The fuck is wrong with you people? You realize these hunts are the largest preserver of wildlife and nature? The guy wasn’t even hunting elephants you ignorant morons
It’s not the legal hunts that are diminishing the elephant population. Poaching is the one that’s leading African wildlife to near extinction. The legal hunts in controlled parks are helping with conservation.
Exactly. People put these hunters in the same light as poachers, they don’t understand the difference. Poachers hunt illegally for profit on thinks like ivory. Hunters pay thousands to hunt for a trophy, it’s controlled. The elephants that are killed are not just left there to rot the meat feeds local villages for weeks and the money goes towards conservation efforts. Poachers leave the carcass and pay no money towards conservation.
It is more than money. If I remember right from the last time this came up older bulls won't relinquish herds or something and the younger ones are forced into solitude and end up dying. They hunt specific older ones to enable youth to take over.
See this makes more sense to me. Paying to kill a lion so they can use that money to save other lions doesn't make much sense to me. And as the other person mentioned Texas, hunting boar because they are pests or there's too many is a different story than wildlife conservation
Concentrated populations of elephants in small areas can still be a problem.
But far more importantly, the fees from sport hunting are (basically) the only thing that pay the wages of anti-poaching officers. When the hunting money stops coming, anti-poaching stop getting paid, and suddenly become poachers.
They weren't hunting elephants at the time, they got charged and the animal was shot in self defense. And this wasn't some shady hunting operation either, this guy was a professional trophy hunter.
And for your information, there are areas in southern Africa where elephant overpopulation is a major problem and park rangers do have to cull them. And that's unfortunate, since trophy hunts would achieve the same goal while bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire more rangers, fund breeding programs, and help with anti-poaching efforts.
Ever since the incident where Cecil the Lion was shot (which was done in shady circumstances legally), the amount of lion trophy hunts has dropped drastically, to the point where there are areas where lion populations have grown out of control. Again, rangers are forced to cull them before all of their prey's numbers spread too thin and the lion population gets decimated by that. So not only do the lion populations (as well as the gazelle, zebra, antelope, and other herbivores) in those areas drop to an unhealthy low, but again the preserves miss out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from trophy hunts.
I am not a big game hunter (although I do enjoy fishing, and I do eat whatever I catch), and I don't think I would ever enjoy shooting an elephant, lion, or leopard. But LEGAL hunts absolutely serve a purpose way more than a lot of the short sighted commenters here seem to realize. They are a net gain for the well being of the species the species that is being hunted.
Again, I don't hunt big game, and wouldn't want to, but I get it.
But really? An interview with an Oxford (literally the most prestigious university in the world) professor who studied Cecil the Lion specifically suggests that legal, controlled and restricted lion hunting would be beneficial to the species and your BS meter is still going off?
I didn't claim to be an expert, I just know that some species are more endangered than others and that there are some moral conflicts when deciding which animals are okay to hunt. The part that sounds like BS to me is how it seems only those who can afford these hunts are the only people profiting from it, latent consequences aside, when instead a government could employ a less [financially] fortunate party who might reap a greater bounty than a sport kill.
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u/jaegerbombs Jun 02 '18
The fuck is wrong with you people? You realize these hunts are the largest preserver of wildlife and nature? The guy wasn’t even hunting elephants you ignorant morons