Worth watching if you can find it online somewhere: Louis Theroux’s African Hunting Holiday. There’s a segment where Louis goes out to feed the “future trophy” lions that really shook me up.
I specified alone. If the Trump spawn want a lion, they’re going to have to go hand-to-paw with it.
it’s funny. I thought conservatives hate participation trophies.
Okay fine, stabbed repeatedly with a pointy stick.
If you’re referring to what blondebear’s last post is talking about, fine, that’s not particularly sporting or even hunting. But not everyone who goes on an African hunt is glamping.
https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-how-much-does-hunting-contribute-to-african-economies/
According to this link more money is made from visitors than hunters
Sure, but still, $200MM is nothing to sneeze at.
And here’s the thing- to the natives, the local animals are not cute things to be treasured. The local animals eat their livestock, or destroy their crops, or the preserves take up land they could be farming on. They are pests to them. Tasty pests that can be shot and eaten, and then no more problems with them eating the maize crop, etc.
Look right here on the SDMB, where posters talk casually about killing skunks, raccoons, squirrels and what not just because those animals have the termerity to come onto their property and cause some small annoyance. As compared to destoying the crops that will stave off starvation.
So, if one can show these people that they can get hard cash from tourists or even sport hunters ( especially as most sport hunters distribute the meat)- they are less likely to kill all those wild animals.
Trophy hunters, with their hard cash- make those wild animals into a resource, not a pest.
Doesn’t really matter what the hunter wants, it’s what the ranger will let him or her do. One of my grandfather’s friends was a big game hunter. He made at least a half dozen trips to Africa and usually bought a license to hunt a few different species on each trip. It was not uncommon for him to drop 5 figures on a license for, say, a lion only to find out when he got there that even if one walked up to the barrel of his gun, he was strictly prohibited from shooting it. And when he did get his lion, he was told which one specifically he could take. I assume it was an old, maybe even sick one.
No, just looking for potential economic opportunities. If, say, you could get a rich guy to pay $1 million to take part in an execution, maybe you could fund local police departments and get them away from constitutionally-questionable civil forfeiture policies. The condemned is going to die anyway so what difference does it make, and the wealth redistribution might do some good.
Or perhaps a person with an incurable disease could sell his life rights to a hunter so that his family would be taken care of financially. At least in this case, both parties would be entering into the transaction will full knowledge, unlike with animal hunting.
The local pack of coyotes eats your dog, you’re not going to care that someone goes out and shoots them …
I suspect that any country with a sufficiently advanced infrastructure and sufficiently stable to be an attractive destination for hunters does not have desirable trophy animals roaming around outside of protected areas.
This is certainly true for South Africa, where lions, elephants, rhinos, giraffes and lions, are not found outside of protected areas or game farms.
Vervet monkeys, baboons and jackals are more likely to pose a threat to crops but these are hardly sought after as trophy animals.
Most of the favoured trophy animals are not particularly tasty either.
This doesn’t speak well of South Africa’s environment … is it so bad that these megafauna can’t survive outside protected areas … or is it so bad in the protected areas that the megafauna can’t breed enough to expand …
How many people get eaten by lions in Kruger National Park every year? …
Despite our best efforts, rhinos (black and white) are heavily poached, (for the “medicinal” properties of their horns) at a rate that threatens their sustainability. . They can barely survive inside protected areas, alone outside. IIRC, SA still has amongst the largest populations of these species, which are both healthier than Asian rhino species populations
Giraffes are animals of grassy savannahs,which covers only a small proportion of South Africa; their numbers are likely to always have been limited.
I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you why lions and elephants don’t play well with humans.
There is more to SA megafauna than those animals, but those were the ones I specifically mentioned earlier.
Oh, and a lot were rendered regionally extinct by white hunters. When Dutch colonists first arrived at what is now Cape Town, lions, black rhino and elephants abounded. Barring zoos and “safari parks” there have been none within a thousand kilometres of Cape Town for over a century.
:rolleyes:
For starters, let me tip my hat to the South African efforts to conserve your wildlife … you folks are doing a wonderful job and I didn’t really want to come across demeaning y’all’s efforts …
The subject I’m addressing is “trophy hunting”, where a foreigner comes in, buys the proper licenses and permits, goes to an area of surplus trophies and proceeds to kill one … for example, where lion predation is a problem for local herdsmen … poaching is a different problem all together, I can only speak for the United States; if a US citizen travels to Africa, poaches a rhino, and tries to bring that rhino back home, that citizen will be looking at some serious jail time …
I guess I should have framed this as a question: how much of South Africa’s natural habitats remain outside your parklands? … It would be nice if the rhinos fully recovered until they start eating some poor dirt farmer’s annual food supply … or a pride of lionesses taking up residence in downtown Pretoria (“Mountain lion killed in downtown Santa Monica” - Seattle Times - May 22nd, 2012) …
I’m perfectly fine with trophy hunting as a wildlife management tool … if the wildlife biologists say the species is endangered, then no hunting at all … if the wildlife biologists say the species is over-populated, then start issuing tags … or in the case of coyotes in the West, offer a bounty …
I suspect that it matters to the animal.
A trophy bighorn ram has been through a lot over the years, surviving his first year, evading predators, struggling through alpine winters, fighting off all comers to reach the pinnacle of his herd, and siring the next generation. He has accomplished a hell of a lot more for a bighorn than Ted Nugent could dream of in his world. Who are we to drop in one day and cavalierly snuff all that out by putting a bullet into his lungs (can’t even make it quick and shoot him in the brain; gotta make him suffer so that majestic head will look impeccable on the wall)?
AIUI, hunters don’t go for head shots. Hitting them in the lungs and then following the trail of blood to where they’ve collapsed is, I believe, a surer way to impose our biblical dominion over animals.
Or shoot the dog owner for not keeping his dog safe with coyotes around.</sarcasm> Why does he bear no responsibility in the death of his dog?
Military snipers don’t go for head shots. This is because it is a small target. Furthermore, sheep have very thick skulls. Male sheep crack their heads together with the force of a car crash or something, and they do it multiple times per day in the breeding season. In other words, it is incredibly irresponsible to “go for head shots.” But if you want to believe that hunters are moustache-twirling villains from your armchair, feel free.
Also, bighorn sheep are considered lifetime hunts. A hunter who gets a tag has been applying annually for about 20 years straight. Once they get a tag, they can expect to not live long enough to get another chance. In a given year, there are only a few dozen sheep tags per state, calculated by an incredibly strictly managed program. The sheep population is fine, but it takes a strongly managed program, and the method of paying for that involves hunting fees. That does include the rich dude who wants to drop $100,000 plus on an auction tag, which in at least some states (Arizona for sure I think) 100% goes directly to sheep.
Quite a few, in fact. “Perfectly-legal” doesn’t equal “Right.”
To me, the issue is with trophy hunting as an activity, not actually what these clowns have decided are their trophies.
It’s just as barbaric to want to go deliberately kill a trophy buck/ram/boar/tarpon/etc… (just to name a few close-to-home trophy animals) just for the sake of having killed it, as it is to travel to Africa or Asia and shoot some other sort of animal. I guess it would be more tolerable if they didn’t use modern rifles to do so- there’s no real skill in shooting an animal with a large-bore rifle at 75 yards that you couldn’t show off at the range with a paper target. These guys just want to kill something for the sake of killing it.
Let’s face it though; most people are dipshits who are nearly entirely unaware of anything other than their own petty desires, and have little concept of why trophy hunting would be considered barbaric. They’re the same assholes cheering loudly when one boxer starts beating the crap out of the other one, and probably are the guys who like the violent aspects of football because people get hurt. They’d likely have little interest in games like football and hockey otherwise.
That’s right, the kill isn’t instant, as you claimed it was. The animal has to suffer while its lungs fill up with blood and it eventually dies of suffocation. What did it do to deserve that fate?
[Full disclosure: I shot lots of little critters in my callow youth, before I grew up.]
LOL. I’m hardly “in my armchair”. I’ve spent a lot more time in the wilderness than most, including you, very likely. I’ve had plenty of encounters with wildlife, including being chased by a momma black bear. Your knee-jerk condescension is grossly misplaced.
I fail to see how that is a defence of snuffing out a life for shits and giggles.
It is the second fastest and most foolproof method of doing so, aside from the heart. To suggest that they should instead aim for the head demonstrates a lack of understanding of the physics involved in a long range shot, nor the anatomy of a given species. You want to approach this from an emotional argument, fine. But that’s never good for policy.
By the way, why are you assuming that people don’t eat bighorn sheep?