Who is Tom Opre?
Tom Opre is an award-winning filmmaker, conservationist, and the founder and executive director of the Shepherds of Wildlife Society, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to educating the public on sustainable wildlife management and the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Through his documentary films, including Killing the Shepherd, The Real Yellowstone, and the forthcoming Operation: Return of the Wild, Opre uses storytelling to bridge the widening gap between urbanized society and the on-the-ground realities of what it actually takes to keep wildlife alive. A Montana-based director with roots in national television and Fortune 500 commercial production, Opre frames conservation not as an emotion or a mindset but as a physical act: one that requires human engagement, economic incentive, and a clear-eyed understanding of what happens to wildlife when both are absent.
Storytelling as a Conservation Strategy
Opre’s path into documentary filmmaking grew from a household where the outdoors was not a hobby but a livelihood. His father spent nearly 30 years contributing to Outdoor Life and Field & Stream, and the home he built around that work included hunts with Ted Nugent, fly fishing evenings with Fred Bear (whose name Opre did not recognize until years later), and a lifetime of proximity to the question his father lived by: what do we owe the land?
Opre became a commercial director working for Fortune 500 companies before launching Eye of the Hunter, a co-production with NBC Sports that ran from 2008 to 2015 and became one of the highest-rated outdoor field sports programs in the world, airing opposite Monday Night Football at 9 PM Eastern. His wife, Olivia, a former Mrs. Nebraska who built her pageant platform around hunter-conservationist advocacy and later co-hosted dozens of national outdoor television programs, appeared alongside him. When the Cecil the lion controversy hit in July 2015, they received five to six thousand death threats through social media. NBC Sports blocked them from a scheduled appearance on The Today Show. The hunting conservation community, by Opre’s own account, failed to take a billion-dollar media platform that was handed to them.
He decided to start making films that could do what no coalition press release ever had: change minds at scale.
Operation: Return of the Wild
In March 2025, Opre sat in the Zambian national parks office and learned that the government planned to donate Cape Buffalo and Puku antelope to the Lower Luano Valley game management area: two species that had been locally extinct in the 1.2 million-acre concession for over a decade. The logistics required helicopters, veterinary teams, and six-wheel-drive transport across 700 to 800 kilometers of Zambia. The community and the safari operator were expected to fund it themselves.
Opre came home and raised approximately $150,000 in eight weeks.
Phase one of Operation: Return of the Wild covers the wildlife reintroduction. Phase two is a $100,000 documentation and media campaign to bring the story to the widest possible audience, with CBS News and 60 Minutes discussions actively underway. The goal is to show people what conservation actually looks like from the inside: not fundraising appeals and protest signs, but game scouts pulling wire snares, helicopter operations over the bush, and children in school uniforms learning English in buildings funded by hunting concession revenue. As of the latest count, 22,500 snares had been removed from the Lower Luano over the first eight to nine years of operations. The school program has grown from an initial grant request of 80 uniforms to 800, across eight classroom blocks in three schools. Those children receive a curriculum directly addressing the value of wildlife to their community. They know why the school exists.
How Opre Operates:
The Rat Analogy as Economic Framework:
Opre distills the economics of conservation into a single question: what is the rat worth? If a rat is in your house, you eliminate it. If the rat is worth $50,000, you raise and protect more of them. That same logic, he argues, governs every iconic wildlife species from lions in Zambia to Marco Polo sheep in Central Asia. When local communities see direct economic value in keeping an animal alive, they protect it. When that value disappears through hunting bans, corruption, or collapsed tourism infrastructure, the wildlife disappears with it. This is not a romantic argument. It is an economic one, and every film Opre makes is built around it.
Storytelling as the Only Tool That Moves the Middle:
Opre founded Shepherds of Wildlife after failing to build a functioning coalition among the major hunting and wildlife conservation NGOs, which he describes as an institutional turf problem rooted more in ego and donor retention than in mission. His target audience is neither the dedicated hunter nor the committed anti-use advocate: it is the 55 to 75 percent of Americans who are neither. Focus group research conducted by Responsive Management, a firm that works with nearly all U.S. state fish and game agencies, showed that after watching Killing the Shepherd one time, respondents who strongly agreed that hunting is a form of conservation jumped from 3 percent to 33 percent. Combined with those who agreed, the number reached 77 percent. On the question of whether well-regulated legal hunting can help rural stewards achieve basic human rights: 10 percent strongly agreed before the film, 47 percent after. Combined with agree: 90 percent. One film. One viewing.
Conservation Without Human Dignity Is Not Conservation:
Opre states this principle plainly and returns to it often. The Lower Luano project did not succeed because of outside pressure or government mandate. It succeeded because a community game scout program gave local people a direct stake in protecting wildlife. The safari operator paid wages and school fees. Children who once lived adjacent to a wildlife wasteland now attend school in buildings funded by hunting concession revenue. When Opre talks about conservation, he means this: people on the ground, seeing a benefit, choosing to protect a resource because their lives are materially better when it exists.
Film as a Long Game:
Opre is 10 to 11 years into documenting the Lower Luano story and is now positioning Killing the Shepherd: Return to the Wild as a 10-year bookend narrative that includes the criminal bushmeat era, the wildlife restoration, the school program, and a 19th-century subplot about John Harrison Clark, known locally as Changa Changa (“the one who stood up”): a white British South African who became chief of the Soli people in the 1890s after fighting off Portuguese slavers, controlled territory roughly the size of half of Texas, imported the first cotton gin and first Model T to the region, and whose name is still given to the best mining managers in Zambia today. The new film is being scored by Paul Munsey, an Isle of Skye-based composer who spent 15 years working with Danny Elfman on the Avengers films and scored the 2020 Academy Award-winning animated short Hair Love. An A-list Hollywood producer is pitching The Real Yellowstone to Netflix. Opre is playing a long game, and he has always known it.
