“Trophy Hunter Seeks to Import Parts of Rare Rhino He Paid $400,000 to Kill”
My question: how small does your penis have to be to pay $400K for an orgasm? And did committing this atrocity make his dick any bigger?
:mad:
The spin on this is that the money will partially go to pay for conservation, so in the long run it’s good for the world rhino population.
Because as science tells us, if you get enough cash and put it in a pile, and let it sit for a while, a bunch of baby rhinos will pop out of it.
That is 100% beside the point I am making. If he gave a fuck about living rhinos, he could have just donated the money to conservation. Clearly, he could spare the cash. He craved the rush that comes (so to speak) from killing.
I have every confidence that none of that money was siphoned off by various corrupt individuals and/or the government.
: old rolleyes :
One reason rhinos are hunted is that some people – Chinese, in particular – believe powdered rhino horn is an effective aphrodisiac, for reasons that should not require, and cannot survive, much thought.
Of course, rhino horn is nothing but compressed hair, and there are much cheaper, and clinically tested, erectile dysfunction drugs on the market.
OTOH, it’s hard to arouse public sympathy for an endangered species so ugly and nasty and ill-tempered as the rhino. I once saw a performing hippo at Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus, but a rhino would have been out of the question.
Perhaps “Save the unicorns!” would be an effective message. (It is generally believed that the legendary/heraldic unicorn was based on third-hand accounts of the rhino – medieval Europeans would never actually have seen one, so they rendered the story into a “one-horned horse.”)
By far the largest market for rhino horns for traditional medicine is Vietnam. Another market is newly wealthy citizens of Yemen and Oman who want high status rhino horn handles for their traditional daggers.
Strange comment. The rhino is one of the “Big Five” in Africa, safari sightings are highly valued. There’s immense public sympathy for conservation for such an impressive beast. It’s harder to gain support for an endangered animal if it’s seen as dull or unimpressive.
Trophy hunting isn’t posing a significant risk to animals in Africa. It’s the demise of suitable prey because bush meat is popular, habitat loss, and locals killing them to prevent loss of cattle or people that are the main threats to lions, rhinos, and other animals. Trophy hunting as a source of revenue gives the people a reason to give a damn about their local wildlife. If these animals are a source of income the locals are more likely to set aside land for them to live on, less likely to assist poachers, and more likely to seek other alternatives to protecting their cattle and people than slaughtering the offending creature.
I’m not a fan of trophy hunting myself. I hunt deer but I have zero desire to shoot a lion, rhino, or some other exotic African animal. But trophy hunting appears to be good for conservation efforts.
This is why I’ve always enjoyed the “Predator” move franchise. Humans get to see what it’s like when the shoe is on the other foot. Getting hunted and then murdered is a terrifying thing. I couldn’t do that to any living creature unless it was for food to survive. Even then, I’d feel pretty darn bad about it.
Again, NOT the point! If he gave a rat’s ass about conservation, he could have just donated the money. Yes, the deer population can get out of control, so hunting deer CAN be good for the deer population. (My late husband was a hunter all his life and our freezer was usually full of venison.) The population of an ENDANGERED SPECIES does not need to be culled.
“Good for conservation efforts”? Bullshit.
The article mentions as justification that this particular rhino was supposedly interfering with breeding by other male rhinos.
Allowing importation of “trophy” parts still sends a bad message in my view. Better to have our government financially support conservation efforts instead of using bounties from hunters for that purpose.
And yes, from what I’ve heard, use of rhino horn for “medicinal” purposes endangers these animals far more than hunting by dumbass foreigners. It’s disheartening to hear of so many animal and plant species that are threatened because collectors/poachers are supplying a market for “alternative” remedies - that mostly are ineffective for the conditions they’re claimed to treat.
Its not even as though this hunt was going to be particularly thrilling. You follow the signal on the radio collar in a jeep to where the Rhino is peacefully browsing, someone hands you your high powered rifle and plop him one between the eyes. I’m not seeing much of a point other than ticking off another box in your “animals I’ve murdered” life list.
There’s an episode of Futurama that you’d love.
Seems like you completely ignored the part of my post that you cut in the quote. I think you’re the one that missed the point here. Throwing cash at a problem doesn’t fix it when that problem is a dwindling population and you’re simultaneously paying someone to kill a member of it.
I’m pretty sure ThelmaLou understood your post and your point just fine, based on what I read.
What’s wrong with someone that they’d pay $400,000 just to murder a rhinoceros?
I get hunting. I’m in favor of hunting. It’s part of human nature. But this sort of “hunting” is just pathetic.
There are all kinds of animals out there for you to murder, and this is what you decide to do? You can’t hunt deer, or wild pigs like a normal human being?
In the past, killing a powerful animal like a rhinoceros proved that you were a serious bad ass. I could understand if a guy 1000 years ago felt like a big man because he killed a rhinoceros with a spear or something. But in 2019? This is what you choose to make yourself feel like a big man? Seriously?
Then why is she saying that what I wrote is 100% beside the point when we’re in agreement? That makes zero sense.
I tend to agree that these big game hunters are generally douchebags looking for bragging rights, and I’m also not sure that we should be giving them permission to import their penis-substitute trophies into the country.
At the same time, as a believer in animal rights and a vegetarian for almost three decades, I just can’t get too excited about this. Most of the available evidence suggests that the money from big-game hunting does contribute measurably to broader conservation efforts in Africa. It gives local communities jobs and income, helps to reduce poaching, and provides an incentive to maintain a wilderness that might otherwise be depleted even further in search of economic gain.
Firstly, the population is not currently dwindling. The black rhino population is currently about two and a half times the size it was at its low point, in the early 1990s, when there were only about 2,300 left in the wild.
Namibia has the right, under international treaties, to allow five black rhino kills per year. They’re probably going to take advantage of that allocation no matter what, so they might as well do it by charging some American asshole with too much money the price of a decent house to satisfy his blood lust. For the five kills, that’s a total of about $2 million into an economy with a per-capita GDP of less than $6,000, and this sort of hunting helps sustain a tourism industry that’s almost 15% of the country’s economy, and over 18% of its employment.
I concede the possibility that some of this money ends up lining the pockets of corrupt officials, but according to Transparency International, Namibia is the second-least corrupt nation on the African continent, and its corruption index is not far behind Spain, and is ahead of Italy and South Africa. They say that much of the money from these hunting trips helps to fund conservation. If the money they get from five rhino kills helps them to prevent even, say, 8 rhinos from being killed by poachers, isn’t that small net gain a good thing?
This is stupid.
No-one is arguing that THIS PARTICULAR GUY is a conservationist. But that doesn’t mean that the money he paid, and the trophy hunting program more generally, don’t contribute to conservation efforts.
So what does this guy plan on doing w/ the rhino-remains? What subset of American society would react anything other than unfavorably to seeing rhino parts displayed?
Yeah, I don’t understand why someone would get a thrill out of this sort of killing.