Are Trophy Hunters Really To Blame For the Eradication of Species?
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I would have thought other tiny countries like Singapore would have been first to ban hunting as did Costa Rica, but you aren’t typifying the millions (13,000,000 in the US) as rich, white trophy hunters are you? Those are not significant and they’re not the cause of the population decline in predators and other large animals that’s been going on since the last ice age.
Build a suburb and plant a farm to provide food for growing cities and you’ve upset the ecosystem much more than you ever could with a gun or crossbow. Farmers poison predators in bulk while they deprive the remainder of food.
Lions have a tiny fraction of their former range which used to include Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Their fate was written on the wall the same day the first wall was built – the same fate as the Mammoths, the ground sloths, the saber tooth cats and countless others.
It’s us, it’s all of us because civilization is not compatible with wilderness with 7 billion humans and soon to be 10. World wildlife is dying out rapidly and that has nothing at all to do with hunting. It has to do with you and me. The planet can’t support us all: our garbage, our pollution and our need for more and more space.
If we get rid of malaria and AIDS and a few other diseases we will kill more lions as a result because it’s not hunters but eaters killing the wildlife.
The “typical” American or European or Asian hunter in Africa buys a permit and uses a licensed guide who makes sure the animal is killed quickly and humanely. Our meat animals should be as lucky.
Managed hunting in Africa and elsewhere is a business that helps population management and supports the game parks, and African Governments promote this. Many of them are angry at misinformed do-gooder Americans who aren’t helping catch poachers but are quick to take pots shots at straw men.
Managing a game park, or a zoo for that matter often requires killing animals — or “culling” if that sounds less gruesome. Overpopulated lions die of disease and starvation in a necessarily closed environment. Poverty in Africa certainly doesn’t help. Subsistence farmers and villagers are not compatible with lions and elephants and it’s impossible to contain them. They need to hunt anything they can to put protein in their diets. That includes Gorillas and other Great Apes.
Humans upset the natural balance 15,000 years ago and we can’t possibly go back to sharing any kind of natural balance that includes the remaining Pleistocene megafauna. We have never been able to share the world with elephants and if we want to preserve those that remain, we have to go after poachers, not dentists who got scammed into paying for a fake permit.
Hunting for “bush meat” by Africans is what nearly all hunting in Africa is about and has a far bigger effect on animal populations. Farmers and poachers kill more elephants and lions than dentists of any skin color, while destroying their habitat at an accelerating rate. The biggest dangers to responsible population control are human expansion and the sentimentality that misdirects us.
Original comment can be found here.
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For him and many other hunters, it’s imperative to eat what you kill. Antlers make a nice trophy, but “the trophy aspect is subordinate to the experience, to the knowledge required and the knowledge gained, to the very ancient relationship that you are experiencing with an animal that you are hunting for food.
It might be an ancient relationship, but the “ancient” part ends with high powered rifles and sophisticated crossbows 🙂
Give the lion’s a nuke. It’s the only real chance they’ve got 🙁
Glenn, as right as you are in this well written piece it still makes me like the dentist no more. I still despise people who kill animals for the sport and just to hang the heads on their walls. That goes for those in this country’s animals as well as those around the wall. It does make no difference in the grand scheme of things because the human race has been a blight upon this spinning rock since we first learned to use tools and weapons. While people think that the end of the world is coming from some type of apocalypse it may well end with a whimper of starvation from not being able to feed the masses. With some places having populations reproducing so fast that they don’t have room to live it is only a matter of time before either we cannot produce enough food or we run out of oxygen.
You are so right Bill and that clock is ticking old friend.
Brilliant, but depressing at the same time. I don’t think our animals really have a chance.