Two subscribers have checked in with reports on a hunt in Central African Republic. Both hunts were arranged with Jean-Pierre Bernon’s Club Faune and were conducted by Mathieu Laboureur of Idogo Safaris. One is a very negative report from subscriber Robert Costos. The other is a rave review from subscriber Pemble Davis.
In total, we have 22 other reports already in our database on Club Faune. Of those, three are complaints, and they are all for hunts in Benin. We have six other reports on hunts in CAR with Club Faune, all positive. So, we were very surprised when we received the complaint from Costos. His hunt took place in February/March 2009. This was his eleventh African safari, and he says it was his only bad experience. He begins outlining the problems with his hunt by saying that he was never told that Club Faune was not the actual operator, but more of a booking agent. “This left me with inaccurate descriptions of the hunting itself and resulted in my being assigned to a poor operation rather than a good operation,” he says. Also, he says he was not told that the bongo hunting would be from a blind, nor that he would be overnighting in one.
On the hunting concession he says the area was constrained because the two main blinds were only a mile apart, covering a relatively small area. “Five bongos had already been shot out of these blinds before my arrival,” he says. “Clearly the number of bongo available to come to these salt licks was limited because after spending 14 hours a night for 14 different nights for a grand total of 192 hours of boring blackness, I failed to get a bongo.” The other problem with the concession, he says, is that it was roughly divided in half with an apparent “gentleman’s agreement” that half belonged to poachers. Out of six animals that Costos shot, he says three had multiple machine gun holes in them with one being quite fresh. “I questioned Club Faune about security and poaching in CAR several times,” he says, “only to be told that those fears were unfounded and inaccurate.....
