"You must have hated this moose..."
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 ...
“As for the mounted heads. I like one or two. Too many just turns me off.”
Here is one for you. Growing up my best friend in grade school was being raised by his Grandfather. So I was like a family member in this home. His Grandfather was the one and only Elgin Gates... Every wall in the place was covered with trophies. There was barely room to walk through the house because of the stuffed trophies standing around everywhere. It was like a museum...
I eventually found it to be kind of tacky to have this home stuffed with all these even though I was raised as a hunter... But that is what Elgin Gates did, and was famous for. It was indeed a unique opportunity though.
“I have found that environmentalists have a great disconnect from reality. Throw a million dollars and a few regulations into the pot and on to the next problem.”
The regulations are the worst, they are never fully thought through before implementing. And in many cases the true result actually ends up being a worse situation for what they claim to be protecting.
Hi.
Dad said don’t kill anything you don’t eat.
(Sans humans).
5.56mm
I think I’m of a similar vein. Killing for food is okay. Killing for trophies is disgusting.
What they should be doing in Africa is let hunters shoot the elephants and rhinoceros with dart guns, remove the ivory and the country gets the benefit of that income & saves the life of the animal.
You are trying to confuse tourism economic benefits with permitting and licensing to hunt. They are not at all the same. These hunters are almost completely funding their whole wildlife management programs with hunting fees.
And it is the same here in this country also.
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.
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Ditto
Photographic and general tourism could in reality easily replace hunting if there were other means of population control.
I agree. I no longer hunt as the joy of killing has left me. I have no problem with ethical hunters. One hunts on my land and we share the venison. It is delicious. I do kill vermin on my land but that is just housekeeping.
There was a bar in Estacada, OR that I went to a few times in 1980, called (I think) the Sportsman’s Bar, or maybe the Sportsman’s Club. It was filled with trophies of just about anything you could think of, deer, birds, fish, big cats, etc., even a walrus head. At the entrance there were standing mounts of a grizzly bear and a polar bear.
I don’t think it’s still there, at least I couldn’t find any mention online.
“Photographic and general tourism”
Do you have any sense of reality what happens when you take a little populated or visited place and turn it into a tourist attraction? I have seen many very very cool places trashed and destroyed because in the name of protecting it they turned it into a tourist attraction with FAR TOO MANY visitors. They would have served the area much better by just leaving it alone and not attracting attention to it at all.
So the true cause and effect will be... First end hunting, then end the tourism because it is now a problem, then no income at all to manage wildlife programs. The effect? The animals will be the ones to actually suffer in the end.
“if there were other means of population control.”
Why? What is the difference? The irrational bleeding heart? Controlled hunting is a win win compromise that has worked extremely well all over the world for ages now. If we had not done it here we would not have all the wildlife preserves, sanctuaries, and refuges we have now which kept many species from going extinct.
Photographers and tourists are just not going to make up the income difference. Photography and tourism is allowed right now and it is obviously not enough to pay the bills or they would have already outlawed all hunting and relied upon photography alone. The funding needed is just not there is it?
Look at the numbers. South Africa is always touted as a conservation success story due to hunting but trophy tourism is only a few hundred million v. over 20 billion for normal tourism. This is the case across any country in Southern Africa that has been studied.
Many things are theoretically possible.
Many things which are theoretically possible are neither practical or desirable.
Why do you wish to replace hunting with photography and general tourism?
It is not an obviously moral choice.
To me, opposition to hunting is rooted in a desire to deny our mortality.
Everyone dies. I will, and so will you.
Hunting is part of the circle of life.
Again you confuse direct purpose fee revenue with general economic income. They are not the same. Hunting fees all go directly towards one purpose, conservation.
General tourist economic income does not...
Like I said even the WWF acknowledges that, under condition of good governance, sustainable use can benefit conservation. And just as a rather obvious aside there may be a few programs in Africa that meet that standard.
The hunting permits are TARGETED fees. The money these permits brings in is earmarked for wildlife conservation, unlike money spent by other types of tourists.
Are there a small number of permits sold?
Yes! This is due to the conservation efforts of the governments. Which the permits help pay for.
“His Grandfather was the one and only Elgin Gates...”
WOW!!!
Hunting royalty!
The man who quite literally wrote the book on hunting in Africa and Asia. So Cool.
What was the guy like as a private person?
As far as the heads, we had a moose head (from only God knows where) and a buffalo head (again, from where only God knows). Deer and bear weren’t around. Dove, rabbits and squirrels were the most abundant wildlife.
Have you ever been to Africa ? I can’t imagine this is news to anyone but, yes, widespread corruption and mismanaged conservation programs do keep money from protecting threatened species. Funds either get diverted from their purpose or are not being dedicated to conservation in the first place. Crack down on ivory and you would find the money from out of general revenue.
Not just hunting... Boat racing, flying, archaeology... He was a nice regular kind of guy. He was out of town a lot and we had he place to ourselves most of the time. But he always had time to treat us kids like we were human and have in depth discussions, he was like a teacher. He loved to share his hunting and arrowhead hunting stories and of course there was no end to them.
If he was home on weekends he would take us out boating or flying. Or out to the range to trap shoot. We often went and goofed around with racing boats against Jimbo McConnell who was much younger at the time. Jimbo lived there also, another boat racing legend. I was also good friends with Jimbo’s son David, we were the same age and lived only a block from each other.
It was a lot of fun to grow up in that little town because of folks like this who lived there. And everyone closely knew everyone, it was like one big family. :)
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