I’m actually surprised that “We won the war on insects!” isn’t some sort of headline on Fox right now as a Presidential accomplishment. Given our country’s current position on the environment, I figure the earth is toast anyways. May as well stick up for goat’s rights while we all still exist.
Radiolab did a really good story about this issue following a guy who paid to shoot a rhino. It’s worth a listen and puts me in the JonRiwe camp of, this is a win-win. I wish there was a way to fund these conservation efforts that didn’t involve hunting but these programs are very effective. Often the animal selected for the hunt is being put down for a reason.
Gman is furiously taking down notes!
Great episode, which I have also listened to.
It is a similar idea to the concept of conservation hunting of deer in the U.S. (One big caveat is deer aren’t endangered) but hunters pay for tags to hunt, that money goes back into the state DNR to help with conservation efforts. In the US it helps control the massive deer population, and helps fund conservation efforts. This is just a situation where the goat tags are 100k instead of 40-50 bucks.
Pretty much. It’s a complete shit scenario, but it’s where we’re at.
If you just donate the money, the locals don’t see the direct connection, nor is there one really. When you pay the locals to let YOU shoot it, well… shit they better make sure there are more of these things around so rich fucks can shoot them and they can put bread on the table.
It’s a fucked situation, but most of the places these things are happening are fucked situations, so whatever works. I still wont like it, even if I realize that it’s the only thing that’s been proven to work.
There’s really no difference between this and how we handle guns in the US. We allow various random kids and innocent folks to be killed every year so that a certain percentage of people can enjoy their gun fetishes.
I am one 100% OK with these dudes going for trophies, so long as they take on predators of their weight or greater, buck naked with no tools, weapons or devices of any sort except that which they make themselves. If they can go out onto the savannah in their birthday suits, whittle a sharp stick and take down a lion, I say let em mount the trophy. If, on the other hand, the lion takes them down, then Darwin has been paid due tribute.
Exactly. That’s not hunting. That’s just killing.
It’s all about making the animal more valuable alive than dead, right? If we could charge 110,000 dollars to take a picture with the animals, we would.
Don’t forget about this hypocrite:
Boy, the PR firm for the rich trophy hunting assholes certainly has earned it’s money, if this thread is any evidence.
Yes, I’m sure the money from trophy hunts goes to impoverished villagers and conservation efforts instead of lining the pockets of corrupt officials in Pakistan and Central Africa or where-ever. And I’m sure there’s tight controls on how many animals are killed each year, instead of taking however many animals rich American assholes from Texas are willing to pay for.
Remember Cecil the lion, how some rich dentist lured him out of a protected park with an elephant carcass then slowly killed over several hours with a bow and arrow, turns out the paperwork was completely bogus and… he wasn’t punished at all outside of public opinion for that.
Nah, just the numbers. Where they let the occasional fuckwit come in and shoot some animal, those animal populations do better than where they don’t and poachers kill them en masse. Because the locals are willing to work with poachers if they get paid for it.
I’ll still keep calling the people doing it assholes though.
I wonder if people on various sides of the managed hunting issue would also fundamentally disagree about the Trolley Problem.
Yes, exactly. It’s trivial to get close to a lion in the wild. I have been close enough to a lion to shoot it with a handgun (if that’s what I wanted to do) at least a dozen times, and on several occasions I’ve been within 10 feet of a lion. It takes no skill of any kind to kill a lion with a rifle, and anyone who does it is a cretin.
It’s a bit harder with a leopard. They’re shy when lions aren’t, and they are solitary rather than social. Despite that, I have many close-up photos of them as well. It just takes patience, not skill.
As for elephants, I have literally been surrounded by thirty or more elephants at least 3 times, and have been within 50 feet of an elephant more times than I can count.
People who ‘hunt’ these animals are cretins. That they’re rich cretins looking for trophy kills somehow makes it worse.
Related.
(Edit: The only thing I knew about Jainism was that it was a pagan religion in CK2.)
Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe animals are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy. This idea that animals are conscious was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. And not just the obvious cases—primates, dogs, elephants, whales, and others. Scientists are now finding evidence of an inner life in alien-seeming creatures that evolved on ever-more-distant limbs of life’s tree. In recent years, it has become common to flip through a magazine like this one and read about an octopus using its tentacles to twist off a jar’s lid or squirt aquarium water into a postdoc’s face. For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.
There now appears to exist, alongside the human world, a whole universe of vivid animal experience. Scientists deserve credit for illuminating, if only partially, this new dimension of our reality. But they can’t tell us how to do right by the trillions of minds with which we share the Earth’s surface. That’s a philosophical problem, and like most philosophical problems, it will be with us for a long time to come.
Well, now I feel more guilty about the burger I had yesterday.
I guess I’m on track to be a vegetarian in the future.
Elephants remember their dead, and because they follow well-established migratory paths, they often return to places where one of their family has died. When they do, they basically hold memorial ceremonies, as if the family member has just died. Watch them for an hour at play and you’ll know they’re intelligent. I really can’t grasp how anyone could kill one other than in self-defense or possibly as food, though the latter is a stupid feeding strategy.
You and me both. I was raised by a NRA gun nut. My dad wasn’t the type to care about putting some food on the table, he just enjoys shooting animals. As a kid I thought the guns were really cool, but by the time I was 10-11 it just struck me how fucking gross and wrong the whole thing was. Why are we out here shooting animals? I can’t recall a single time he actually brought something back to put on the dinner table, it was all just about roaming around and blowing up meat-filled target dummies for him.
That feeling of revulsion has only grown in the 30 years since, mostly related to trophy hunting. I don’t really care about people hunting deer and the like when they make use of the venison, especially since without hunting their population will get out of control and a lot will suffer. But stuff like hunting elephants and the like? It makes me sick. They should sell licenses to hunt those people.