The current J.A. Hunter is known as Alex, and with his wife Diana, owns and runs Insiders Africa Ltd and Ol Pejeta Bush Camp, the only owner-managed bush camp in Laikipia. His grandfather, the original J.A. Hunter, was probably the most famous professional hunter in East Africa during the early-mid 1900s. For over fifteen years, he hunted with maharajahs, millionaires and other famous sportsmen of the day once famously refusing to take the Prince of Wales because he already had another booking which he, quite rightly, decided to honour instead.

John Alexander Hunter was born in Dumfries, Scotland in 1882, one of 5 children of farmer David Hunter and his wife Elizabeth. J.A. became a keen, accurate shot by his teens, and decided that agriculture in Scotland was not his calling so with a distant relative who was a dairy farmer in Kenya, sailed for Mombasa aged 26. Arriving in 1908 with some clothes and a Purdey shotgun, he worked on their farm but then found employment on the railway.

After fighting with distinction in the First World War in German East Africa (Tanzania) he founded a transport company delivering supplies to remote regions. In 1918 he married Hilda Bunbury and they had six children. Their eldest son was Gordon Hunter, Alex's late father. In 1920, he collaborated on setting up the Nairobi gunsmiths Shaw and Hunter, with the famous gunmaker Morrison Shaw. Soon after he joined the colonial government game department and became a professional hunter known as a PH.

His job was essentially to clear the land for farming of what were seen as destructive wild animals, and shot mainly elephant, buffalo, rhino and lion. Of great assistance to the Maasai people whose livelihood is cattle, he shot 360 lion in one year. Fantastically accurate and known for killing usually with a single bullet, J.A. still holds the record for shooting the most rhino in one year at just under a thousand, while clearing land for settlement.

A member of the Professional Hunters Association, J.A. Hunter was a close friend of many of the hunting fraternity, and he was the last person to see Denys Finch-Hatton alive before he died in a plane crash in 1931. He was also the author of 4 books: Hunter (by Hunter, 1952) and Hunter's Tracks (1957) were autobiographical accounts of his hunting adventures. Later in life he opposed the destruction of the land for farming, which due to population and other pressures was becoming damaging for the habitat and numbers of wildlife. A great bushman, naturalist and conservationist, he supplied specimens for the Natural History Museum in London. He died at the hotel that he started, Hunters Lodge in Makindu, on June 27th 1963 and is buried near Nairobi.

The irony is not lost on Alex and Diana Hunter, who now have their own bush camp on the biggest rhino sanctuary in East Africa which is the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, also home to the world's rarest large mammal, 4 of the last remaining 8 Northern White rhinos.