I just watched a totally licensed and legal elephant hunt on TV and the host made some very good points very similar to Andy's. The guides that took them our are very well trained at what they do, they grew up hunting these animals because they NEEDED to. The meat from the elephant harvested was enough to feed the village for a year. The hunters are also there and able to locate signs of poaching including highly unethical snare traps. If the hunting were outlawed, then these guides would have to go back to their roots and start hunting to support their families instead of relying on the income, and meat, that the paid hunters provide.
The bull they shot was old, solitary and not contributing to the gene pool any longer. Removing him from he herd not only provided much needed food for the locals, but also freed up resources for the remaining herd with a very ethical one shot kill vs a leg snare that poachers use that could catch a very young (or old) animal and cause them to suffer with no benefit to the locals or herd.
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- Sat Jul 05, 2014 8:18 pm
- Forum: Off-Topic
- Topic: The girl got game
- Replies: 14
- Views: 2064
- Thu Jul 03, 2014 2:17 pm
- Forum: Off-Topic
- Topic: The girl got game
- Replies: 14
- Views: 2064
Re: The girl got game
AndyC wrote:I don't hunt for trophies - never have and doubt I ever will, but I don't judge those who enjoy it and here's why.
In Africa there's a saying - "If the game pays, it stays". Game farms and ranches are businesses - land there is certainly NOT free, and the owners don't pay millions of dollars on setting up an infrastructure on tens of thousands of hectares (it has to be huge so the animals can roam freely) out of the goodness of their hearts so that animals can "have a place to live" and let people take photographs. If nobody was willing to pay for the privilege of hunting, those game farms would be out of business which would mean the animals would have no place to live and slide towards extinction.
Let's take elephant hunts - if it's an old bull who has lived a long productive life and has passed along his genetic material to the herd through breeding, it's very practical and sensible to make full use of his hastening end - what a waste it would be to just let a pack of hyenas or jackals take him down and slowly eat him alive. It's much more humane to give him a quick and respectful send-off with a single bullet to the brain (paid for by a trophy hunter at an expensive price commensurate with the scarcity of that resource), whereafter the products of his body are used to feed local villagers as well as be used by many industries which provide employment, profit AND give the locals a stake in the continuing welfare of the animals.
Similarly, the finite resources of that game farm can only hold so many animals; there's only so much grazing available on that land, so either the animals are harvested legally (by paying hunters) or the herds have to be culled (a very brutal event) so that the rest can live and thrive.
In Africa, it is the hunter whose money is helping conserve wildlife - not the whiny shrub-hugging bunny botherers we have here.
