Posted on 11/20/2017 11:07:01 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
It’s not often that President Trump’s Twitter feed is the voice of reason and compassion, but on the issue of trophy hunting it makes more sense than his own Department of Interior.
Trump put on hold the department’s initial decision to reverse an Obama-era ban and allow the importation of elephant trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia. In a tweet, the president referred to trophy hunting as a “horror show.” He said he would be “very hard pressed” to conclude that such hunting advances the cause of conservation, the justification for the decision.
Trump, who has publicly dissented in the past from the notorious trophy hunting of his own sons, is right. In this case, government by tweet is better than the alternative, and more in keeping with the interests of the most majestic creatures on this earth.
The African elephant population is in historic decline, driven by the loss of habitat and poaching. Early in the 20th century, there were more than 10 million elephants. Now there are about 350,000. The killing proceeds apace.
A 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that 100,000 elephants had been killed by poachers in a three-year period from 2010-2012, and the Central African elephant population had declined by 64 percent over a decade.
In one orgy of destruction in 2012, poachers killed more than 300 elephants in a national park in Cameroon with AK-47s and grenades.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Eff Rich the little bitch
I’d beat his snobby ass down
Never liked him
Dumb move on elephants btw
“It’s not often that President Trump’s Twitter feed is the voice of reason and compassion”
Unlike you, Dick, he’s rarely wrong.
If they are too populous, which they are in some areas, hunt the things. Same with whales, grizzly bears and any other beast.
Yet if you look at the elephant numbers from Kenya and from Zimbabwe, elephant numbers are growing in the countries where the elephants are treated as a resource.
Kenya made trading in them illegal so there is no incentive to keeping them alive.
Back in 1980 I visited the wealthy American owner of a very large ranch in Kenya. He had his own private force of game rangers to protect the elephants & rhino on his ranch. He told me that the elephant and rhino population had grown to the point that it was too large for the available food sources.
He’d contacted the Kenya government offering to donate the surplus animals to the game parks. Kenya replied, “Thank you very much, but we could not keep them alive.”
But he is too unstable and blood thirsty to have nuclear bomb?
I thought Trump wanted to end the ban?
Elephants aren’t territorial; they don’t stay in one area. Instead, they travel over a wide range, keeping food and water sources in their memory and passing what they learn to the next generation. To kill a seeming overabundance of elephants in one area is to simply reduce a traveling population that moves on once the food and water sources are depleted and then returns as the various areas cycle through their growing seasons.
Elephants are a keystone species that keeps where they roam open and capable of sustaining all the other herbivores which in turn keeps the carnivores well-fed. Change that balance and you run the risk of reducing all of the wild animal populations which are already up against smaller and smaller natural areas in which to thrive. Then the non-hunting safaris won’t be providing jobs and opportunities for paying customers to experience animal sightings in the wild.
Cameras shoot too, but they leave the subjects (older bull elephants) alive and able to show younger elephant bulls how to behave. The young ones, pushed out of their natal herd, have been known to attack other animals, including the endangered rhinos, because they had no role models in their vicinity.
He is keeping the ban in effect while he takes a week to reconsider.
Maybe even Dem or deep state plants.
Without anybody making $ off elephants, there is no incentive to poor Africans to save them!
“Same with whales, grizzly bears and any other beast.”....
Too bad we couldn’t include demodummies, “beasts” that they are.
I don’t know where you get your information, but elephants do not “keep areas open”, benefiting herbivores. Elephants destroy the habitat, first be uprooting trees, which protect the grasses and soil from erosion. Within a matter of a year or two the vegetation and topsoil is washed away by the monsoons, and nothing can live there. That is why elephants have to keep moving into new areas to feed. There are huge populations of elephants that are now starving because they have destroyed their own habitat, and every other species in that ecosystem is now also under stress. Botswana, which ended game hunting a couple of years ago, is seeing a huge die off, but of course hunting is evil, so everyone will just sit around and feel good about themselves because there is no hunting. Meanwhile, every animal species living there is threatened because humans want to ignore the facts. What a mess we have made of things.
My understanding was that licensed and regulated hunting helped preserve the herd.
A certain number of elephants are going to die every year. This is a fact, they will die through predation, old age, illness, poaching, etc... If a park is able to charge $20K for a wealthy “hunter” to take these animals, they will be able to pay for infrastructure and security to protect and manage the rest of the herd.
Personally, I don’t get the appeal of trophy hunting. I hunt to fill my freezer and that is all. I also don’t get the appeal of sports cars or why a guy would wear a toupee but I am not going to judge anybody else’s weird quirks.
If there is a market for elephants, either it will be fulfilled in a managed, deliberate way or it will be fulfilled in a way that does not take into account the long term health of the herd. Making elephants illegal does not eliminate the market.
Treating elephants as a natural resource and managing them as such - both for trophy hunting and for regulated ivory sale (as opposed to black market poaching) is their only hope for long-term survival.
Every animal that's managed as a game species in the US, from whitetail deer to elk to bears - is more abundant today than 100 years ago. If Africa can do the same for elephants, then elephant numbers will climb back to what they were once. If not, they'll just be extirpated.
Most likely due to a teary-eyed plea from Ivanka. At least this one's relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things. She's no doubt tried to get her way on the Paris Climate Accords and Citizenship for "Dreamer" illegals, luckily daddy didn't give in on those.
My information is straight from people who live in Africa and who work with land management and animal behavior.
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