The leaders of these conservancies protect and count their wildlife, and make informed decisions on hunting quotas, in order to keep their lands and animals in as harmonious a balance as possible. Game guides and scouts keep a watch for poachers, and in general, the conservancies feel a special pride that they have been entrusted with this large responsibility. Tourism and hunting are both adding to the local economies through use of the conservancies, although hunting has been noted to add vastly more to the economic support than does tourism. Such enterprises are expensive to operate properly. When animals are killed, the local villagers use the meat, and local people are trained by conservancy leaders to be game guides, and to watch out for poachers. The employment and the use of the meat are extremely important in a country whose people are "protein starved" compared to people in Europe and North America.

Maggi Barnard, a writer who knows Namibia and its problems, has described a recent dispute between conservancy leaders and a protectionist organization, Save the Rhino Trust, or SRT. The latter is calling for a ban on hunting in the Kunene Region, a dry and mountainous area, claiming that hunting is disadvantageous to the tourism industry.

Conservancy leaders counter with the information that there should be no conflict in the huge game reserves between tourism and hunting, because the hunting is done on foot, and is not done at water holes unless a specific problem animal has to be eliminated, in which case, hunting by the water hole is the most efficient method. Therefore, hunting does not disrupt animal behavior to any great extent, and because it is only infrequently done at water holes, does not conflict with tourism, which depends on areas around water holes for the greater concentrations of game to be viewed.

This dispute in Namibia is just another example of the modern day protectionist propaganda that tourism and active management carried out by hunting can not successfully co-exist. We see it in the whaling issue, and now it is becoming more common in Africa, where it is essential that large game species be kept under strict population control so that people, animals, and the general environment shall all prosper in a balance as close to nature's own as possible.