Sure, if you can convince a dozen billionaires to pay $110K for someone else to take a (I guess bespoke) picture each year, it would again accomplish the same thing. I suspect you cannot.
Of COURSE it’s a thin justification to kill something. The question is: Do the ends (protecting an endangered species and ensuring that they don’t become extinct) justify the means (allowing a dozen of that animal to be killed for sport)?
I can understand a worldview that says that hunting anything for sport is so cruel that no positive side-effect is worth it.
I don’t share it though. In this case, I’d say that the ends do justify the means.
Yeah. I’m 100% in favor of managed wildlife, especially for endangered species, and if that means managed hunting, that’s what it means. I’m pro-goat survival, not anti-goat killing, so if killing a few allows overall numbers, to increase, I say go for it. Often, e.g. killing juvenile males can be necessary to the overall herd health.
But I’m very much a pragmatist on this point. For a lot of people, it’s an emotional argument.
They actually do pay herders in Asia, and they don’t pay six or seven figures either. And from what I can tell, it’s effective.
Since humans killed off many predators, hunting is often necessary else the game animals (deer and the like) would explode and the population would eventually starve.
Killing endangered animals is not remotely the same thing. One is necessary, the other isn’t. (It’s most cases it’s not even sport, which is bad enough). But no, the ends do not justify the means.
P.S. Netflix has a snow leopard documentary. Highly recommended. :)
The problem is that a) charities do that all the time and b) I don’t think that would even work all that well.
Telling somebody “here’s some money, let’s agree not to kill that goat” is probably less effective than saying “Your job is to stop people from killing that goat. Here’s some money if you do that.” The latter encourages a culture around actively engaging with the goat as a valuable resource to be managed. Making the money directly contingent on the animal matters, from a sustainability and cultural perspective.
I’m a pragmatist too, I just think that the killing of an endangered species for pleasure diminishes the good of paying the money to help keep it from going extinct (morally, I mean, not referring to efficacy).
I’m not a vegan or vegetarian and I have no problem with people hunting animals for food. I do have a problem with trophy hunting and killing for the pleasure of it. I just find it disturbing and gross, so I’m not going to applaud a rich guy for paying money so he can jerk off over the corpse of an endangered animal. If you want to protect and endangered species then do so, you don’t have to revel in the fact that you’re rich enough to be able to kill something that other people aren’t allowed to.
I agree, but in my opinion it’s just dealing with the hand we’re dealt. Ideally we wouldn’t have to kill any endangered animals for any non-medical reason, but then again, ideally we also wouldn’t have assholes with billions of dollars who want to kill those animals either. It’s a problem of human incentives.
Yeah, I totally get the “deal with the hand you’re dealt”. I’m just saying, if it’s something he truly cares about he can drop the $110,000 without going out to kill the thing he’s trying to protect.
I’m sure the money will be put to good use in the sustainability of the animal, just don’t expect me to praise or like the guy. :)
Say there’s a refugee camp somewhere in Africa where there’s a bunch of ethnic-based violence and killings (like a Sudan or Rwanda). I’m rich and want to do some good, so I offer to donate one million dollars to provide tents, food, and security for the refugee camp. I’m going to be saving many lives by doing so. Of course, for me to donate this money, I demand the right to pick a child of my choice, blow her face off with a shotgun, and pose with the corpse.
Well, I think that if you incentivize the locals to value the goat, you’d get the same result.
The difficulty in my view is to sustain the funding. Unlike sexy snow leopards, I don’t see a long-term funding stream to support brown goats in some remote corner of Pakistan. You could excite the public to pay for a year or three, but eventually their attention would be transferred to something else.
The beauty of the managed hunting scheme is that it is self-perpetuating. The animal has value to hunters, and you exploit their desire to hunt rare animals to price the hunt at a high-enough level that it sustains the animal herds and incentivizes the locals.
The risk is that the program is so successful that there are too many goats and the hunters won’t pay top-dollar to gun down a common animal. But of course at that point, you’ve kind of won, right?
Well, people who care about the welfare of nature and wildlife aren’t biased against the “sexiness” (appeal) of a particular species. That said, these are pretty cool looking goats.
I don’t see this as any more than a win-win scenario.
The asshole billionaires who get their dicks hard murdering endangered animals instead of hunting animals in need of population control get their photo op.
The people who would poach the animals get paid not to.
The animals get conservation support and their population rebounds.
And we get to see the photos and names of the people who we can know who are assholes to avoid.
I agree – but there are a limited (if hopefully growing) number of donors/dollars out there for these types of efforts.
It’s just the nature of the beast that charity funds will ebb and flow over the years. Getting $1.32M for a good cause in one year is not that hard (relatively speaking), but getting $1.32M each year for the next fifty is not an easy task.
They do have cool horns… but most rare sheep/goats/antelope would probably have roughly equal value simply by being super-rare.
But it’s true this manage-hunting approach wouldn’t work with lots of other animals – simply being rare is probably not enough to entice pricey managed-hunts for rare kangaroo rats or wood toads, not to mention some endangered beetle. Which is another good argument for freeing up some charity funds.
Because they weren’t actually protected. They were only declared protected, but the protection wasn’t funded.
You see the same thing happening in Africa, where multiple countries sell licenses to hunt e.g. lions, licenses that come with big price tags, so wealthy hunters can bag a lion. Personally, I think it’s a terrible program.
What’s strange is this: The wealthy hunter could quite easily go to many places in Africa, stalk a lion, and then take a picture of that lion, which picture is taken by a telescopic sight indicating that he could have killed the lion. It’s the same achievement without the death of the lion, yet somehow, it isn’t enough for the wealthy hunter. The wealthy hunter needs to kill. It’s not a good thing.
That was in response to species like toads and beetles that can’t generate charity directly. Nature Conservancy is international, but I don’t know if they operate in Asia/Pakistan (and there’s other international organizations that do the same thing.) There’s risk of course that in less stable places, the government would just do what it wants with the land regardless of who bought it, which is why it’s useful to work with the local populations like the Snow Leopard trust people do.
At the end of the day, insisting that hunting is the only or best way to possibly save endangered animals is really quite specious. Tourism (and eco-tourism) can be effective too (see for instance Costa Rica), and rare creatures aren’t getting killed Sure there’s downsides to eco tourism, but if we want to celebrate pragmatism, I’ll celebrate that instead.
Literally nobody is suggesting that here, and I doubt there is anyone saying that anywhere. Obviously, there are many approaches. Eco-tourism is an awesome one. But they won’t all work everywhere. Costa Rica is a lot more accessible for westerners than some remote spot in Pakistan. Philanthropic organizations are awesome, too, but they can’t buy everyplace endangered species live. Managed hunting is one solution among many, but it will may be the only one that works in some spots.
If your priority is treating animals humanely and avoiding cruelty, hunting is a terrible ‘solution.’ I get that. But if you’re focused on preserving the species, it’s going to be the best practical approach to some situations.
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