Two Spaniards are part of the list of the twenty most prolific trophy hunters in the world. And a third, if it were not for his aversion to receive prizes or participate in competitions, would be officially, without a doubt, the man who has killed the most living beings throughout his existence.
The British Oenegé has first prepared the list of the most avid collectors of exotic animals, or parts of their body, with the intention of exhibiting them in their private rooms or museums. Obtaining this data has been a long and tedious track of public information, together with a hidden research task, sometimes with false identities, within organizations such as Safari Club International (SCI), responsible for the most famous awards around this hunting activity of high economic cost.
Of the first twenty, Spaniards apart, fifteen are Americans. Three are Russians. The number one is George Harms, a magnate of the construction of the state of New Jersey who has won on a couple of occasions, and the most important Prize of the SCI, the World Conservation & Hunting Awardfor participating in the main competitions of society, contributing financially to conservation tasks and also, yes, to hunt up to 537 copies of different species.
is responsible for the death of at least 2,000 animals that belong to 420 different species. Its predilection is for the Mountain Hunting, but among its trophies is a leopard of Zimbabue, a Thailand tiger, a lion of South Africa, a white rhinoceros of Angola or a Cameroon monkey. And fourteen elephants. When the police began to investigate much of their trophies for a possible continued crime of traffic of protected species,
Gómez Sequeira occupies the eighth place in the world on the list prepared by CBTH.
José Martí Ruano, co -founder of the law firm Larrauri & Martí, has hunted 258 different species of animals. Normally, it is formed with a copy of each. But he also has four elephants, seven leopards and seven African buffalos.
It is the tenth trophy hunter on the list.
But from his own books, in which he tells decades of hunting around the world, such as Memories of a life on the path of elephantsthe organization has pointed to Spanish Antonio Tony Sánchez Ariño, son of a Valencian surgeon, as the largest trophy hunter of all time. 4,044 confirmed animals, including 1,317 elephants, 340 lions, 167 leopards, 127 black rhinos, 2,093 African buffalo.
And two gorillas. Sánchez Ariño, personal friend of King Emeritus Juan Carlos I (came out in his defense after the Botsuana incident: “Hunting is an art; killing, a disgusting act,” he said), reveals in an episode that went unnoticed to the media, and that has rescued the study of CBTH, which ended with two of these primates in a hunting expedition in equatorial guinea, when it was still a Spanish colony.
“He has never wanted to appear to any competition, nor has he aspired to any prize. If he had done it, he would be at the top of the list without a hard place, because for what I have been able to confirm, he has the highest figure of collected pieces,” explains Eduardo Gonçalves, the British-Portuguese journalist who is now in charge of the CBTH, and that he has managed to infiltrate for years in some of the organizations of more prestigious hunting to collect data and testimonies.
In memory of the lion ‘Cecil’
The presentation of the CBTH list coincides with the tenth anniversary of the death of the lion Cecil In Zimbabue. An American dentist unleashed international outrage by attracting the feline outside the Hwange National Park, with the remains of the body of an elephant, leaving it seriously badly injured from an arrow and finishing it ten hours of agony later.
From that episode, which aroused an ephemeral political impulse for acting against the importation of trophies of exotic and protected species, at least another 10,000 lions have fallen dejected by hunters, according to the data of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of wildlife and flora. Only in 2023, according to the convention, about 25,000 trophies in the form of entire corpses, or part of them (head, skin, limbs …), from one hundred protected species, were imported to the country of residence of the hunters.
Despite the multiple promises of successive British governments for ending this practice, it is still valid, in an environment that mixes legality, allegality and other gray shadows such as bribery.
-What motivates all these people to launch this race for years to accumulate trophies?
“The answer to which I have reached all these years is, to summarize, the enormous impact of adrenaline that they achieve with this activity. Something that is very powerful and addictive. It is a chemical reaction in the form of emotion. A hunter who has dejected numerous elephants, lions and leopards described it as the heroin in vein,” says Gonçalves.
The publication of the list with the most avid hunters in the world, which will take place this Monday, will also incorporate three books and a documentary in which all the CBTH investigations to hunters, organizers of hunts, organizers of hunts and all the economic world that generates this activity are gathered. In fact, the first book uses as a title a record publicly admitted by Sánchez Ariño: 20 Elephants in 75 minutes. Personalities such as the humorist Ricky Gervais, the conservationist Jane Goodall (the chimpanzees expert and other primates on which the film was based Gorillas in the fog) or the British actress Jude Dench have given their public support for efforts to eradicate trophies hunting.
“These hunters are very rich people, who can allow them to travel around the world and do what they want. It is possible that 80% or 90% of the citizens of their countries of origin reject these practices, but they do not completely the same,” he says on the phone from Johannesburg Linda Park, which in front of the organization Voice4Lions Fight to put an end to the mass hunt throughout Africa of these beautiful animals. “The hunters always go behind the male with the most lush hair, which the most powerful genes usually have. When ending them, other males will come to seize the pack and kill females and puppies. By a death, you can end up causing ten more,” explains Park.
The CBTH insistently claims, with little success to date, an international moratorium on hunting the most threatened species, and the general prohibition to all governments to be able to issue export or import licenses of the so -called trophies.
