is not a luxury camp by any stretch of the imagination! |  |
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 Clients come in all shapes and sizes, from many different countries and cultures, and each is unique. Take the time to understand them. |  The so-called "African carry", ie. rifle barrel held in the hand, rifle balancing on the shoulder, with muzzle pointing forward, this carry may be fine if you are alone, or walking in front, but otherwise, potentially dangerous. |  |
7. Quote the Hunt, and Charge What You Quote
Even if a hunt is successful, nothing annoys a client more than being billed something other than he is expecting to pay. Take the trouble to document, in writing, the cost of the hunt including all extras, before taking the client's deposit. VAT, transfer fees, government levies, and dip and pack charges should not be a surprise. To hit your client with a surprise on his bill as he gets ready to board his plane home is as good as showing him the finger as he leaves. This will undo all the goodwill you may have built by giving him a good hunt.
He will fume all the way home, and his buddies will hear about the money issue and not the hunt. On a recent hunt, the client was offered a PAC elephant in place of the promised exportable buffalo, and furthermore the pricing was such that this would take $4000 off the price of the hunt. A last-evening PAC success saved the hunt, but the bill failed to reflect the savings. As the accompanying agent, I intervened and straightened things out before the client was confronted with the financial equivalent of a shotgun wedding. The PH may as well have shot himself in the foot.
8. Keep Your Client on the Right Side of the Law
I once wounded a Caracal at night, while shooting porcupines on a potato farm. The evening hunt was a side-event to a group bird hunt in South Africa. The outfitter had offered some night varmint hunting, and I shot the cat in tall grass with a scoped handgun, drew blood, but was unable to find him in the dark. I was a nervous wreck all night, thinking that we had lost him. The following morning, at first light, and with the help of a terrier, we treed the cat after an exciting chase. I finished him just as the sun rose over the trees. Needless to say, I was ecstatic. I had recovered a cat that I thought was lost, a trophy that I wanted badly, and this was the crowning moment of my hunt. The chase was exhilarating and the setting, with the sun a red orb in the morning sky, was memorable. Three months later, the taxidermist informed me that Nature Conservation had confiscated my trophy, as there was no permit. The outfitter denied being aware of a new law requiring permits for small cats. Furthermore, I learned that the landowner was not OK with the taking of cats, his permission being specific to crop-raiding bushpig and porcupines. Similarly, but on a bigger scale, hunting was once being offered in Zimbabwe's National Parks by unscrupulous outfitters working with rogue Parks officers, for elephant as well as other species. This is illegal and could result in imprisonment of the hunter, foreign or not. Perhaps the best example of this sort of thing, is the recent debacle with the named lion shot on the boundary of Hwange National Park.
9. A Safe Hunt is Better than a Successful Hunt
A Namibian outfitter was host to two clients, a man and his wife, both bow hunters. After several animals were wounded, the PH decided that the clients should exchange their bows for rifles and attempt to ambush the wounded animals coming to water. The hunters split up, each going to a blind at a separate water hole, the wife being assigned a tracker in lieu of a PH. When a wounded Kudu appeared, the tracker passed a loaded 7mm Magnum rifle to the woman, shooting her in the thigh as he did so. She recovered after a lengthy hospital stay, but was disfigured for life. The operator lost his SCI membership and was sued for a substantial amount of money. Clients are often at fault here, too. A pet peeve of mine is the so-called “African carry”, i.e. rifle barrel held in the hand, rifle balancing on the shoulder, with muzzle pointing forward. And please don't tell me that you are in control of the muzzle with this form of carry. I have hours of video that prove otherwise. This carry may be fine if you are alone, or walking in front, but I have never been on a hunt where the client hunts alone or walks in front of the rest of the party. There is invariably a tracker in the lead, followed by the PH. In most cases, clients are just copying their PH. So set the example, and have a little talk about safety at the beginning of the hunt. Shotguns are particularly nasty at close range, and a group bird hunt is by definition an unsafe act. Strict “blue sky” rules must be enforced. Any safety infractions must be corrected as they occur.
Don't rely on a safety mechanism, or on an unloaded chamber.
10. The Hunt is Not Over Until It's Over
The hunt may be over for you when the client gets on the plane, but it's not over for him until he receives his trophies in good order. An American client that I know is still waiting for his shipment of two exportable bull elephant from Zimbabwe, almost three years after the skins were in the salt. The hunt was memorable but that’s long forgotten. In its place are some very hard feelings that were vented on a well-known Internet bulletin board. Reputations were damaged and grievances were aired for thousands and thousands of potential clients to read. Not a good outcome for anyone.
In a prior article in this magazine - Seven Ways to Ruin an Otherwise Perfectly Good Safari - I drew on a real safari experience to show how clients can contribute to a poor hunt experience through their lack of proper preparation and/or their own behaviour. In this article, I draw again on genuine experience to show how outfitters and PH’s let clients down, sometimes without being conscious of their actions.
Almost all PH’s want to send their clients home with good trophies, fond memories and a smile on their faces. While most hunts go well, there are many that don't, and each year there are a few dismal failures that hurt reputations for years. There are a host of ways in which an outfitter or PH can ruin a hunt. I have tried to boil these down to ten major “commandments”, that if broken will surely result in an unhappy conclusion and damage the outfitter's or PH's reputation.
1. Know Your Client
We are talking about foreigners for the most part, who are willing to pay an enormous amount of money by local standards to enjoy sport hunting in an exotic location. But that's about the only generalization one can make. Clients come in all sizes and shapes, from many different countries and cultures, and each is unique. What is acceptable to a South African client who has hunted the bush all his life may not be acceptable to an American who may only hunt Africa once or twice. South Africans are used to basic camp facilities and understand how things work in Africa. An American is likely to expect better treatment in terms of camp and catering, and will get frustrated more quickly when things are not going well. A South African client may not place a lot of importance on trophy size, whereas an American may be obsessed with horns and tusks. And of course one cannot generalize according to nationality. Yes, many Germans are happy to shoot an old dagga boy with horns worn almost to the bosses, while most Americans will not shoot anything less than a 38” bull and may not care if the bosses are a little soft. But clients from the same country also vary through the entire spectrum. A wealthy elderly client who may have hunted all over the world will have a different set of needs on a hunt than a young buck who has scraped together his money for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. An experienced PH will try to understand what strain of client he has on his hands for the next week or two. How does this client define success? How hard will he hunt? What are his ethics? Would he rather go home empty-handed than return with a “representative of the species”. Some clients are purists, and won't shoot anything less than an exceptional trophy. Some are shooters, who want to shoot a lot of animals regardless of trophy quality. Many clients are successful people, who will approach the hunt as they approach life: as a competition to be taken seriously. Others just want to get away and relax, often with the help of liberal amounts of alcohol. Getting up at the crack of dawn is not their idea of a vacation. The first mistake a PH can make, then, is to assume that the current client is just like the last.
2. Sell What You Can Deliver, And Deliver What You Sell
This is a very common and serious shortcoming. Under pressure to move quota and fill up the calendar, there is a temptation to paint a glowing picture of the area, the camp, and the trophy quality when selling hunts. Some operators deliberately over-sell their quota, betting that some clients will fail to shoot their kudu/buffalo/bushbuck or whatever. If things work out, fine. But it's hard to tell someone who has been saving and dreaming of taking a big kudu, over the first night's dinner that there is no kudu quota remaining because the Russian high roller that was there earlier in the season shot three of them. On one occasion, while sitting around the dinner table discussing their wish lists, my group discovered that despite being only the second group of hunters through the area that season, there were only two bushbuck available to the four of us. The other four on quota for the season were being saved for later clients. We were told that we would have to sort out amongst ourselves who would get to take the two available. On a recent hunt, the PH broke the news to my client that the exportable buffalo wasn't exportable after all, and furthermore that it was going to be a cow, not a bull. Oh, and the elephant hunt would be conducted at night in a maize field, rather than by day in the Safari area! In any other business, this would be outright fraud. But somehow, in the hunting game, many outfitters and PH’s think it's OK to modify the deliverables without modifying the price. You cannot change the basic structure of the hunt once the client has paid for his ticket, and especially not when he is on the ground thousands of miles from home.
About the Author
Russ Gould is the owner of bigfivehq.com, an Internet-based business dedicated to heavy caliber rifles and big game hunting. He enjoys restoring vintage guns ,and is a licensed importer/dealer specializing in fine sporting long guns, as well as a booking agent interested in representing quality hunting outfitters that share his ethics regarding the proper conduct of a paid safari. He can be contacted at russ@vh2q.com
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