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 feeder wrote:
Ah, I see. In my case, I used the term "murder" to indicate an unconscionable, immoral act. Not to indicate I think animals are people.

So stealing from the poor is murder?

 feeder wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I see nothing wrong with trophy collecting as long as you also don't waste the meat. Which is what happens with these safari hunts in Africa, the meat gets donated to local villages.

Nothing wrong with it, except the fact that some poor dumb animal has to die to compensate for some stupid d-bag's inferior sense of self.

Again, just take a damn photograph. Why does killing the dumb thing need to be part of it?

Elephants are extremely intelligent. Calling them dumb is dumb.

Straw men are murder.

Tactical_Spam wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Ah, I see. In my case, I used the term "murder" to indicate an unconscionable, immoral act. Not to indicate I think animals are people.

So stealing from the poor is murder?

Yes. That's exactly what I meant.

nels1031 wrote:

 feeder wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I see nothing wrong with trophy collecting as long as you also don't waste the meat. Which is what happens with these safari hunts in Africa, the meat gets donated to local villages.

Nothing wrong with it, except the fact that some poor dumb animal has to die to compensate for some stupid d-bag's inferior sense of self.

Again, just take a damn photograph. Why does killing the dumb thing need to be part of it?

Elephants are extremely intelligent. Calling them dumb is dumb.

Can elephants speak?

Prestor Jon wrote:

 BigWaaagh wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
Yeah, one is different than the others. One is making a difference that helps an endangered species.

Trophy hunting isn't my thing usually. I hunt to kill varmints or feed myself. If I were to bag an unusually large buck, I may mount the head, but it's not my primary purpose.

I don't like trophy hunting, but I don't knock it either. It's legal, it's supporting local peoples, and it is helping the species itself.

In the case of rhinos in particular, the target is chosen by the government/park ranger/etc., not the hunter. This animal is usually all ready targeted for termination whether someone is paying or not. The thing is, when male rhinos get old, their fertility drops, but they become territorial a-holes. Although they can't breed themselves they will prevent younger males from breeding, sometimes to the point of killing younger males. In cases like this terminating an animal helps the species. Why not throw $300,000 into the local community while they are at it?

This is one of the great canards to the whole "Trophy Hunting helps Species/Conservation/Communites" spin. I said it in my post before and I'll say it again, it's nothing but bs that I've been hearing for 40 years and it's as false now as it was when it was first spun to put an acceptable face on taking animals solely for trophy purposes.

As far as the "The money goes to local communities."/"It helps conservation efforts." lies: Of the roughly $200m a year that is paid for Trophy Hunting in Africa, less than 3% goes to local communities and the amount allocated to conservation efforts is negligible. Most of the money goes to middlemen, corporations and governments. Lies. Trophy hunting makes up only about 1.8% of tourism income in Africa. The vast majority of tourists to Africa come for non-lethal appreciation of the wildlife and the activities of that paltry 2% actually contributes to depletion of the reason that generates the other 98% of that tourism income...great business plan! Real life example? Botswana essentially banned game hunting in 2014 after comparing the costs of game hunting with the income generated by photo/nonlethal tourism: The photo tourism season is longer, makes better use of the wildlife and employs vastly more locals. In it's first year of the ban, over $344m was generated from nonlethal tourism.

A previous poster tried to brush this post off as just a "Hunting bad, err." thread, but it couldn't be further from the truth. I hunt, I eat what I kill, but taking wildlife for trophy purposes is just fundamentally wrong and makes no economic or conservation sense when held up to the light of fact.

You're still barking up the wrong tree. If you want to be angry about trophy hunting then be mad at the authorities that allow it and offer people the opportunity to buy trophy tags. Nobody was breaking the law on this elephant hunt, it was all legal and approved by the Zimbabwe authorities. If the people in charge of protecting the elephants think it's ok to sell elephant tags then why are you mad at the people who buy them? If you're disappointed in how Zimbabwe spends the money it collects from selling tags to big game hunters then why are you blaming the hunters? It's Zimbabwe's fault that they don't make smarter decisions regarding the spending of trophy hunting money collected from hunters.

Nitpicking about trophy hunting is silly. Nobody uses the whole animal they kill and nobody packs the entire carcass home with them. Whether you kill an elk and just mount the head in your living room or eat some of it or eat most of it the animal is still just as dead. I honestly don't care what animals hunters kill or what they do with the carcasses as long as they're legally obtaining tags/licenses and aren't poaching.

Ahh, the old "It's legal, so what's the big deal." response. That just washes it clean, I suppose? Do you have any sense of history and how what was legal in very recent years is now viewed with disgust and disbelief in current light? Yeah, so much for that quick washing of the hands. When something is wrong it stinks. Trophy hunting...the taking of a life for purposes of pure sport...stinks. The non-starter "arguments" to the contrary are lies and have been proven such. If all you've got to distinguish right from wrong is whether there's a law on the books then your perspective has serious, glaring limitations.

 feeder wrote:
Can elephants speak?

Don't know. Never really had anything to say to an Elephant on those rare occasions that I was close to one. Next time I have the chance, I'll try to start up a conversation and get back to you on how it went.

 Tactical_Spam wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Ah, I see. In my case, I used the term "murder" to indicate an unconscionable, immoral act. Not to indicate I think animals are people.

So stealing from the poor is murder?

If you steal their lives yes.

Prestor Jon wrote:
Reducing the population of feral cats is a positive all around. Killing kittens reduces the cat population, so braining kittens isn't terribad in my book.

Just in: killing kitten is the new good guy thing to do!
Up next: the blooming new hobby of beating the gak out of homeless people is actually good because social Darwinism .

 Tactical_Spam wrote:
I was so ready to give you some Frazzled-Tier rambling.

Over “Meat is murder”? As a vegetarian I love that sentence not because it is thoughtful or anything, but because it often makes the blood of omnivores boil. And not all omnivores, mostly the annoying kind that goes on and on about how I am wrong to be a vegetarian or whatever .
Omnivores complain about vegetarians/vegans but they can be SOOOO annoying about diets too .

I thought about becoming vegetarian for a long while.

Not because I am against the killing of animals.

It's because I REALLY hate plants.

I'm in no way saying that people that pay a small fortune to trophy hunt AREN'T giant donkey caves. They pretty much are. That being said, if you can use them to milk a little net positive out of the deal, so what?

Yes, only a small part of the hunt money goes to the locals, and only a small part goes directly to animal conservations. That's still a net positive when many of those animals were all ready slated for termination. If only one cent made it to the local population it would still be a net good.

not to mention that a lot of that money that goes to "the government" and "large corporations" is also used (both directly and indirectly) to combat the two largest threats to endangered species: Poachers and habitat loss. Even small amounts of government assistance can help locals to both prevent poaching and choose not to be a poacher. There are also thousands of people that are choosing NOT to farm because it is more profitable to not destroy animal habitats.

Quite frankly, I believe that the animal conservation groups that fully support regulated hunting know more about it than any of us. You don't have to like trophy hunting, but it is a net positive.


As for killing kittens, feral cats have been a bane on local species while leading short, harsh lives. I support sterilization efforts, and culling in some instances. Frankly I feel the same way about a good portion of the wild horses in the US.

The elephant's a beast, 'tis said,
That wears its tail upon its head;
And where the beastie's tail should be,
A wrinkled suit's all one can see.
It eats too much, its brain's too small
It takes up room from wall to wall;
Ears too big, and feet too flat,
Now, who could love a thing like that?
Yet, bullhands tell of circus rings
Surrounded by those smelly things.
Ballet girls would perch on top
While bullhands followed with a mop
And spade and barrow to haul away
The stuff the beasts et yesterday.
Bullhands speak of those squashed flat
By giants who are sorry that
Their keepers, friends, companions all
Must be scraped from off the wall.
Bullhands sing in tones adored
Of all of those who have been gored,
Or torn apart, or trampled down
By some bewrinkled, tusked clown.
It's sad to say but it's no act,
They love the beasts, and that's a fact.
And if you have but half a wit,
Can't find that 'pon which you sit,
Your back is strong, your mind is weak,
Your sense of smell is not at peak,
Then what they say, my friends, is true:
You can be a bullhand too.

-Song of the Rubber Bulls by Barry Longyear

Sorry, I don't have a lot of sympathy for a guy engaged in a trophy hunt being subtracted from the equation of life.

Maybe they should allow the elephant to mount his head on its own wall?

Strange as it may sound, a fair number of elephants have died in Maine....

The Auld Grump

 kronk wrote:
I thought about becoming vegetarian for a long while.

Not because I am against the killing of animals.

It's because I REALLY hate plants.

I can respect the reasons why people decide to become vegetarian or vegan. I agree with many of them, but personally, I didn't have the force of will to not eat meat.

Just look at a chicken in a hoven... is like... hmmm...

 BigWaaagh wrote:

Prestor Jon wrote:

 BigWaaagh wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
Yeah, one is different than the others. One is making a difference that helps an endangered species.

Trophy hunting isn't my thing usually. I hunt to kill varmints or feed myself. If I were to bag an unusually large buck, I may mount the head, but it's not my primary purpose.

I don't like trophy hunting, but I don't knock it either. It's legal, it's supporting local peoples, and it is helping the species itself.

In the case of rhinos in particular, the target is chosen by the government/park ranger/etc., not the hunter. This animal is usually all ready targeted for termination whether someone is paying or not. The thing is, when male rhinos get old, their fertility drops, but they become territorial a-holes. Although they can't breed themselves they will prevent younger males from breeding, sometimes to the point of killing younger males. In cases like this terminating an animal helps the species. Why not throw $300,000 into the local community while they are at it?

This is one of the great canards to the whole "Trophy Hunting helps Species/Conservation/Communites" spin. I said it in my post before and I'll say it again, it's nothing but bs that I've been hearing for 40 years and it's as false now as it was when it was first spun to put an acceptable face on taking animals solely for trophy purposes.

As far as the "The money goes to local communities."/"It helps conservation efforts." lies: Of the roughly $200m a year that is paid for Trophy Hunting in Africa, less than 3% goes to local communities and the amount allocated to conservation efforts is negligible. Most of the money goes to middlemen, corporations and governments. Lies. Trophy hunting makes up only about 1.8% of tourism income in Africa. The vast majority of tourists to Africa come for non-lethal appreciation of the wildlife and the activities of that paltry 2% actually contributes to depletion of the reason that generates the other 98% of that tourism income...great business plan! Real life example? Botswana essentially banned game hunting in 2014 after comparing the costs of game hunting with the income generated by photo/nonlethal tourism: The photo tourism season is longer, makes better use of the wildlife and employs vastly more locals. In it's first year of the ban, over $344m was generated from nonlethal tourism.

A previous poster tried to brush this post off as just a "Hunting bad, err." thread, but it couldn't be further from the truth. I hunt, I eat what I kill, but taking wildlife for trophy purposes is just fundamentally wrong and makes no economic or conservation sense when held up to the light of fact.

You're still barking up the wrong tree. If you want to be angry about trophy hunting then be mad at the authorities that allow it and offer people the opportunity to buy trophy tags. Nobody was breaking the law on this elephant hunt, it was all legal and approved by the Zimbabwe authorities. If the people in charge of protecting the elephants think it's ok to sell elephant tags then why are you mad at the people who buy them? If you're disappointed in how Zimbabwe spends the money it collects from selling tags to big game hunters then why are you blaming the hunters? It's Zimbabwe's fault that they don't make smarter decisions regarding the spending of trophy hunting money collected from hunters.

Nitpicking about trophy hunting is silly. Nobody uses the whole animal they kill and nobody packs the entire carcass home with them. Whether you kill an elk and just mount the head in your living room or eat some of it or eat most of it the animal is still just as dead. I honestly don't care what animals hunters kill or what they do with the carcasses as long as they're legally obtaining tags/licenses and aren't poaching.

Ahh, the old "It's legal, so what's the big deal." response. That just washes it clean, I suppose? Do you have any sense of history and how what was legal in very recent years is now viewed with disgust and disbelief in current light? Yeah, so much for that quick washing of the hands. When something is wrong it stinks. Trophy hunting...the taking of a life for purposes of pure sport...stinks. The non-starter "arguments" to the contrary are lies and have been proven such. If all you've got to distinguish right from wrong is whether there's a law on the books then your perspective has serious, glaring limitations.

Your personal opinion of trophy hunting doesn't qualify as some absolute truth or make your arbitrary viewpoint unassailable. The fact that not everyone hunts the way you think is the proper way to hunt doesn't make it wrong or bad or immoral or unethical. Me killing a deer and packing off some meat or me killing an elk and taking the head as a trophy or me killing an elephant it's all just slightly diffeent versions of the same activity. You need to step back from your myopic condemnation of others. How dare those dirty evil trophy hunters not hunt in accordance to your personal views. They're just subhuman scum and we should all join you in gloating and basking in the schadenfreude anytime someone who trophy hunts dies. The dead guy, he hunted wrong so good riddance his kids are better off without him.

Your personal disapproval of an activity doesn't mean it's some terrible evil that needs to be expunged from the world. Chill.

It's a lot more than just his personal disapproval. Big game trophy hunting, especially like this, is condemned by many (I'd even say most) around the world.

If people are allowed to laugh at Twin Towers memes, where does your outrage at people having a chuckle over this come from?

 feeder wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I see nothing wrong with trophy collecting as long as you also don't waste the meat. Which is what happens with these safari hunts in Africa, the meat gets donated to local villages.

Nothing wrong with it, except the fact that some poor dumb animal has to die to compensate for some stupid d-bag's inferior sense of self.

Again, just take a damn photograph. Why does killing the dumb thing need to be part of it?

Again, all of these animals were going to be killed anyway. Culling occurs all the time with endangered animals because often you have older individuals who are no longer producing offspring, but are still hogging all the mates and resources. Or you simply have a localized overpopulation resulting in there not being enough food/water/space for the animals. They NEED to be killed to allow the species to survive. If that is happening anyway, you might as well let some rich dude plop down a few hundred thousand bucks for the privilege of pulling the trigger and getting to take home some sort of trophy.

Hunting is not some sort of sick method of compensating for self worth. It's an age old tradition that also has real practical uses beyond subsistence. Educate yourself on the matter. It's quite interesting.

Elephant conservation has been quite successful, so successful in some areas that there are too many elephants. They are actually a perfect animal for using controlled trophy hunting to raise funds for helping Elephant, and other animal, conservation efforts. It also provides a good amount of revenue for the local area.

If you have a steady, but small, stream of hunting tourists going to a specific area, you can build a sustainable source of jobs for the locals, as well as the country. You can have numbers be bulked up with more common animals like antelope and gazelles, with bigger animals being rarer options for getting a hunting permit. The result will be that local people will have massive incentives to protect the local wildlife because it is what gives them a source of income, instead of them being incentivized to only see predators and large game as threats to their crops, lifestock, and even very lives.


For what it's worth, it's ok to laugh at the irony of a hunter being killed when the elephant fell on him. That is genuinely hilarious.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 feeder wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I see nothing wrong with trophy collecting as long as you also don't waste the meat. Which is what happens with these safari hunts in Africa, the meat gets donated to local villages.

Nothing wrong with it, except the fact that some poor dumb animal has to die to compensate for some stupid d-bag's inferior sense of self.

Again, just take a damn photograph. Why does killing the dumb thing need to be part of it?

Again, all of these animals were going to be killed anyway. Culling occurs all the time with endangered animals because often you have older individuals who are no longer producing offspring, but are still hogging all the mates and resources. Or you simply have a localized overpopulation resulting in there not being enough food/water/space for the animals. They NEED to be killed to allow the species to survive. If that is happening anyway, you might as well let some rich dude plop down a few hundred thousand bucks for the privilege of pulling the trigger and getting to take home some sort of trophy.

The big issue is that, while in many cases this is the advertised situation, it is not the reality. When it is, that system is fine, but there are lots (perhaps most) of hunts of big game (especially cats) that are basically just poaching expeditions, but palms were greased to get legal paperwork, or they're canned hunts of shelter animals that were born to be killed and served as amusement for tourists at shady "shelters" until that time.

Elephant conservation has been quite successful, so successful in some areas that there are too many elephants.

Hrm, conservation has only been successful in localized areas, african elephant populations in most cases are essentially in free fall, as only 20% of their already much diminished range is under any sort of protection (and less still under effective protection), they're being extirpated. If the number of elephants poached in Tanzania alone (not counting anywhere else in Africa or any causes from loss of habitat or anything else) from 2009-2014 continued on, African elephants will be extinct in the wild in about 2040. African elephants have lost ~90% of their population since the 1940's. Recent plummets in population have primarily been due to poaching from demand for ivory from China, which finally seems to be slowing down.

But Elephants gave so much food resource in Age of Empires.

It's worth pointing out that a lot of the 'localised overpopulation' happens when nature reserve land is turned over to farming, and elephants are pushed in to smaller regions with lower food supplies. At which point there's too many elephants for the small areas of land and officials declare the local elephant population is too large.

Prestor Jon wrote:
Reducing the population of feral cats is a positive all around. Killing kittens reduces the cat population, so braining kittens isn't terribad in my book. Killing kittens in a manner that induces suffering solely for the sake of suffering is immoral and unethical but giving kittens a quick death via blunt force trauma to the head isn't bad.

I spend a week and a half away with limited/no wifi, and come back to read a long time dakka member talking casually about beating kittens on the head to kill them. So that's a thing.

Seriously mate, when animals can't be cared for we euthanize. But it is done with a needle. Not by smacking them on the head 'til they're dead. Because holy gak mate what century are you posting from?

 djones520 wrote:
Ahhh, another one of these "hunters are bad, and they deserve bad things to happen to them." threads.

I'll just leave these here.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-oe-allen-trophy-hunting-endangered-species-20150808-story.html

http://www.conservationmagazine.org/2014/01/can-trophy-hunting-reconciled-conservation/

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/big-game-banning-trophy-hunting-could-do-more-harm-good/

So basically, trophy hunters are dicks, but they pay a lot of money to be dicks and maybe perhaps some of that money goes to conservation (but realistically probably bugger all does)

I don't have anything against hunting, but trophy hunting just strikes me as creepy. I understand culling and whatnot, but it doesn't say good things about the character of a person who needs to hunt* for a trophy, even if they pay a lot of money to do it.

*and by "hunt" I mean get guided around by some locals to blow away some animals that are probably just sitting around chilling out.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
but it doesn't say good things about the character of a person who needs to hunt* for a trophy

I feel that way about any kind of hunting beside necessity-based hunting.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
but it doesn't say good things about the character of a person who needs to hunt* for a trophy

I feel that way about any kind of hunting beside necessity-based hunting.

I can understand wanting to get out in nature and using that time to kill some pests (out here it might be deer, rabbits, foxes, wild pigs, cats, etc). But the desire to kill some endangered animal for a trophy just seems a bit creepy to me, and paying a large sum of money to do so, especially when you're just being guided there by some locals doesn't make it sound any less creepy.

I'm firmly in the camp that subsistence hunting is fine, and even necessary in places (Alaska beyond Anchorage comes to mind), but trophy hunting is only a problem, especially against low population species.

I also don't really believe the whole culling thing. Sounds like just one of many garbage excuses in favor of trophy hunting. Species have managed not to go extinct for billions of years (edit: a single species has tended to have a lifespan around 5-10 million years, but I hope you get the point) without human intervention, I doubt the existence of old members of their respective populations was not the primary cause of extinct species going extinct. It truly is curious, how humans think the world would come screeching to a halt if we weren't around to make it run, even nature.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I can understand wanting to get out in nature and using that time to kill some pests

I can understand it just fine, and I can understand trophy hunting just fine too. Both still paints you in a pretty terrible light though.

 KommissarKiln wrote:
I also don't really believe the whole culling thing. Sounds like just one of many garbage excuses in favor of trophy hunting. Species have managed not to go extinct for billions of years (edit: a single species has tended to have a lifespan around 5-10 million years, but I hope you get the point) without human intervention, I doubt the existence of old members of their respective populations was not the primary cause of extinct species going extinct. It truly is curious, how humans think the world would come screeching to a halt if we weren't around to make it run, even nature.

Culling becomes necessary because humans screwed it up in the first place.

In Australia, we introduced a bunch of species that don't have natural predators and displace native species (like rabbits or toads) or animals that prey on species that previously didn't have any natural predators (like foxes and cats eating the native birds, possums, wallabies, etc).

Of course, we could just let the buggers destroy the unique flora and fauna, the world isn't going to stop turning if we do, but some of us would like to allow that unique flora and fauna to survive.

Australia isn't the only place where we're screwing up the environment and thus needing to also try and fix it. You also have things like human populations displacing different animal species, or us killing off the natural predators of some species.

While the gruesome picture was painted of someone going around braining kittens.... honestly I have no problem with the idea of culling as many of those introduced species as possible, if they could be wiped out I'd be totally fine with that.

 Humble Guardsman wrote:
It's a lot more than just his personal disapproval. Big game trophy hunting, especially like this, is condemned by many (I'd even say most) around the world.

If people are allowed to laugh at Twin Towers memes, where does your outrage at people having a chuckle over this come from?

People can laugh at whatever they want. The point remains that individual subjective opinions don't make something objectively and absolutely true.

There are two primary factors that drive the existence of state sanctioned hunting, population control for the species being hunted and revenue generation for the State. That's what hunting licenses and tags do, they transfer money from those hunting to the State and they cull populations to keep them in check. There is a finite amount of area for wild animals to roam so there is a finite amount of wild animals that land can support so there is a finite amount of animals that can removed from the population every year via hunting. This holds true whether you or hunting whitetail or mule deer or elephants or coyotes or feral hogs or alligators, etc.

The idea that its totes cool for me to hunt the way I like to hunt within the laws in my country but it's super terribad for people to hunt they way they want to hunt under the law in their country is just cultural centric aggrandizement. The same type of legal system that lets me hunt deer in the US allows people to hunt elephants and the same type of joy I derive from hunting in the US is enjoyed by people hunting elephants in Zimbabwe. Shaming one over the other is just arbitrary demonization of others to prop up the rationalization of one's own behavior and sense of righteousness. People are of course free to feel indignant and set themselves up as the fun police and decry anyone who doesn't behave in a manner they approve of but that's a problem that exists solely in their own headspace.

Prestor Jon wrote:
Shaming one over the other is just arbitrary demonization of others to prop up the rationalization of one's own behavior and sense of righteousness.

While shaming both is 100% awesome .


People judge me very hard because my hobby is killing defenseless creature for the thrill of killing, this is so unfair .

 sebster wrote:
It's worth pointing out that a lot of the 'localised overpopulation' happens when nature reserve land is turned over to farming, and elephants are pushed in to smaller regions with lower food supplies. At which point there's too many elephants for the small areas of land and officials declare the local elephant population is too large.

Prestor Jon wrote:
Reducing the population of feral cats is a positive all around. Killing kittens reduces the cat population, so braining kittens isn't terribad in my book. Killing kittens in a manner that induces suffering solely for the sake of suffering is immoral and unethical but giving kittens a quick death via blunt force trauma to the head isn't bad.

I spend a week and a half away with limited/no wifi, and come back to read a long time dakka member talking casually about beating kittens on the head to kill them. So that's a thing.

Seriously mate, when animals can't be cared for we euthanize. But it is done with a needle. Not by smacking them on the head 'til they're dead. Because holy gak mate what century are you posting from?

Killing kittens is killing kittens whether you poison them or bash their skulls in or shoot them or trap them. Better to kill them as kittens than to let them grow up, terrorize and destroy the ecosystem as feral cats, reproduce more cats and be hunted down as adults. Bashing kittens skulls in is a more humane form of execution than hanging them or electrocuting them and both of those methods are acceptable execution methods for people. Thousands of cattle are slaughtered daily with concussive blows to the head and it's no big deal.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

Prestor Jon wrote:
Shaming one over the other is just arbitrary demonization of others to prop up the rationalization of one's own behavior and sense of righteousness.

While shaming both is 100% awesome .


People judge me very hard because my hobby is killing defenseless creature for the thrill of killing, this is so unfair .

I never said it was unfair, merely pointed out that it's just your personal opinion that carries no more or less weight than anyone else's opinion about something. Carry on with your dehumanization of people for being different.

 KommissarKiln wrote:
trophy hunting is only a problem, especially against low population species.

I also don't really believe the whole culling thing. Sounds like just one of many garbage excuses in favor of trophy hunting. Species have managed not to go extinct for billions of years .

Okay, so on one hand we have your "feels", and on the other hand we have thousands of people over a hundered years both studying the situation and having successful practical application. Ecobiologists, land management officials, park rangers, the U.N, and even 90's superhero Captain Planet have given it a thumb's-up.

A scientific concencious has been reached. You don't want to be a science denier, do you?

Prestor Jon wrote:
Carry on with your dehumanization of people for being different.

I guess “being different” is a very well thought out summary of “gets his thrill out of killing stuff” .
Works as a summary for plenty of other things too! Josef Mengele was being different from me! Ted Bundy was being different from me too!

Tell me, Prestor Jon, do you sometime dehumanize people for being different too? Or would you never do such a thing?

Prestor Jon wrote:

 BigWaaagh wrote:

Prestor Jon wrote:

 BigWaaagh wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
Yeah, one is different than the others. One is making a difference that helps an endangered species.

Trophy hunting isn't my thing usually. I hunt to kill varmints or feed myself. If I were to bag an unusually large buck, I may mount the head, but it's not my primary purpose.

I don't like trophy hunting, but I don't knock it either. It's legal, it's supporting local peoples, and it is helping the species itself.

In the case of rhinos in particular, the target is chosen by the government/park ranger/etc., not the hunter. This animal is usually all ready targeted for termination whether someone is paying or not. The thing is, when male rhinos get old, their fertility drops, but they become territorial a-holes. Although they can't breed themselves they will prevent younger males from breeding, sometimes to the point of killing younger males. In cases like this terminating an animal helps the species. Why not throw $300,000 into the local community while they are at it?

This is one of the great canards to the whole "Trophy Hunting helps Species/Conservation/Communites" spin. I said it in my post before and I'll say it again, it's nothing but bs that I've been hearing for 40 years and it's as false now as it was when it was first spun to put an acceptable face on taking animals solely for trophy purposes.

As far as the "The money goes to local communities."/"It helps conservation efforts." lies: Of the roughly $200m a year that is paid for Trophy Hunting in Africa, less than 3% goes to local communities and the amount allocated to conservation efforts is negligible. Most of the money goes to middlemen, corporations and governments. Lies. Trophy hunting makes up only about 1.8% of tourism income in Africa. The vast majority of tourists to Africa come for non-lethal appreciation of the wildlife and the activities of that paltry 2% actually contributes to depletion of the reason that generates the other 98% of that tourism income...great business plan! Real life example? Botswana essentially banned game hunting in 2014 after comparing the costs of game hunting with the income generated by photo/nonlethal tourism: The photo tourism season is longer, makes better use of the wildlife and employs vastly more locals. In it's first year of the ban, over $344m was generated from nonlethal tourism.

A previous poster tried to brush this post off as just a "Hunting bad, err." thread, but it couldn't be further from the truth. I hunt, I eat what I kill, but taking wildlife for trophy purposes is just fundamentally wrong and makes no economic or conservation sense when held up to the light of fact.

You're still barking up the wrong tree. If you want to be angry about trophy hunting then be mad at the authorities that allow it and offer people the opportunity to buy trophy tags. Nobody was breaking the law on this elephant hunt, it was all legal and approved by the Zimbabwe authorities. If the people in charge of protecting the elephants think it's ok to sell elephant tags then why are you mad at the people who buy them? If you're disappointed in how Zimbabwe spends the money it collects from selling tags to big game hunters then why are you blaming the hunters? It's Zimbabwe's fault that they don't make smarter decisions regarding the spending of trophy hunting money collected from hunters.

Nitpicking about trophy hunting is silly. Nobody uses the whole animal they kill and nobody packs the entire carcass home with them. Whether you kill an elk and just mount the head in your living room or eat some of it or eat most of it the animal is still just as dead. I honestly don't care what animals hunters kill or what they do with the carcasses as long as they're legally obtaining tags/licenses and aren't poaching.

Ahh, the old "It's legal, so what's the big deal." response. That just washes it clean, I suppose? Do you have any sense of history and how what was legal in very recent years is now viewed with disgust and disbelief in current light? Yeah, so much for that quick washing of the hands. When something is wrong it stinks. Trophy hunting...the taking of a life for purposes of pure sport...stinks. The non-starter "arguments" to the contrary are lies and have been proven such. If all you've got to distinguish right from wrong is whether there's a law on the books then your perspective has serious, glaring limitations.

Your personal opinion of trophy hunting doesn't qualify as some absolute truth or make your arbitrary viewpoint unassailable. The fact that not everyone hunts the way you think is the proper way to hunt doesn't make it wrong or bad or immoral or unethical. Me killing a deer and packing off some meat or me killing an elk and taking the head as a trophy or me killing an elephant it's all just slightly diffeent versions of the same activity. You need to step back from your myopic condemnation of others. How dare those dirty evil trophy hunters not hunt in accordance to your personal views. They're just subhuman scum and we should all join you in gloating and basking in the schadenfreude anytime someone who trophy hunts dies. The dead guy, he hunted wrong so good riddance his kids are better off without him.

Your personal disapproval of an activity doesn't mean it's some terrible evil that needs to be expunged from the world. Chill.

My personal disapproval can, and will, be voiced as I see fit. Don't care for a passionate response to something? I honestly couldn't care less if I tried. Try keeping to the subject being weighed and measured and "chill" yourself on the personal digs.