I'm a bit late on this because I've only just had time to listen to Cara's interview podcast all the way through.
I'm an amateur photographer who has photographed in 8 wildlife reserves in South Africa, Botswana and Malawi: I'm doing 3 more later this year. I have had prolonged discussions on this sort of subject with several people in SA. including some currently involved in conservation and one previously an anti-poaching ranger. So I have some first-hand local experience, but am very far from an expert.
Some personal comments:
The SGU episode did get my skeptical antennae buzzing over the perceived lack of balance: for such a complex and nuanced subject there was a very superficial discussion and frankly a credulous impression created. In fact, I was misled by the words chosen into thinking they were endorsing hunting of all types in Africa, even canned hunting. That was not the case, as I now know having heard the interview, but this just illustrates my point.
I would much rather ban African game hunting entirely, but when managed as described by Cara's interviewee, personally I would support it pragmatically. The keys are first that it should only be done of animals where culling is needed, and secondly that it remains expensive and a significant proportion of the cost goes to conservation (in the widest sense - a major usually unmet current need being supporting & educating local populations, and making the animals valuable alive to them, and the interviewee was right to emphasize local population pressure).
So, in well organised countries like Namibia and Botswana this works, however I have been given loads of examples from my SA friends about other African countries where all the money goes to local big game operators (with only a limited amount going in to conservation via the basic licence), and sometimes to organisations involved in poaching and supplying Chinese 'medicinal products'. There is also a penumbra of conservationy respectability created by the Namibian/Botswanan arrangements that in my experience is used to weaken controls in the more weakly-organised countries.
For example, have a look at the Wikipedia report on the bow killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe in 2015, and perhaps anyone can tell me how much of the $50k paid by that dentist to the hunting operator went to support conservation? F-all, as we say over here.
I cannot see that import-export of trophies can ever be justified, and to be convinced otherwise I would need to see specific evidence that it is also not used to cover and facilitate movement of illegally killed animals and their products.
I am also skeptical of the strength of the evidence that each hunter in subsaharan Africa invests 1600x the amount (to conservation, or in total?) that each photographer does. That might be true in Namibia/Botswana where lodge & infrastructure prices etc are so high, but there are loads of cut-price operations in other countries run shall we say more 'flexibly'. A quick Google search reveals lots of differing alleged 'evidence-based' views on this.
So, Cara's eloquent interviewee was I assess reasonable as far as he went, but in my view an imbalanced pan-African picture was painted overall. I think a proper segment on the SGU is justified, after a 'deep dive', and I'd be very interested to listen to it. I also wonder if Cara is planning to interview anyone similarly eloquent but with the opposing view?
Anyway, to lighten things up a bit, here are a couple of links to blog posts from my most recent trip to Botswana:
https://www.microcontrast.com/new-blog/2018/11/2/patience-rewardedhttps://www.microcontrast.com/new-blog/2018/11/30/panthera-pardus-the-leopard