The sheep hunters
The search for the ultimate trophy is luring hunters to Kyrgyzstan

By Karin Palmquist

"It's an incredible feeling," Foster Yancey, a Georgia real estate developer and trophy hunter, says of downing his first Marco Polo sheep six months ago. "A Marco Polo sheep is the ultimate prize for a trophy hunter." 

Sheep, though? Do real men hunt sheep? "Oh these aren't some cute, cuddly animals," Yancey says. "They're 500 pound creatures. The challenge is you have to beat the animal in its own environment. And we're talking mountain terrain at 15,000 feet. It is used to those altitudes. You're not." 

"We aren't meant to be at those altitudes. We can barely walk up there," James Visvis, a pharmacist from Sydney, says. "This is dangerous stuff. We're risking our lives here. I left a wife and two children at home. My wife wasn't happy. She was screaming in fact." 

The dangers of hunting are not what they used to be… 

The hunters rarely get closer to the animals than 450 yards. They might see a hundred sheep in a day, but they have to make their choice carefully, as the Kyrgyz government has strict limits on how many animals can be harvested a year. It has to be a male, as the point with trophy hunting is the trophy - the horns - and it has to be an old ram, past reproductive age. Listed in the Red Book of endangered species, only one hundred Marco Polo sheep can be harvested a year worldwide according to international regulations. 

The sheep are hunted close to the Chinese border, in the Naryn region. "The hunting benefits everybody. We get the trophies, the government gets the trophy fees, and the community gets the meat, as we are only interested in the horns," Yancey says. 

The trophy fees, ranging from a couple of thousand to five thousand dollars, depending on whom you ask, provide a welcome income to the Kyrygz tourism sector. Foster paid $20,000 to come to Kyrgyzstan and shoot a sheep. "The booking agency in the United States gets $6,000, the booking agency here $6,000, and then the Kyrgyz government gets the rest." 

There is a problem with illegal hunting in Kyrgyzstan, but the two hunters say locals, not by foreign hunters, do the poaching. "The point for a trophy hunter is to get the trophy. Without the proper documentation it is impossible to get it out," Yanzey says. It can still prove to be difficult. The trophy from Yancey's first trip to Kyrgyzstan is still sitting in customs at the airport in Moscow. "I'm hoping I'll get it home this time around," he says.

Yancey has made fifteen trips to Africa over the years, hunting for game big and small. "I'm trying to get every species of duck in the world. I flew to Mozambique just to get one specific species of duck." So what drives a trophy hunter? "Hunting is a primitive interpretation of nature," Visvis says. Primitive instincts, paired with the rush of the challenge, are sending these men all over the world. For, as Yancey says, "life on the edge is life at its sweetest." 

For some, that means the edge of a Kyrygz mountaintop.