Posted on 04/21/2022 4:28:23 AM PDT by Kaslin
I’m ready to make a lot of you mad, and I’m ok with that….
I’m not against hunting, it helps control animal populations that otherwise would grow too large and starve a lot of them. It also feeds people. I’m not even really “against” what I’m going to talk about here, I’m just saying that I simply do not get it. I’m talking about trophy hunting.
I get that in a lot of cases trophy hunting helps support the animals and keeps populations alive – an animal that provides incomes to tribes and/or governments will be protected and less likely to go extinct. I get all of that.
What I don’t get is the desire to kill an animal so you can say you did. So you can take a picture next to its dead body. So you can mount its head on your wall.
I will never understand the mentality of watching television, seeing some majestic creature in Africa and thinking, “My God, such a beautiful creature – I must kill one.” More than that, you have to drop a huge sum of money for the privilege.
What brought this up? This story from the UK Daily Mail about a man who paid $50,000 to kill a rare big tusker elephant. The weirdo, in my opinion, said after, “You know, there's more to it than shooting a bull, taking a photograph, becoming a hero and all this other nonsense.”
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Probably, but, he did better throwing a baseball.
You laid it out very clearly. This article left out the reason the government allowed the hunt for this Elephant.
As you clearly stated, you can’t just go out “on safari” and shoot something, you will find yourself in a jail in Africa, not a good place to be. The hunter in this article was probably the winner of a lottery for the license to hunt this Elephant.
I have a buddy who’s a retired Kroger store manager, hardly a rich guy, who had the opportunity to hunt an Elephant in Africa about 10 years ago. He won a lottery to hunt a rouge Elephant that was destroying villages and wreaking havoc on the crops the villagers needed to survive.
He bagged the critter, it turned into a festival of sorts. The villagers butchered the carcass, the government took the Ivory, the villages returned to safety and my buddy kept the feet. It took 5 years before the US would allow him to import the trophies due to a blanket ban on hunting trophies Obama instituted.
The African state, I forget which one, stored the feet for my buddy for free, they were thankful he removed a threat, until he was able to get them here.
I’m not for micromanagement but smoking and hunting have major social, economic and even ecological consequences. They are hardly tiny decisions.
All animals die.
Regulated hunting is one of the least cruel ways for animals to die.
Your statement is false.
Trophy hunting is not allowed for animals who are endangered.
You seem to misunderstand basic biology, population dynamics, and ecology.
If you believe killing animals is immoral, we will disagree on many things.
Legal or not, trophy hunting certainly isn’t stopping poaching, especially in countries that have a poor record of protecting their wildlife. Yeah, we will disagree that the rest of the world should become more like China.
There is a local museum that accepts various animals from our state that have been stuffed and mounted by private collectors. Given the age of a lot of these specimens it seems likely that a lot of them were from estates. The reason the stuffed bear (for example) is donated instead of being fought over by grieving relatives is because it is unfashionable for most people now. People have moved onto other ways to signal their status.
To find out why some people are willing to plunk down so much money to shoot animals that would normally pose no danger to them (since they have to travel quite a distance for the purpose), I think you’d have to know someone who does things like that and ask them.
Why are people still summiting Everest?
There’s no such thing as dying of old age.
Something kills all living creatures.
(H/T John Dutton)
Here's a hypothetical. Lets say a Grizzly is menacing the livestock and family on your property. You have exhausted all means of humanely deterring it. It is, however, listed as endangered, and the local branch of the Interior dept. refuses to relocate or let you shoot it. Would you not want the right to be able to protect you and yours without fear of penalty and/or prosecution? Maybe, just maybe, your opinion is rooted in class hate. Damn rich people and their trophies.
Something else not mentioned in all this is the money. The money for hunting animals goes a long way towards preserving, protecting, and managing all the species in an area. Hunters and hunting for whatever purpose, are the main source of funding to actually protect the very animals being hunted. It is self-sustainable to sacrifice one select animal to protect many many other animals. Hunting is almost the sole funding for all the successful wildlife programs around the world.
Menace animals ? Trophy hunting selectively eliminates the oldest, most genetically fit elephants from the population because they have the largest tusks. Support the closure of domestic markets for elephant ivory worldwide, then we will talk about the role of sustainable use in promoting conservation.
Total ditto to what you said.
No, you are misunderstanding reality.
Those old elephants with the biggest tusks have already passed their genes along.
They are going to die very shortly.
Banning legal ivory has made black market ivory much more expensive and lucrative for poachers.
Government mandated control of everything does not work well. It needs the feedback loops the market brings.
Remember: every animal and every human dies, and there is nothing you can do to prevent it.
All we can do is work to manage it, and only humans are capable of the management.
Nature does a much worse job.
Dittoes
And,
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. Which is to say: Trophy hunting isn’t the issue. The issue is: do you want to live under tyranny?
Have a close friend here in Colorado that hunts and processes and eats elk. Excellent. And he doesn’t hunt anything else that he doesn’t eat. Excellent.
But he has 2 dozen trophy animals mounted on his walls in his house and office THAT HE DIDNT HUNT. It is his house, and he can decorate it as he wants. Personally, i’d rather have a full sized replica of Venus de Milo, but my artist wife wouldn’t agree.
WSWYDT
Odd, this writer gets upset when an animal is killed.
I wonder if he is writing a series of articles on the Blacks shooting Blacks in our Dem cities, does that upset him enough to write an article?
Too many people think of old practices - modern trophy hunting is (in most places) the best option, as it provides controlled action to maintain proper animal density, reduces/eliminates wastage, and provides legitimate alternatives to poaching. Indeed, it would provide incentive to actively prosecute poachers, who steal from the community.
Personally, I think taxidermy mounts with glass eyes staring out you are a little much, especially in multiples, but that’s a personal preference. To each his own.
I don’t get why you think I should care one whit what you think about anything.
It’s kinda like Brits whinging on about guns in America — in part we have them so we don’t have to care about what any Brit thinks about us.
Bugger off.
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