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I know many people have done it. I also know it takes a lot to kill and elephant. I have no problem hunting Elephants, just don’t know if I want to do it with a bow…..

Matt.

It's been done and with the right equipment is a reasonable option. I always thought I would go back and complete my quest but it never happened.

Many people have been successful with archery equipment on elephants and if you really want to do it, it can be done. Listen to those who have done it, not those who think it can't be done.

—jim

It is comments like these from within the hunting community that creates a lot of problems for our beloved lifestyle. Because if we would hold a referendum on hunting elephant, you would vote against hunting them with all the greenies. So next time you want to make emotional comments online, think before you do. Please.

some names from that past on that one

I dunno.......some of the sh!t you post is pretty shameful.

Shooting an elephant with a bow or gun ain't on my phucket list, but for those who want to, have at it.

The same discussion could be moved over to Whitetails also. Occasionally I make the mistake of watching Whitetail deer hunts on TV and many of them run away with the arrow hanging out of the side of them. a relatively thin shoulder blade stops penetration.

Even with moderate weight modern compounds, there are broadhead and arrow combos that would provide sufficient penetration on a Whitetail.

So should that be considered a “stunt” or unethical. I’m not saying it is or isn’t. Just throwing another angle to the (stunt) or ethics question.

However, I have zero desire to do it with a bow. If I ever do it, the only way I want to do it is with an open sighted double rifle

Also for those who have never been to Africa it is impossible to explain how amazing the animals really are!

I will have the opportunity to hunt Elephant, but am not convinced I want to use a bow.

As mentioned a “proper” stalk and brain shot at close range with a rifle is the classic way of the old elephant hunters….

On a per animal basis Africa is still way more affordable than most guided hunts.

The cost of buying a nice double rifle will definitely be more than the cost of the hunt!!

I can't read his mountain book because it's only in German, but apparently he hunted Marco Polo with his open sighted .404 elephant rifle. If that's not something a bowhunter would do . . . .:)

If it's not harmful to the resource, there isnt, much on my "never would" hunt list when it comes to big game. We all here should be knowledgable enough to know that legal hunting has a giant positive impact on elephants as a whole.

For some reason Tusk-less Cows are usually pretty ornery or rank. So you get the thrill at a fraction of the cost. Approx $10k

Whoever posted about bow fishing for blue whales :) … it’s a perfect way to ask - how big is too big, where do you draw the line?

I'm not against hunting anything. My thought is if I shot something the size of an elephant....what would I do with it? The import requirements for the parts/pieces or elephants are pretty strict. I was at Keystone Tannery/Taxi in lower PA one time dropping off some hides for tanning. I got a tour in the back work building. On the taxi side I seen some African animals in the process of being mounted. I recall a full mount giraffe....that thing was tall!! I seen several sets of elephant ears being worked on and maybe some feet.

I believe it would be fun to tag along on someone else's elephant hunt. I think that is because I could walk away afterwards with no financial or logistical obligations for the animal yet had the temporary satisfaction of being part of an elephant hunt.

I know it's different strokes for different folks. For myself, I'm thinking after I shot an elephant, would I mentally move on and be asking myself...ok...what's next on the kill list? The blue whale....a killer whale maybe? For me at my current place in life....the emotional or psychological desire (gratification???) to kill or keep killing things isn't there. I can be happy being a part of someone else's hunt. I suppose I, like many others, do still kill things for other reasons such as food and maybe a small memory or two. If I do eat some tag soup...it happens and that's cool too.

I was eventually able to book an elephant hunt and had two goals in mind. I was going to shoot a good bull and I was going to mount it when I got it back home. Every part of it was a dream come true. It took several years to get the cape and tusks back, knowing for sure, at one point that I would never see them again. When I got the call that the crates were in Houston, I drove 17 hours the next day to personally pick them up.

I shot a good bull at 15 yards with a .416 Remington mag, helped with the skinning and deboning and had a grand time. I still haven't gotten around to mounting it but I haven't given up. I always thought I would go back and get one with a bow but things changed and it's not looking good. At least I got to hunt the all time #1 animal on my list. Few hunters get that chance.

I worked very hard to prepare for that hunt, got my draw weight up to 90 pounds (and had just started archery 2 years prior and hunting about 18 months prior). I still have my Monster Safari and 14 of my elephant arrows. I am hoping to complete that quest in the near future but I am now working on planning the NA Super Slam and that is going to force me to schedule around the hunting I can do here since I am limited to seasons whereas in Africa, I can essentially hunt whenever I have both the time and the money. My best guess is that I only have 10 years or so before my body won't pull back a bow like that and I need to get all three of my extra large animals still (elephant, hippo, rhino).

Back to the thread topic. I'm very interested in any setups someone has used to harvest an elephant as well.

And at under 25 yards, I’m not sure that it takes any less nerve to take one with a rifle than with a bow…. especially when there’s a guy (or several) standing right behind you with a Stopping Rifle which he has used before.

So it seems a bit of a Stunt. I would never think more of a man because he had done it, but I might think less, depending on his attitude about it.

I would be willing to take a young, tuskless female as part of a culling effort if I were in a situation where an operation needed help reducing the herd.

But I’ve read up on the science, and it turns out that the oldest bulls are the best & most successful breeders - 45 year-olds (no, I did not misplace a decimal point) are just coming into their prime years, and the oldest individuals (of both sexes) are the most critical to the long term survival of actual Elephants as Natural Selection has formed them.

Hunting them for Ivory - legal or not - is making them into something other (and I think less) than Nature needs from them. Some do need to be removed from some areas; some need to disperse through (or be moved) through areas without Elephants into places where there is actually room for them.

Great line from a book I read just recently (The Last Giants; Levison Wood): a Native guide said something to the effect that all of these non-African people who keep telling the Africans how they must manage their elephant populations should be required to adopt a few herds and see how they get along with them first. Then, perhaps with a little direct knowledge, they might offer some productive solutions.

What actually terrifies me is that…. At some point, Humanity is going to have to decide whether it is more important to maintain some semblance of biodiversity… or to feed all of the humans.

I suppose the planet will survive, one way or another… At least until the sun burns out. But it’s going to be one hell of a genetic bottleneck at some point…

I suppose it depends on one's definition of stunt they are using:

noun: stunt; plural noun: stunts an action displaying spectacular skill and daring. ** OR ** something unusual done to attract attention.

I suppose many would fall into one camp or the other and they would often have the opposite opinion of the person depending on which definition of stunt they are using.

Shooting a deer at 300 or 500 or 1200 yards with a rifle off of sandbags… is also a Stunt. Don’t get me started on archery stunts and YouTube Hero wannabes….

The thing about shooting an Elephant with a bow is that even if everything goes perfectly (by ordinary Bowhunting standards) and Jumbo goes down in 20-30 seconds, you’re still - VERY foreseeably - putting your PH and his team in a life-threatening situation, and not everyone always walks away from that.

I have no clue what percentage of elephants would turn and burn vs turn and charge, but I’m plenty sure enough that if an elephant with 30 seconds to live decides that he wants you to be dead… You’d best be 32 seconds away.

Yeah, I know: If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have signed on. And your PH knows what he’s getting into. All true. But 35 years ago, I was taught that it’s unethical to knowingly go into a situation where if anything Goes Bad, someone else is going to have to put themselves in foreseeable peril to save your sorry carcass. I look at pretty much everything the same way.

Guess you could say that I don’t believe in gambling with someone else’s money.

That’s my Belief System on matters such as this. Different people have different beliefs. That’s OK.

Just making it clear that my POV is based on more than whether I think someone else is compensating for his small penis. I don’t care - not until somebody else gets hurt.

When any dangerous game animal wants you dead, you either kill it very quickly or die. The only real difference with elephants and other animals is that you don't have the alternative option of climbing a tree to escape the danger that you have with rhino, hippo, croc, and Cape buffalo. The cats can climb the tree and an elephant will just push it over unless it is a really old baobab.

This doesn't just apply to hunting, either. It is the same thing for people who climb Everest, K2 or any other high-risk mountain. Rodeo clowns put themselves in danger to distract bulls from the bull riders. I would hesitate to paint with such broad strokes that we label all those activities as unethical.

And Mtn Rescue folks have a name for those who pull stupid $#!+ vs. those who know what they’re doing, don’t take unnecessary risks and stuff happens anyway.

You Poke the Elephant, and you have poked an elephant. It’s gonna be a Rodeo. And I’d never want to be That Client who got somebody killed….

Climbing K2 doesn't need to be done any more than hunting an elephant does, but people do it and almost always they are making sure they are well prepared. I think most of the people who are ill prepared for either mountain climbing, or hunting are generally on more entry level rungs in their respective hobbies. I mean, the people I see that are not prepared for a hunt are the locals out looking for deer after dusting off their bow from last year and their practice is generally 5-6 shots at a bale of hay in the camp area somebody else set up. One year I recall seeing somebody who had arrows that didn't even weigh the same and one was slightly bent. I would never see that in Africa on safari. The bowhunter going for an elephant in Africa surely knows his stuff and is properly prepared and if he isn't, then his PH is going to recognize that immediately because part of his job is assessing if his client is even up to the challenge. My PH had me take a few animals before we went after by buffalo. Seeing my arrow bury to the fletches in a giraffe was convincing enough and then we started the DG hunt. I would expect any guide or PH to do his due diligence on any similar activity and again, reiterate that hunting an elephant with a bow isn't really that different than deciding to climb K2.

To each his own, though. If it’s legal and the animal isn’t wasted, have at it if that’s your thing.

Matt

Matt

So off we went for a maybe a quarter mile. Suddenly we were close to an elephant that had pushed over a tree and was eating leaves and bark off it. We got into 12 yards. I got a great photo of the bull quartered away and still remember his stomach rumbling. My PH says to me "if he comes our way we have to run!" My response was "don't stop or I'll run you over!"

Anyway, the bull didn't discover us and I dare say, 12 yards looking up at big bull is awe inspiring. I never had the urge to go back and arrow one, but appreciate that some of us do! Don't think it related to penis size either, more like how we are wired.

Is that a bull you took with a bow?

Why is killing a deer good but killing a giraffe bad? Few people have a problem with killing a warthog but many cringe at killing a zebra. Think deeply for a minute and try to justify your position. Can you justify it? Do you fully understand the biological reasons behind certain hunts? Is a completely imotional response a valid resonse?

John Dutton articulated what I've been saying for years. "Just how cute does an animal have to be before you care if it dies to feed you". And he wasn't talking about animals that you think are acceptable to eat.

Hundres of billions of animals are killed each year in the process of agriculture and few of them are eaten by humans. "You can only kill an animal if you are going to eat it". That's an emotional statement. There are thousands of reasons to kill specific animals that you don't intend to eat to ensure that the balance remains. To ensure that other food is not destroyed. To ensure the cheap and easy access to what we need to survive. To ensure that valuable populations are protected. Before vilifying those who would do what you aren't willing or capable of doing is probably morally questionable. Try very hard to look at why something needs doing before condemning it. I realize that is a daunting task but as hunters, we need to fully understand the "why" before we condemn it.

God gave us dominion over the animals. With that comes great responsibiity. We are tasked with ensuring that all animals, especially the wild ones, are properly respected, properly managed, and properly consumed. If the populations get out of balance, we have to bring them back into balance for the benefit of all of them. We are pretty good at that as long as you take emotions out of the equation. Killing elephants in some areas is a necessaty. Would you rather pay someone to do it or allow someone to pay to do it? The answer is obvious. There is a clear economic incentive to properly manage all wild beasts.

I will fall back to the old Peta statement that a chicken = a dog = a cow = an elephant. Why is one sacred and the other nothing special? I get it. I don't have a love of chickens that I do for elephants. I certainly don't have the level of respect for them I do for elephants. I also would never have the level of respect for elephants that I do now if I had never hunted one.

You learn a lot about animals when you hunt them. This is why hunters tend to love the species they hunt. They want them around for future generations. I would be willing to wager I have a better understanding of elephants than most here and not because I am any better educated or for any other reason than that I have actually hunted them. There are plenty of reasons to hunt them. The vast majority have nothing to do with ego or flexing one's finances. Those few who have walked miles over elephant tracks understand this. Most of those who have not done so are not only ignorant, but often unwilling to learn. Fortunately, places like this have very few people like that, compared to most other places I have found on the net.

For anybody who has just a little over an hour of their time and would like to see an amazing documentary on elephants and their impact on Kruger National Park, I would HIGHLY suggest watching this video:

Cull giraffe hunts can be had for a few thousand dollars, even multiple animals in that price.

Elephants that are non-importable, even tuskless or small males, can be added on hunts for $4-5000. So all in less than $10k can get you an Elephant hunt, with some plains game.

Of course you can pay way way more for top end trophy hunts with all the 5 star lodges and cuisine.

But you would be hard pressed to find a fully guided elk hunt for those prices.

Thornton, Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you!"

It’s not the Disney cartoon many have in their mind. For some reason, even North American hunters that are pretty savvy on whitetail and N.A. Game population dynamics. But ignore that same science for animals they don’t want to hunt.

I have been guilty myself of weighing in a topic before fully educating myself.

Your hunt was fun to read and ethically sound. I tried to square the criticism you just responded to from the same poster who put this on the win for the good guys threads;

“ This grouse took about ten shots before I hit it. Actually walked back to my pack and reloaded with full Velocity ammo instead of the subsonics I missed him ten times with.”

I am willing to bet most of the non-hunting public is more comfortable with your field behavior than his.

I enjoyed your story tremendously. At one time I intended to go. I still have my custom safari grade M700s in .375 H&H and .416 Remington Mag which will be left to a deserving family member who I hope will use them.

Thanks for sharing!

I am on pins and needles waiting to hear back on my rhino permit. Hopefully I get word tomorrow, since I am just over 2 weeks away from wheels up.

My total application was around 30 pages long, not including anything provided by my outfitter.

The local offices for the permit had approved my permit and also were on board with allowing me to use a bow. The National office for nature conservation just today denied my bow exemption. In my application I have already stated that as an exclusive bow hunter, I have zero interest in hunting the animal with any weapon other than a bow and if I am approved for a permit but not an exemption for the bow, I would have to respectfully decline to accept the permit for use with a rifle and cancel my plans to hunt a rhino.

We are scheduling an appeal for either Friday or Monday but there is little chance to get them to change their ruling. Still, if we do not push, it will never get opened back up and so I have to push hard and appeal and hope they change their mind. I have already been down this path in Zimbabwe with Zim Parks on my elephant and it was denied in writing. Now, I make sure I don’t pay one penny for a hunt until my bow permit is approved. I am wheels up in 15 days now with no hunt itinerary and probably won’t be able to get things locked down until 11 days before I leave at best.

If anybody knows how to change the mind of these guys or has ever been a part of getting regulations changed for bow hunting, I certainly wouldn’t mind the advice.

There is always a rifle back up when hunting in Africa and when DG hunting, that rifle is .375 H&H or larger. My PH for my elephant hunt carried a .458 Lott so they run big heavy calibers. The guide backing up my first Cape buffalo hunt carried a .416 Rigby and the all the PHs on my lion hunts have carried .375 H&H Magnums. When out hunting plains game, I have seen PH's carry rifles as small as .300 Win Mag but that was in areas where there was no DG present (aside from possibly a leopard).

In reality though, with a 1,250 grain arrow coming from an 88lb bow with a 350 IBO speed and 28.5" draw, I cannot really see the rhino survive the arrow unless I simply make a terrible shot and cannot get a follow up and have to resort to a rifle. That or he charges and then the PH earns his money the hard way. Charges happen and I have been charged by lion and had a tracker charged by a wildebeest. I have told my PH's that I am not going to be the dick client who gets angry with the PH for doing his job of keeping me and my hunting party safe. If he feels he has to shoot the rifle, the only person I should be mad at is myself. Hopefully that doesn't happen here because then it is not a bow kill and I would have to go through this whole thing again.

Right now, my rhino hunt is in the application and appeals process and that might take a few years. My permit request to use a bow was denied by the national office of nature conservation. I was told that the local office was going to approve it but needed the national office to sign off on it. It has been a long time since a rhino was legit bow hunted in South Africa.

We have an appeal scheduled as soon as we can get somebody from the national office to hear it. That should happen tomorrow or Monday. I am told it is unlikely they will change their mind. Still, I will continue to press forward with trying to get them to approve a bow permit and might make it an annual attempt as I continue to get more and more progress towards my African grand slam. I figure that if I can get the rhino permit, there is a good chance to try and get a hippo permit, then a croc permit and finally an elephant permit, which would essentially reopen bow hunting for all species in South Africa. If things change, I will get my white rhino now but otherwise I will just do more plains game on this trip. There is no other new dangerous game for me than I can get in South Africa otherwise. I am racing time though. I don't know how many more years my body will let me pull a 90lb bow. Most likely, I will be fine one day and then "pop" and I will never be able to shoot 90 again.

I would prefer to do my green hunt on a rhino when my children are all old enough to go to Africa and really appreciate the trip. When I took them to Australia and Singapore years ago, they were young and one of them has her memories she recalls were sitting in a hot tub in the hotel and eating noodles for lunch. I would think being able to come up and take a photo with a real live black rhino would be a cool hunting memory even for the daughter who does not agree with hunting.

My rhino bow permit was denied so I am back on looking for elephant with a bow. I dusted off my Tembo package of arrows and don't want to have that done for nothing. Heard Zim was allowing it again but have not gotten confirmation. Too late for this year but maybe for 2023...

WDM Bell shot hundreds of bulls in the head with a 7x57 and FMJ slugs. He know exactly where to aim at any angle and if he pulled the trigger a bull dropped. Today, that would be considered unethical. It really comes down to shot placement.

That is where I’m contemplating an elephant hunt

https://gothunts.com/bowhunting-in-zimbabwe/

Been on 2 Archery Elephant hunts. Tried to add one onto my Leopard hunt in 2021, Zimbabwe won’t allow, too much pressure from Greenies!

It’s not necessarily the same time frame for recovery, but we have the same issues here; there are landscape ecologists who have suggested that the whitetails in places like VA are sufficiently overpopulated to prevent forest regeneration following a major fire or hurricane. Eastern hardwoods could become savanna. Something they have never been.

That’s why wolves were brought back in to the Yellowstone system - something had to be done, and hunting was off the table within the National Park system.

The thing to take in, though…

When a species is allowed to become grossly overpopulated, whether out of a desire to “protect” it or just because we humans want artificially high populations to ensure that we can have a “quality” hunting experience, there’s no difference in the outcome. It’s a train wreck.

Hunters can be just as wrong-headed and short-sighted as Antis; we just rationalize it differently.

It’s not necessarily the same time frame for recovery, but we have the same issues here; there are landscape ecologists who have suggested that the whitetails in places like VA are sufficiently overpopulated to prevent forest regeneration following a major fire or hurricane. Eastern hardwoods could become savanna. Something they have never been.

That’s why wolves were brought back in to the Yellowstone system - something had to be done, and hunting was off the table within the National Park system.

The thing to take in, though…

When a species is allowed to become grossly overpopulated, whether out of a desire to “protect” it or just because we humans want artificially high populations to ensure that we can have a “quality” hunting experience, there’s no difference in the outcome. It’s a train wreck.

Hunters can be just as wrong-headed and short-sighted as Antis; we just rationalize it differently.

Which is problematic. Whales, dolphins and the great apes, too. Pretty much all long-lived mammals.

But where do we draw the line between an animal and a creature that is afforded more “personhood” than other “animals” ?(because People are Animals, too…)

Since we’re talking about matters of Law here - international law at that - religious-based positions don’t figure. So let’s not go there.

But the elephants aren’t managing themselves and they’re (at least in Kruger) clearly not managing their own ecosystem for sustainability. If they’re killing off 5,000 year-old trees/forests, ir would be more accurate to put them on par with the Taliban taking out world heritage sites. So some management must be done.

Total respect for those with no desire to kill one, but I have no idea how many places in Africa feel like they need to bring in more of them… so Kruger at least, evidently has a surplus that needs to be dealt with.

I still can’t get behind taking out the biggest, oldest bulls (unless they are specifically known to be crop-raiders or a threat to human life) but unnatural selection is reversing the natural order of things, so probably culling of younger, tuskless individuals is the way to go. To the extent that individuals are traumatized by “witnessing” a cull, seems that the thing to do would be to basically go wholesale, which sounds horrible; but if you accept the idea that a lone survivor would have “psychological” trauma (not convinced that that is the case), maybe it’s better off being taken out with the rest of the bunch. If 90% reduction is what’s really needed, there aren’t many appealing options.

The trick is leaving enough of the eldest ones which know all the tricks and watersources so that they’ can pass that knowledge to younger members of the herd.

Messy as hell.