dominion does not necessarily include luring an innocent animal out of his haven to shoot him ... for a f***ing trophy, for God’s sake!!!!!!!!
“The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.” Prov. 12:10
Wow, you have really gotten lost in emotion. Do you get this emotional about your chicken? They are lured from their pens and mercilessly chopped for Colonel Sanders...
Thank you. I am Conservative and rational. This does not preclude me from having emotions as well. There is balance; one does not have to be a Pollyanna to love animals nor treat animals as furniture either. One must respect nature and the animals God placed there. We thank God for the food on our plates not the trophys on our wall.
But that does not make trophy hunting bad, or even morally suspect. The manner in which the hunt is conducted can be subjected to moral scrutiny: one should not, for example, deliberately or recklessly cause needless pain and suffering.
I can see that you are immune to reason on this point, but I hope you'll forgive me for using your post to point out one of the logical errors that seem so prevalent among the anti-hunting fanatics.
You say "luring an innocent animal out of his haven to shoot him ... for a f***ing trophy"...
The first error is to anthropomorphize the animal by giving him moral agency "innocent animal". Animals can be neither innocent nor guilty -- they can't think, reason, sin or be saved. They are simply beasts, a category distinct from humans which are the only animals who are, in fact, capable of moral agency.
Your second error isn't necessarily logical, but simply betrays a lack of familiarity with the natural world. "lured...out of his haven". Well, the "haven" part betrays the same sort of illogical sentimentality of your first error, but there's no need to belabor that particular point. No, the second error is with the "luring" part.
One does not "lure" a particular game animal any more than one baits a hook with the hopes of catching a particular shark.
Which gets us to a corollary of the "luring" bit which is the area that might well be problematic for the hunting party. I have to admit ignorance of current game management practices in Africa. It may well be that the use of bait is currently illegal in that part of the continent, though with the general collapse of what could properly be called the rule of law in Rhodesia, excuse me, Zimbabwe makes that whole discussion almost academic. What I do know, for sure, is that just because using bait in North America for hunting large predators is illegal, we cannot draw the inference that it is even bad game management in Africa. It's utterly apples and oranges.
If one wants to go down the legal route, one has to address the fact that the "law" in "Zimbabwe" is largely what the murderous dictator Robert Mugabe says it is at any particular moment. And speaking of President Mugabe, it was widely reported that his own birthday party in March of this year feature a rather exotic menu.
"His guests were fed a young elephant, and two buffaloes, two sables and five impalas were also donated to the president by a local landowner. He also threw in a lion and a crocodile to be stuffed as an extra gift for Mugabe. On top of this, 40 cows were offered to the president by two members of his government. A second elephant is going to be shot and given to the Victoria Falls community."
Cursing and quoting the bible in the same post.
Covered quite a bit of ground there.
But to the point.
“The righteous care for the needs of their animals...”
Yes they do.
Especially when caring for the animals needs mean some must be killed.
With wild animals, the most efficient way is hunting.
The permits and fees paid by the hunter are used to manage the animals and their habitat to maintain a healthy animal population.
“but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.”
And so too the kind acts of some righteous.
Is it better to leave the lion to over populate his habitat, which will endanger the survival of *every other* species in the habitat.
When a lion is hungry, it eats.
It eats whatever it can kill.
An overpopulation of lions would severely depress the wildebeest, for example.
At some point, there won’t be enough wildebeests left to keep the species going.
That would be devastating to the local ecology.
Take just *one* animal species out of the picture and the ecological order is upended.
It could mean the collapse of the entire ecological system.
So which is the best stewardship, judicial hunting of all animals or leaving them all to wither and die?
We must always look beyond the point just in front of our own noses to see the big picture in order to provide the best stewardship of the ecology.
Innocent? Haven? Anthropomorphize much. Baiting is legal, 'Cecil' was just doing what came natural. Along with all the others that came to the bait.
I have to say it again, all lion hunting is over bait, and animals tend to not stay in fences. How hard is that to understand??? I doubt that they lured anything, they put out a bait and he came in to it! Hundreds of lions are killed that wander off refuges and take up residence where the living is easy near cattle herds, they don’t look at the maps before looking for lunch, for God’s sake.
No one is more interested in the preservation of animals than a hunter, and every PH that I have hunted with in Africa was constantly on the watch for poachers, the ones that will take over if hunting is abolished.