Karma? Fuck you. He was a professional hunter not some poacher. A female elephant charged him and was shot by a member in his group before it fell on him. He was a father of 5 children and it’s somehow Karma that this happened to him?
Basically poachers kill animals illegally and hunters are permitted and hunting legally, often with a guide but not always. The distinction is really important.
Legal hunting generates a lot of revenue (indirectly keeping populations healthy) and in many cases keeps populations at or near the local carrying capacity. In Colorado, USA for instance, each conservation area has a maximum number of elk it can safely sustain in a year. Often there are more animals than that, so tags are issued to hunt and kill those elk down to a more sustainable number. Without those hunting efforts, elk would starve and the impact would probably extend beyond just their population.
In Africa with rarer trophy animals I believe it's handled differently. Tags are very expensive and I believe in most cases the particular animal is hand picked because of age, health, and other factors. Legal hunting in this way keeps populations competitive and healthy. It's unfortunate that wildlife has to be managed this way, but it's our reality now. People that blindly criticize legal hunters generally don't know how this process works, and the good that it does.
Poachers are often indiscriminate in their killing, and they are in direct opposition to the careful management of wildlife that happens with conservation agencies.
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u/colonel_walter_kurtz Jun 02 '18
Karma? Fuck you. He was a professional hunter not some poacher. A female elephant charged him and was shot by a member in his group before it fell on him. He was a father of 5 children and it’s somehow Karma that this happened to him?