Early chapters were founded in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Arizona, and Mississippi.

[2] Notable leaders include businessman and philanthropist Ken Behring,[3] one of the world's leading big game trophy hunters and SCI's largest donor at one point,[4] and outdoor journalist Craig Boddington, who joined in 1977.

[8] It also owns the Granite Ranch in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, south of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where it hosts the American Wilderness Leadership School.

Sportsmen Against Hunger began in 1989,[12] and through the network of SCI chapters, provides food banks with meat from harvested animals.

[12] The Sensory Safari program allows sight-impaired individuals to get a “visual” perspective of what animals are like by feeling mounts, skins, skulls, horns, and antlers.

[13] The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) asked SCIF to host a Sensory Safari at its annual convention.

[16] In 2023, over 850 exhibitors from 30 different nations[17] converged in Tennessee for the yearly assembly of Safari Club International, an event aimed at advocating for hunting.

Additional outlets include SCI News, a weekly e-newsletter and a podcast titled Tag Soup.

[20] In 1994, SCI successfully lobbied for a change in the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 to allow for the importation of previously banned, legally hunted polar bear trophies into the United States from Canada.

Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) hearing opposing the proposed listing of polar bears as a "threatened" species under the U.S.

The FWS found that, “[c]aptive breeding in the United States has enhanced the propagation or survival of the scimitar-horned oryx, addax, and dama gazelle worldwide by rescuing these species from near extinctions and providing the founder stock necessary for reintroduction.

The dama gazelle and addax are rumored to exist in only a few small and highly fragmented populations in the most remote parts of the Sahara Desert.

[27] In the case of the black rhino, 83% of those countries represented at the 2004 CITES meeting approved sport hunting of the species in very limited numbers.

[4] He has made multiple safari trips to East Africa, and has shot lions, leopards, rhinoceroses, an elephant, and a bighorn sheep.

The Smithsonian attempted to import the remains by petitioning the Department of the Interior for an Endangered Species Act waiver, but withdrew its request after questioning and negative publicity from Representative George Miller and groups like the HSUS.

According to the New York Times, Behring's spokesperson "sent a reporter a copy of a $5,000 check, dated six weeks after the hunt and made out to the provincial government with the notation 'elephant permit.'"

Bill Quimby, a past president of SCI, writes in his book Safari Club International that rumors were passed among hunters that McElroy "ignored hunting laws", that McElroy was even accused of killing a Rocky Mountain bighorn ram in a national park, and that his "ideas of sportsmanship and ethics simply were different from those of hunters who came along later.

He was initially wounded with an arrow by Walter Palmer, an American dentist and SCI member,[33][34][35] then tracked, and reportedly killed with a rifle about 40 hours later on 1 July 2015.