OLIFANTSVLEI, South Africa — Before the two hunters from Texas had breakfast, Stewart Dorrington drove through his 12,000-acre game ranch. As the early-morning sun cast a soft glow on the landscape, turned a wintry pale brown, buffalo wandered in the tall grass and giraffes appeared in a cluster of trees.

Mr. Dorrington drove on, pointing to a blind where his American clients would wait for a target to shoot with their bows. He moved on, past a house rebuilt after a fire during his mother’s childhood, then a dam raised by his grandfather, memory and longing melting into the South African bush.

Then kudu sprinted across a clearing. Mr. Dorrington quickly turned to the business at hand.

“My trophy hunting price is $2,500” for a kudu, more than 10 times what the meat of one of the antelopes would bring, he said.

“You stop trophy hunting, the live market is going to change completely; it’ll go to meat value, really,” less than 60 cents a pound, he added. “So that will deprive the national parks and the provincial parks of a lot of their budget.”