South Africa's newly released professional hunting statistics tell a story that is rarely stated plainly: trophy hunting is not a conservation tool, nor a reluctant compromise at the edges of wildlife management. It is a large, industrialised system of wildlife extraction, normalised through regulation, sanitised by conservation language and sustained by political accommodation. Between 2016 and 2024, professional hunters operating under state permits recorded the killing of almost 300,000 wild animals by international clients, according to official Professional Hunter (PH) registers submitted to the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment. These figures are not activist estimates or leaked data. They are industry self-reports, compiled, accepted and archived by the South African state itself. The animals listed are not limited to antelope. They include lions, elephants, rhinos, leopards and a long trail of species that rarely enter the public conservation debate: baboons, otters, honey badgers, monkeys, caracals, jackals, squirrels and other wildlife treated as legitimate commercial targets. What these statistics document is not conservation under pressure. They document extraction at scale.