Who Owns the Animals?

It sounds absurd at first. How can anyone own a lion, a giraffe, or a herd of buffalo? Yet across Africa, laws and practices around wildlife vary dramatically. In some countries, individuals can legally buy and sell wild animals. In others, every elephant, wildebeest, or leopard is considered a national asset. These systems reveal much about how we value nature — and the delicate balance between protecting the wild and commodifying it.

South Africa provides the clearest example of private ownership. Landowners can buy, breed, and sell wildlife just as they might cattle. Over the past 50 years, roughly 20 million hectares of private land have been converted into game ranches, private reserves, and breeding operations — far more than the 11 million hectares held in state and provincial parks. Photographic reserves, hunting blocks, and breeding farms have multiplied. The incentive is economic: when a buffalo is worth millions of rand, landowners invest heavily in protecting animals and restoring habitat.

The figures are striking. Earlier this year, a buffalo bull named Magic fetched USD 1.2 million at auction. In 2016, another bull, Horizon, was valued at USD 12 million. Disease-free certification — ensuring buffalo are free of bovine TB and foot-and-mouth — drives much of this market. It has fostered genetic management, veterinary innovation, and advanced auction systems, channeling private money into conservation at a scale few governments can match.

The model is often misunderstood. Many assume private ownership is just a mask for exploitation. In reality, it is nuanced. Some animals are bought from breeders and marked; others are considered the responsibility of landowners managing them within fenced properties. In certain cases — such as land adjoining Kruger National Park — fences are removed to allow collective management rather than individual control. Even then, all operations must comply with regulations: registration, licences, and permits are required for hunting, breeding, sales, and translocations.

Ownership has made wildlife financially valuable, driving investment in land, veterinary science, genetics, and management. Rhino are perhaps the clearest example. By most accounts, Southern Africa’s rhino survive today because farmers saw value in protecting and breeding them. This created a genetic pool that spread across provinces and now supplies reintroductions elsewhere on the continent. African Parks is undertaking one of the largest rewilding efforts in history, moving more than 2,000 southern white rhino from South African breeding facilities into secure parks and reserves across Africa over the next decade — about 300 animals a year, each forming the nucleus of new wild populations. The same principle applies to other species: much of the game used to repopulate wildlife areas across Africa originates from South African ranches and reserves. Private ownership has, quite literally, restocked the continent.

But there are pitfalls. Regulations remain largely paper-based, creating loopholes and opportunities for abuse. The high value of individual animals can drive intensive breeding systems where habitat is reduced to fenced-off feeding camps, often for a single species. This degrades vegetation, disrupts soils, and unravels ecological integrity. True conservation requires embracing the whole system — predators and prey, small antelope as well as iconic megafauna. Across South Africa, some properties strive for this balance, maintaining functioning ecosystems with controlled populations of lions, wild dogs, antelope, and more. Others focus narrowly on one lucrative species, undermining ecological health. Deeper risks include moving animals far outside their ecological range, introducing exotics such as tigers, or keeping elephants in habitats that cannot sustain them. These distortions highlight the danger of reducing wildlife to mere assets.

South Africa is not alone in experimenting with private ownership. Namibia follows a similar principle south of the so-called “red line,” a veterinary fence first erected in 1897 to control livestock disease. South of this line, landowners can fence properties and claim ownership of the animals within. North of it, the land is communal, and wildlife remains the property of the state. Elsewhere, approaches diverge. In Zimbabwe, wildlife largely belongs to the state, which has constrained private reserves, though some landowners have successfully fenced and managed game. In Zambia, private animal ownership is permitted only on properties under 10,000 hectares; if the landholding is larger, the animals automatically become state property. Mozambique has a similar threshold at 9,999 hectares. These rules allow individuals to manage and breed wildlife on smaller holdings while keeping larger landscapes under state custodianship.

These contrasts highlight the central dilemma: ownership is never straightforward. Governments set thresholds balancing political, ecological, and economic priorities. The result is a patchwork of models, each with its own benefits, contradictions, and unintended consequences.

East Africa takes a very different approach. In Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, no individual can own a wild animal; all wildlife is held in trust by the state. This has preserved vast, interconnected ecosystems where animals move freely across landscapes, guided by rainfall, instinct, and seasonal cycles rather than fences. The great wildebeest migration surges across international borders, elephants follow ancient routes between dry-season waterholes and wet-season grasslands, and predators roam at scales unimaginable in more fragmented landscapes. These movements are not merely spectacles; they are foundations of ecological resilience, enabling genetic exchange, habitat recovery, and adaptation to a changing climate.

Yet state custodianship carries human and practical costs. Farmers whose crops are raided by elephants, or herders whose livestock fall prey to predators, often see no tangible benefit from the wildlife around them. Compensation schemes are slow, inadequate, or fail to reach those most affected. In many areas, the state cannot fully manage wildlife, leaving animals vulnerable to poaching or reliant on private and donor funding. Humans and wildlife compete for the same resources — water, pasture, and farmland — putting communities and animals on a collision course. Retaliation, though regrettable, is understandable. Without incentives linked to conservation, ideals of free-roaming wildlife clash with daily survival.

Efforts to share tourism revenue — Kenya’s conservancies, Tanzania’s Wildlife Management Areas, Uganda’s gorilla permit schemes — aim to turn wildlife from a threat into an asset. At their best, they provide income, jobs, and a reason for communities to tolerate risk. Yet these programmes remain uneven: payments may be delayed, siphoned through administrative layers, or distributed in ways that leave many households excluded. For those on the front line, promises from Nairobi, Dodoma, or Kampala often feel distant.

The question of ownership is not unique to Africa. In the United States, wild animals are generally considered a public resource held in trust by the state. Landowners can apply for licences or permits to hunt or cull deer, bison, and other game on their property, including “problem” animals, provided they follow seasonal and regulatory limits. At the same time, the U.S. hosts one of the largest populations of privately kept exotic animals in the world. Loopholes and limited federal oversight have allowed thousands of lions, tigers, and other big cats to be bred and owned as pets or display animals, often in conditions far removed from conservation. This demonstrates that ownership debates are not confined to Africa: every country navigates tensions between public trust, private rights, and animal welfare.

India takes a strictly state-centered approach. Hunting of wild animals has been banned since 1972 and no individual can own or trade in native species. All wildlife is vested in the state, from tigers and elephants to leopards and spotted deer. Conservation is managed through state-run reserves such as Project Tiger, where access and tourism are tightly regulated. This has helped safeguard some of the world’s most threatened species but concentrates power in government hands, leaving communities around reserves bearing the costs of crop loss, livestock depredation, or human-wildlife conflict.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that no single model works everywhere. South Africa’s fenced system suits a country where wildlife migrations have long been blocked and intensive land use dominates. Botswana’s unfenced landscapes allow free-roaming herds impossible under a private-ownership system. Context matters: ownership works in some landscapes, state custodianship in others.

The debate is not just about law and economics. It cuts to something deeper: what does it mean for an animal to be wild? For many, the idea of “owning” a wild creature is offensive. Animals, they argue, are not here for our enjoyment; they should roam free. Yet humanity does not treat animals this way: we eat them, trade them, ride them, experiment on them, and sometimes humiliate them online for fleeting entertainment.

Perhaps the real question is not “who owns the animals” but whether animals should be owned at all. Are they assets, national treasures, sentient beings, or something else entirely? The challenge may be to move beyond ownership as the framework and instead embrace stewardship — ensuring that, whether on private ranches in South Africa or state-managed landscapes in East Africa, economic incentives are aligned with ecological responsibility. And there is a stark reality: stewardship costs money. Someone, somewhere, must pay to guard, feed, monitor, and protect wildlife. Without sustained funding — from governments, tourism, private owners, or donors — even the best intentions will fail.

The future of Africa’s wildlife depends on getting this balance right. Economics will always matter. But wildness matters too — and without investment, wildness cannot survive.