African Hunting Gazette

Our Objective is simple and clear - to promote hunting in Africa. And everything we do, focuses on this central mission. We believe that for the passionate hunters they are either hunting, or spend their time wishing they were hunting. This publication helps them get through that time when they are not actually in the bush. Our reader is more committed, more passionate and has tremendous interest in just about everything to do with the African Safari. From cover to cover the AHG brings you everything you need to know about hunting the great continent of Africa. From the southern tip of Africa to the northern reaches of Ethiopia, we go about pursuing our simple and unambiguous objective.

African Hunting Gazette

Kariba, Crocs and the Caprivi • At Makuti, everything changes. Turning left, you start descending along a narrow, windy road. The vegetation changes, and you’ve left the maddening trucks that ply en route to or from Zambia that make the road from Kariba to Harare a hell run.

When hunting, conservation and education combine • Welcome to the CRCS Outdoors, Avula Safaris, and Rockwood Conservation’s South African Adventure.

PH Profile Peter Chipman • This story all started 36 years ago. I grew up in a family that hunted, but not professionally. My father was a commercial crocodile-skin hunter as well as an ivory hunter way back from the 1940s onwards. I grew up hunting on the farm, fell in love with hunting and then actually stayed in Lusaka, right close to Zambia Safaris, which at that time was the biggest safari company in Africa. I used to see all their vehicles coming and going. Sometimes they’d come to our farm, buy chicken eggs, and I’d ask them questions, and slowly, slowly I learnt about safari hunting - and I fell in love with it. In my last year at school I started enquiring and thinking maybe that could be my career. And now, here we are. Turned out I never went to college; I was in the bush.

LEOPARD HUNTERS are crazy • Leopard hunters are unstable, mad, insane, totally bonkers, crazy! The time and effort it takes to catch one of these beautiful charismatic cats is usually monumental. Last-day success or total failure seems to be the norm.

SENGWA safari • Most professional hunters/guides, like many human beings, have an ego. How we deal with our egos as professionals in both hunting and guiding is what is important to ourselves and to those who judge us as professionals in our wildlife business - namely, our clients.

Like old HOME WEEK • I first met Eldre Hattingh in 2005 or 2006. He showed up with a booth at my local sportsmen’s show, the first Africa safari operator and PH that I recall having attended. He was just a young man at the time, probably 26 or 27, but he had an earnestness and transparency about him that made me instantly like him. At that very first encounter I told him I would one day book a safari with him, and in 2008 I did just that. At the time, his Lucca Africa Safaris lodge was in Limpopo province, and my wife and I spent 10 days with Eldre and his team. We weren’t at the lodge long, however, just the few days required to see the area and for me to take a fine Limpopo bushbuck. After that, the three of us travelled south, visiting Kruger National Park, and then stopping here and there to enjoy the wildlife and the landscape of South Africa. Along the way we took time out for me to shoot a nyala, then a couple days later, a zebra. We had a wonderful time together (my wife soon thinking of him as a third son) and formed a fast friendship.

The Odd Couple and the HIPPO RIBS • Do you remember the 1970’s American sitcom, “The Odd Couple”? The comedy’s two lead characters were Felix Unger and Oscar Madison. Felix was the uptight, neurotic, OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) photographer whose wife threw him out of the house. Felix then moved in with his old friend, Oscar Madison, a...