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budroux2w wrote:

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.