If you want to hunt animals so you can eat them, not my cup of tea, but fine (as long as you’re not hunting with AK-47’s or worse, and no hunting from helicopters, of course). It’s not like I don’t eat meat. I just keep several degrees of separation between what’s on my plate and how it got there.
If you want to hunt animals to cull the herd, or whatever they call it when there are too many of them for our liking, not my cup of tea, but fine (as long as you’re not hunting with AK-47’s or worse, and no hunting from helicopters, of course). It’s not like I’m not happy if there are fewer tick-carrying deer out there bringing us more Lyme Disease.
If you want to hunt animals just for the hell of it, not my cup of tea, but fine. I may not have any atavistic, primal urge (nor the requisite testosterone) to want to go after a creature that’s done me no harm, but fine (as long as you’re not hunting with AK-47’s or worse, and no hunting from helicopters, of course). It’s not like I don’t understand on several different levels that it might be thrilling to do something physically and mentally challenging, that it’s probably plenty of fun to hang with the guys and do guy things like not shampooing, and swilling down Old Crow.
Of course, my “but fine” pretty much goes out the window when I think of big game hunting vs. deer-bear hunting. Big game hunting isn’t hunting for food, or for thinning the herd. It’s pure blood sport. And you have to wonder what goes through the mind of someone who’s delighted to take down a magnificent animal like an elephant or a lion or a tiger. Especially given that the survival of these animals in the wild is in such jeopardy.
And the scenarios that I’m more or less fine with all play out in the wild. Hunters have to figure out where their prey are, stalk without spooking them, get off a good shot. Sure, the hunters are armed and the poor animals aren’t, but the odds don’t favor the humans all that dramatically. The animals are, after all, on home turf. They’re the ones who really know the territory. Plus they can move a lot faster than humans.
Anyway, if a hunter’s gonna hunt, if the odds are even…
But big-game hunters who go to those reservations where the animals are penned in so that the big, brave hunters – often accompanied by a “tour guide” whose doing everything for the big, brave hunter other than pulling the trigger. Seriously, what do they get out of it?
You didn’t do anything big, you didn’t do anything brave.
What pride can you possibly take from this?What’s it for? The picture in your man cave? The head mounted on the wall so that you can lean back in your club chair, wreathed in cigar smoke, armiring it?
Since shame and decency are such quaint concepts of the past, it’s no wonder that there are plenty of places where big, brave hunters can satisfy their trophy-craving, sadistic needs. There,
The easy slaughter of animals in fenced areas is called "canned hunting", perhaps because it's rather like shooting fish in a barrel. A fully-grown, captive-bred lion is taken from its pen to an enclosed area where it wanders listlessly for some hours before being shot dead by a man with a shotgun, hand-gun or even a crossbow, standing safely on the back of a truck. He pays anything from £5,000 to £25,000, and it is all completely legal…
Trophy-hunters are attracted by the guarantee of success, and the price: a wild lion shot on a safari in Tanzania may cost £50,000, compared with a £5,000 captive-bred specimen in South Africa. (Source: The Guardian)
And then there are the ranches that provide the animals to populate the canned not-so-happy hunting grounds.
In South Africa, there are “more than 160 such farms legally breeding big cats.”
With so many of these factory farms in South Africa, in that country:
There are now more lions held in captivity (upwards of 5,000) in the country than live wild (about 2,000).
The farms, of course, disavow knowledge of what happens to the lions after they sell them off. And they say that the practice of seizing new born cubs from their mothers isn’t a bad thing, that the cubs are fine. (No: they’re not.) In fact, the reason for taking the cubs is so that the mother can reproduce more quickly than if she were feeding her cubs.
Breeders claim that having hunters take out farmed animals in canned environments is actually better than letting hunters have a go at wild populations, further endangering their existence. The fact is, of course, that captive hunting doesn’t protect animals in the wild. Au contraire:
The lion farms' creation of a market for canned lion hunts puts a clear price-tag on the head of every wild lion, she says; they create a financial incentive for local people, who collude with poachers or turn a blind eye to illegal lion kills. Trophy-hunters who begin with a captive-bred lion may then graduate to the real, wild thing.
Ah, a gateway drug. Swell.
Hunters got to hunt, and business folks need to business, I guess.
But what a shameful practice this type of hunting is, what a shameful business those factory farms are, and those canned hunting reservations.
Whether they’re metaphorically shooting the fish in the barrel, providing those chock-full-of-fish barrels to big, brave hunters, or stocking the barrels to begin with, there’s something really ghastly about all these enterprises.
Glad I don’t know any of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment