Hunters in Britain are challenged by legal bans and animal rights campaigns. They need an imaginative leap over mental boundaries, by reaching out to native peoples such as the Bushmen/San, now facing harsh modernity without any right to choose. Is it possible to create a new, global narrative that joins both types of hunter in a shared defence of human rights and fragile wildness?

The recent forced removal of 2,000 Bushmen/San people from their homeland in the Kalahari area of central Botswana is not just a brutal act of ethnic cleansing; it also means the end for a hunter–gatherer society whose care and knowledge of their fragile eco-system hold many lessons for the rest of humanity. The Johannesburg summit must attend to the inhumanity on its doorstep.