Lately I’ve been haunted by a photo. In it, a mother elephant and her baby are running across a road in West Bengal, India. The mother has her head down and ears forward, heading for safety in the trees. A ball of fire clings to her right foot; her tail appears singed. The baby’s hind legs are engulfed in flames. In the background, a crowd of men is running away, some pausing to gape and jeer over their shoulders. They are the reason for the fire. They have thrown firecrackers and balls of flaming tar at the animals. The image, taken by Biplab Hazra and chosen by the Indian conservation group Sanctuary Asia as this year’s winner of its annual wildlife photography contest, is titled “Hell Is Here.”

Where elephants go, unfortunately, hell seems to follow.

Over the past two decades, the global populations of both Asian and African elephants have declined precipitously because of poaching, habitat loss caused by human encroachment and subsequent conflicts resulting from the crowding together of people and very large animals.

As part of an international effort to curb poaching and protect elephants, the Obama administration tightened restrictions on the domestic sale of ivory and on legal commercial hunting in Africa. In 2014 it implemented a ban that prohibited Americans from importing trophies from hunts in Zimbabwe.

On Thursday the Trump administration announced that it would lift the ban and earlier this month said it would allow trophies from Zambia as well. Hunting advocacy groups and the National Rifle Association celebrated the decision. It was not too difficult to imagine that the president’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., would also cheer this change — they have hunted elephants for sport in the past. Don Jr. even posed in Zimbabwe in 2011, ammunition slung around his waist, holding up the tail he had cut off a dead elephant lying behind him. Criticism of the decision was swift from other corners, however. Perhaps swift enough to give the president pause: Late Friday, he tweeted that he was putting the “big game trophy decision on hold” for further review.