There is a sentence that Tom Opre drops in conversation with the same casualness a rancher uses to mention the weather, and it has that same quality: it sounds obvious until you sit with it.
“Wildlife doesn’t exist because people love it. Wildlife exists because someone saw a benefit to conserve it.”
He says this not as provocation but as a plain description of how ecosystems actually function. And he has 10 years of footage from the Lower Luano Valley of Zambia to prove it.
The Problem-Solving Machine
Opre grew up in Michigan in a household where the outdoors was not a weekend hobby but a professional identity. His father spent nearly 30 years writing for Outdoor Life and Field & Stream, building a life around a question Opre eventually inherited: what do we owe the land? The answer, in their household, was practical and specific. It involved deer in the larder, weekends on leased land managing habitat with neighboring families, and exposure to figures like Ted Nugent and Fred Bear (whose name Opre did not recognize during a conversation with him as a teenager, a detail he still finds remarkable).
Opre became a commercial filmmaker. Not a nature documentarian, but a director working on Fortune 500 accounts, building the technical discipline that would later allow him to produce feature-length conservation films from some of the most remote terrain in Zambia. From 2008 to 2015, he co-produced and hosted Eye of the Hunter on NBC Sports, one of the highest-rated outdoor field sports programs in the world. His wife, Olivia, a former Mrs. Nebraska who built her pageant platform around hunter-conservationist advocacy and later co-hosted dozens of national outdoor programs, appeared alongside him.
In July 2015, a lion named Cecil was shot in Zimbabwe. The world, as Opre puts it, came unhinged. He and Olivia received five to six thousand death threats through social media. NBC Sports blocked them from a scheduled appearance on The Today Show. The hunting and conservation community was given what Opre calls a billion-dollar platform to make the case for sustainable use. They did not take it. That failure became the founding logic of Shepherds of Wildlife and everything that followed.
Surviving 15 Years of Lawlessness
In 2001 and 2002, the Zambian government shut down hunting in the Lower Luano Valley following corruption in both the government and the hunting industry. What followed was 15 years of unhindered access for commercial criminal bushmeat gangs who moved in not as subsistence farmers but as industrialized poachers, building drying racks instead of planting crops, establishing villages at the greatest concentrations of wildlife, and deploying wire snares by the hundreds across 1.2 million acres. By the time the Norton family’s Macasa Safaris arrived in 2015 to begin restoring the concession, at least six species had gone locally extinct in the area, including elephant, rhino, Cape Buffalo, puku antelope, and zebra. Children in the surrounding villages were starving. Crops had failed. The gangsters had placed hits on the father and son running the restoration operation.
Conservation is not a mindset. It’s not an emotion. It’s a physical act. To be a conservationist, you must conserve.”
-Tom Opre
Opre arrived in May 2017 to film what would become Killing the Shepherd. The Norton family was buying mealy meal to feed the community while simultaneously standing up a 36-person community game scout program equipped with AK-47s and a mandate to push back. Game scouts got into firefights. They pulled snares: 22,500 total over the first eight to nine years of operations. They confiscated roughly 250 homemade shotguns and muzzle loaders constructed from pipes sized to hold modern shotgun shells.
Within five years, 80 percent of the poaching had been eliminated. The wildlife did what the late wildlife scientist Valerius Geis spent his career documenting: it rebounded. Everything in nature, Geis told Opre before his death, is programmed to overpopulate beyond the land’s carrying capacity when pressure is removed. Kudu, bushbuck, warthog, and lion came back. The government, which had officially designated the area as “game depleted,” issued the concession its first limited hunting quota: 48 animals on 1.2 million acres. Modest. But real.
The “Wise Use” Philosophy
Opre does not describe his work as advocacy. He calls it education, and he has the data to back the distinction.
Responsive Management, a research firm that works with nearly all U.S. state fish and game agencies and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, conducted focus group research on Killing the Shepherd with a specific target audience: non-aligned Americans, people who were neither strongly pro-use nor anti-use on the question of hunting and wildlife management. Before viewing the film, 3 percent of respondents strongly agreed that hunting is a form of conservation. After one viewing, that number reached 33 percent. Combined with those who agreed: 77 percent.
A second question asked whether well-regulated legal hunting can help rural stewards realize their most basic human rights, including food security, access to healthcare, and education. Before the film: 10 percent strongly agreed. After one viewing: 47 percent. Combined with agree: 90 percent.
One documentary. One screening.
The school program attached to the Lower Luano project shows why those numbers carry weight. When Opre first arrived in 2017, children in the area attended school in open-air thatched structures with dirt floors, no uniforms, and no supplies. The first grant from African Children’s Schools funded three school buildings with teacher residences, salaries, and starter supplies. The first uniform grant request was for 80. The most recent was for 800. Eight classroom blocks now stand across three schools. Children are learning English, the international language of commerce, and receiving a curriculum that directly addresses the value of wildlife. They know why their school exists.
The Bottom Line
In March 2025, Opre sat in the Zambian national parks office and heard that the government planned to donate Cape Buffalo and Puku antelope to the Lower Luano, a species absent from the area for over a decade. Helicopter operations, veterinary support, and six-wheel-drive transport over 700 to 800 kilometers. The community and the operator were expected to cover it.
Opre came home and raised approximately $150,000 in eight weeks.
Phase two of Operation: Return of the Wild is a $100,000 documentation and media campaign, with CBS News and 60 Minutes discussions actively underway. An A-list Hollywood producer is pitching The Real Yellowstone to Netflix. Paul Munsey, who scored the 2020 Academy Award-winning animated short Hair Love after 15 years working with Danny Elfman on the Avengers films, is providing the score for the next chapter of the Lower Luano story.
“Mother nature does not practice conservation, the wise use of a financial resource. People do. That’s the one thing people really need to understand.”
– Tom Opre
That next film will also include the story of John Harrison Clark, known locally as Changa Changa, “the one who stood up”: a white British South African who in the 1890s fought off Portuguese slavers to protect the Soli people, became their chief, married into the community, imported the first cotton gin and first Model T to the region, built a stone palace from materials carried out of mountains 10 miles away, and whose nickname is still given to the best mining managers in Zambia more than a century later. It is the kind of story that earns a Hollywood producer’s attention, and Opre knows it.
What he is building, across films and books and a 501(c)(3) that a neighbor registered without telling him, is a media operation with a single thesis at its center: people protect what they value, they value what benefits them, and no one in London or Los Angeles is going to protect 1.2 million acres of Zambian wilderness. The people on the ground will, if the economics work. His job is to make sure the rest of the world understands why that matters.
“Mother nature does not practice conservation,” he told Tarek Saab. “People do. And without human dignity, there isn’t conservation.”
That is the argument. Killing the Shepherd and Operation: Return to the Wild is how he intends to prove it.
Watch as Tom Opre breaks down the business of wildlife conservation, sustainable use, and the mission behind Operation: Return of the Wild on Episode 48 of Y’all Street.
