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By Jordan King
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Ernie Dosio, a 75-year-old California vineyard owner and longtime big-game hunter, died after a group of elephants charged during a guided hunt in the central African country of Gabon.
Safari operator Collect Africa confirmed a client’s death and said the professional guide with him was seriously injured.
Dosio’s family told the Daily Mail that initial reports of his death were confusing, and they bemoaned some of the negative reaction online.
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Newsweek has broken down what we know about him.
Who Is Ernie Dosio?
Dosio was trampled by a herd of elephants on April 17, while on a trip in Gabon’s Lopé-Okanda rainforest.
He was hunting yellow-backed duiker, a small forest antelope, when he and his guide encountered five female forest elephants with a calf in dense cover, officials said. The elephants charged and ended up crushing Dosio.
Dosio was a Lodi, California, resident and owner of Pacific AgriLands Inc., a Modesto-based operation managing about 12,000 acres of vineyards and providing services to wine producers, according to the Daily Mail, which spoke to his family.
A father of two—both Dosio’s sons are involved with their father's business—he was a veteran hunter who pursued elephants, lions, rhinos and buffalo, the Daily Mail reported.
Dosio was also a board member of the Lodi Winegrape Commission, an industry organization representing winegrape growers in California’s Lodi appellation, a life member of the nonprofit conservation organization California Wildfowl and a part of the Sacramento Safari Club, an organization that promotes wildlife conservation and regulated hunting.
His body is being repatriated to California with assistance from the U.S. Embassy in Gabon, according to the Daily Mail.
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Ernie Dosio's Family Speaks Out
Dosio’s ex-wife, Rinda Butler Dosio, said the family initially received conflicting information about the death.
“The day it happened we heard it was buffalos—and different crazy things,” she told the Mail, adding: “The lawyers got called before the family. There’s just some things that just don’t make sense.”
One of Dosio’s sons, Jeff, addressed negative online comments about his father’s hunting—apparently made by critics of big game hunting in general. He added that the narrative about his final moments and hunting record had been “twisted.”
"It hasn't been fun. It hasn't been fun at all. Whoever got all these pictures of our trophy room—I don't know how that came about at all.
How Common Is It for Hunters to Be Killed?
There is no comprehensive global dataset tracking deaths of trophy hunters specifically, but there is lots of research on human–wildlife conflict across Africa and Asia.
Human–wildlife conflict refers to recurring, sometimes deadly interactions when wildlife and people overlap in space and resources, and it is considered a growing conservation and humanitarian issue on the continent, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
Elephants are estimated to kill about 100 people globally per year, according to the Institute for Environmental Research and Education (IERE), though figures vary by region and are limited by inconsistent data collection.
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