Thread: Defending hunters

This week I read an article in the NZ Herald from a lady called Sandra Kyle about Cecil the lion and how it draws common grounds with hunters all over the world, how it is barbaric, murder, and cruel with no skills required what so ever. I felt like writing a response, but it seems someone else that we know of has done the good thing and put some perspective on the topic. Shot Daryl!

Sandra Kyles ramble:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/ne...ectid=11491271

Daryl's response:

Daryl Crimp: Hunting part of NZ's national identity - Opinion - NZ Herald News

You can only defend the hunters you know and have hunted with. There are plenty dickheads that kill for fun or are unethical or just plain dont care. This also goes the other way and when people generalise hunters into the one group it pisses the hunters off. Head down bum up, do what you think is right

That is true Gibo, there are hunters and then there are hunters. I certainly don't condone what happen to Cecil because I fall under the title of a meat hunter.

Poor ethics and animal cruelty takes many forms.
To me, keeping animals such as Orca in small pools for their entire life, purely for profit and human entertainment is both unethical and cruel.
Others will of course did agree.

Hunters don't need defending - we have guns!

Pieces like Sandra Kyles's make me angry, especially when they don't seem to be very informed about what they are writing about.

The fact is that we do not need to kill animals to control populations. If we leave nature to her own devices things will tend to balance out. For example, natural predators help maintain a balance by killing the sickest and weakest individuals.

If we left animals like deer, possums and rabbits to be killed off by their natural predators in NZ we would trip over them every time we cycled to the health store for our tofu.
On a more serious note though I don't agree with the killing of endangered animals just for the sake of killing them.

Found this an interesting watch.
His comment about putting knowledge before emotion seems on the money to me!
http://outdooroverload.com/ban-lion-...f-lions-video/

Thanks for putting that up @Rusky.

I thought Daryls response was very good & well balanced.

I tried to make this point in the thread about the bloke who killed Cecil the Lion but failed. If we condem or don't condone the dentist bloke who pulled the trigger then we condem ourselves because there is only a subtle difference as to why he wanted to kill a lion and why we want to hunt the species we hunt.

We hunt thing for many reasons, food, trophies, pest control and sport. All of these reasons are valid in the right context and it's fair to say the thing being hunted doesn't care about the reason or what happens to it after it's death - it just wants to keep on living.

The dentist bloke paid for a above board and legal lion hunt. His guides may have done something that could be clasified as poaching but but he paid for and expected a legal hunt so this isn't his crime.

The angry mob on bookface and the rest of the internet is now up in arms about how somone could kill the cuddly wuddly lion and why would anyone do that? This cuts to the heart of the very reason why we hunt and if we can't answer this question then our children won't get to enjoy the same hunting culture that we have.

The reason why we hunt is the same reason Cecil (used to) hunt - we are preaditors, it's in our nature and it's natural for us to do this.

The way the world should work is that humans are scard of Lions and stay out of their territory and Lions are scared of people and like all true wild animals avoid humans if at all possible. A good example of this dynamic is black bears in the USA. When reading Beyond Backpacking by Ray Jardin it contained the following info about bear encounters. In areas where bears are hunting in season they will avoid humans at all cost, run at the sight of humans and they are not regarded as a problem.

In areas where hunting is banned (e.g. yosomite national park) the bears know they have nothing to fear from humans and spend most of their day trying to get at the food in trampers backpacks. The payoff (energy expended vs energy gained from eating the food) for human food is massivly better than it is for foraging for blueberries so this is what they focus on.

So by protecting these animals and then intruding on their space we have completely fucked up the natural relationship between our speices than theirs. The same thing would have happened with Cecil as he was part of a tracking study and tv show. The inevitable conact with humans that this would have brought has taught him that he has nothing to fear from humans and made him unwary of running towards a dentist armed with a bow and arrow. In many ways the humans who tried to protect him are the reason for his death.

Addiontal questions that occured to me:
Would there be as much publicity if Cesil had eaten a person in a village next to the park?
If Snoop Lion had been shot by an american dentists would we be as upset as we are now when Cecil the Lion was shot by said dentist?
For all the animal rights people who say it's cruel to kill for trophies how do they justify letting Cecil kill antelopes while we film it for a nature documentary?
Why does nobody cry for all the fish that are fished out of the sea?

http://www.wisdomination.com/its-tim...ernet-outrage/

Sent from my SM-T800 using Tapatalk

This is good article about the need for controlled hunting in Africa

Lionizing Cecil Makes Us Feel Good, But a Trophy Hunting Ban Will Accelerate Slaughter | California Magazine

Lionizing Cecil Makes Us Feel Good, But a Trophy Hunting Ban Will Accelerate Slaughter

By Glen Martin
If you fly over parts of Tsavo today—and I challenge anyone to do so, if you have the eyes for it – you can see lines of snares set out in funnel traps that extend four or five miles. Tens of thousands of animals are being killed annually for the meat business. Carnivores are being decimated in the same snares and discarded. I am not a propagandist on this issue, but when my friends say we are very concerned that hunting will be reintroduced in Kenya, let me put it to you: hunting has never been stopped in Kenya, and there is more hunting in Kenya today than at any time since independence. (Thousands) of animals are being killed annually with no control. Snaring, poisoning, and shooting are common things. So when you have a fear of debate about hunting, please don’t think there is no hunting. Think of a policy to regulate it, so that we can make it sustainable. That is surely the issue, because an illegal crop, an illegal market is unsustainable in the long term, whatever it is. And the market in wildlife meat is unsustainable as currently practiced, and something needs to be done.

-Richard Leaky, in an address to the Strathmore Business School, Nairobi

Richard Leaky, of course, is the renowned paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and the first director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, the man who was in large part responsible for scotching the ivory trade during the initial round of the Elephant Wars in the 1980s.

I interviewed Leakey a few years ago for my book, Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife (University of California Press, 2012). His words came back to me with the brouhaha over the shooting of Cecil, the most lionized lion on the planet. So did the words of many of the other people I interviewed for the book. That includes Ian Parker, a legendary Kenyan game ranger and warden; Michael Norton-Griffiths, who served as the senior ecologist for Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park and managed the Eastern Sahel Program for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; Ole Kaparo, a former speaker of the Kenyan Parliament and a leader of the Laikipia Maasai people; and Laurence Frank, an emeritus associate of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Biology and one of Africa’s most respected carnivore biologists.

Ultimately, wild animals are disappearing in Africa because they are worthless to the people who live with and near them.
All these men no doubt are upset to varying degrees by l’affaire Cecil—but not for reasons one may think. They’re probably more distressed by the response to the shooting than the shooting itself. That’s because the uproar over Cecil, the fervent calls for expanding the bans on trophy hunting in Africa, will work against African wildlife conservation in general and carnivore conservation in particular.

As Leaky points out, regulated hunting—even poorly regulated hunting, as seems the case with Cecil in Zimbabwe—isn’t the driving force in the decline of the African lion, which has fallen from a continental population of around 200,000 to fewer than 20,000 today. Unregulated hunting is the main culprit: Industrial-scale poaching and bushmeat hunting. Ancillary reasons include the inexorable expansion of agriculture and the increasing populations of pastoral peoples, who inhabit their ancestral rangelands in ever-increasing numbers, spearing or poisoning any predator that could pose a threat to their cattle and goats. And it’s also the booming illegal trade in wildlife parts. More than one field biologist I talked to told me how wild animals—particularly predators, rhinos, and elephants—are disappearing in proportion to the rapid expansion of Chinese-funded development projects. Ivory and rhino horn, of course, remain highly prized in China, and lion bone is considered an “acceptable” substitute for tiger bone in traditional Asian medicine; lion and leopard claws and teeth also are much sought after.

An African savannah devoid of lumbering pachyderms and lolling lions may make a New York animal rights activist weep, but to a Samburu pastoralist or Kikuyu subsistence farmer it constitutes a lovely prospect.
But ultimately, wild animals are disappearing in Africa because they are worthless to the people who live with and near them. Kenya’s hunting ban has been in effect since 1977. During that time, the country’s wildlife has declined by more than 70 percent. The country’s subsistence farmers and pastoralists can derive no legitimate utility from the animals. Indeed, wildlife makes their lives harder. Elephants raid their crops, destroy their water systems, stomp cattle and the occasional farmer. Lions, hyenas, and leopards kill their livestock. Better to shoot the elephant and poison the lion. An African savannah devoid of lumbering pachyderms and lolling lions may make a New York animal rights activist weep, but to a Samburu pastoralist or Kikuyu subsistence farmer it constitutes a lovely prospect, one promising peaceful nights uninterrupted by the trumpeting of elephants raiding the pumpkin patch or the squeals of goats enduring evisceration by hungry lions.

But what about eco-tourism? Why hasn’t that helped? Don’t the eco-lodges sprouting across Kenya like mushrooms after the Long Rains deliver cash, goods, and services to local communities? Aren’t they a very good thing? In a word, no. First, these lodges constitute permanent physical footprints on the wild landscape. They require roads and other infrastructure, and thus fragment wildlife habitat. Locals tend to congregate around them, driving game further afield.

Further, many of the lodges are owned by foreign entrepreneurs and corporations, and the profits tend to trickle up to their proprietors and Kenya’s deeply corrupt oligarchs, not down to the poor farmers and herdsmen on the land.

Michael Norton-Griffiths observes the situation is analogous to a man whose only asset is a goat. But this particular goat comes with many strings attached. The man owns the goat, but he can’t sell it or eat it. In fact, he can’t “exploit” the goat in anyway. The only thing he’s allowed to do is let tourists drive by and take pictures of it. Oh, one more thing: he doesn’t get any money from photo-snapping goat enthusiasts. All profits go to the guys driving the tourist buses. Kenya’s rural residents, in other words, are responsible for the country’s wildlife, but they aren’t allowed to benefit from it.

In any evaluation of Africa’s wildlife crisis, Namibia must be considered. That’s because there isn’t a wildlife crisis in Namibia. At the time of its independence from South Africa in 1990, Namibia’s game populations were at historic lows, decimated by years of combat between locals and the South African army. The new government wanted to encourage both a wildlife rebound and tourism, but it took a tack directly opposite from Kenya’s. Rural populations were organized into communities controlling vast areas of land. Where necessary, the wildlands were restocked with game. Each community was invested with the right to manage its own wildlife resources, subject to certain broad dictates from Namibian national wildlife agencies. In other words, game was commoditized. It could be cropped for commercial meat production; it could be eaten by community members; the rights to hunt trophy specimens of charismatic species could be sold. Suddenly, wildlife had great value for people living in the Namibian bush, and they reacted predictably: They protected their assets.

I saw this dynamic in action at Salambala Conservancy in Caprivi, a lush northern Namibian province watered by the Okavango and Zambezi Rivers. A holding of the Subia people, Salambala is “small” by Namibian conservancy standards, but still vast by any objective accounting: 230,000 acres. The community and the central government have established sustainable annual quotas for almost every species inhabiting the land, right down to game birds: 50 impala, seven African buffalo, fifty zebras, four kudus, four waterbucks, four hippos, three crocodiles, three baboons, two black-backed jackals, 100 white-faced ducks, 150 turtle doves, 50 guinea fowl, and 70 red-billed francolins. The quota for elephants is eight, with six going to trophy hunters, one dedicated to the community’s chief and elders, and one reserved for distribution among conservancy members. (Lions are still relatively rare in Namibia, though their reintroduction proceeds in certain areas. One reason Namibia remains Africa’s cheetah stronghold is the dearth of lions, which reflexively kill the smaller cats; where lions are prevalent, cheetahs, axiomatically, are scarce. Cheetahs, by the way, are also included in the trophy quota of some community conservancies.)

It’s easier to scream in outrage over the killing of a highly charismatic lion with a cute name, sign a Change.org petition, and move on to posting selfies, than it is to actually investigate the deep forces behind the African wildlife holocaust.
The community keeps all income generated from trophy hunters and meat sales. Prior to independence and the establishment of Salambala, any Subia community member who poached an animal likely would have met with praise; his act would’ve meant meat for family, friends and neighbors. Now, the illegal taking of game is considered a major offense, theft from the community as a whole. Shortly before my arrival, the remains of a blue wildebeest had been found, and local administrators quickly determined that a community member was responsible for the killing. They cheerfully predicted he would soon be apprehended, beaten severely, and handed over to government authorities for additional punishment.

Ultimately, then, the African wildlife crisis is a crisis of misperception. Conservation has been subsumed by animal rights. These are not, however, the same things. Individual animals—most recently Cecil and Jericho—have become more important in the Age of Social Media than species stability, habitat preservation, and pragmatic if uncomfortable policies that would actually encourage the preservation of wildlife. This is understandable: It’s easier to scream in outrage over the killing of a highly charismatic lion with a cute name, sign a Change.org petition, and move on to posting selfies, than it is to actually investigate the deep forces behind the African wildlife holocaust. But emoting over Cecil isn’t going to save the African lion. The African lion is not the Lion King, just as Daffy Duck is not representative of a typical mallard in a North American marsh. We don’t live in a cartoon, and our problems are not solved by anthropomorphizing wildlife. Blanket trophy hunting bans may make us feel better, but they will only accelerate the slaughter.

One in a series of personal Perspectives. We invite writers and readers to submit their own essays—inspiration can come from California magazine or California Magazine Online stories, the news, or issues of the day. Read more:

Posted on August 3, 2015 - 7:10am

Originally Posted by MassiveAttack

I tried to make this point in the thread about the bloke who killed Cecil the Lion but failed. If we condem or don't condone the dentist bloke who pulled the trigger then we condem ourselves because there is only a subtle difference as to why he wanted to kill a lion and why we want to hunt the species we hunt.

We hunt thing for many reasons, food, trophies, pest control and sport. All of these reasons are valid in the right context and it's fair to say the thing being hunted doesn't care about the reason or what happens to it after it's death - it just wants to keep on living.

The dentist bloke paid for a above board and legal lion hunt. His guides may have done something that could be clasified as poaching but but he paid for and expected a legal hunt so this isn't his crime.

The angry mob on bookface and the rest of the internet is now up in arms about how somone could kill the cuddly wuddly lion and why would anyone do that? This cuts to the heart of the very reason why we hunt and if we can't answer this question then our children won't get to enjoy the same hunting culture that we have.

The reason why we hunt is the same reason Cecil (used to) hunt - we are preaditors, it's in our nature and it's natural for us to do this.

The way the world should work is that humans are scard of Lions and stay out of their territory and Lions are scared of people and like all true wild animals avoid humans if at all possible. A good example of this dynamic is black bears in the USA. When reading Beyond Backpacking by Ray Jardin it contained the following info about bear encounters. In areas where bears are hunting in season they will avoid humans at all cost, run at the sight of humans and they are not regarded as a problem.

In areas where hunting is banned (e.g. yosomite national park) the bears know they have nothing to fear from humans and spend most of their day trying to get at the food in trampers backpacks. The payoff (energy expended vs energy gained from eating the food) for human food is massivly better than it is for foraging for blueberries so this is what they focus on.

So by protecting these animals and then intruding on their space we have completely fucked up the natural relationship between our speices than theirs. The same thing would have happened with Cecil as he was part of a tracking study and tv show. The inevitable conact with humans that this would have brought has taught him that he has nothing to fear from humans and made him unwary of running towards a dentist armed with a bow and arrow. In many ways the humans who tried to protect him are the reason for his death.

Addiontal questions that occured to me:
Would there be as much publicity if Cesil had eaten a person in a village next to the park?
If Snoop Lion had been shot by an american dentists would we be as upset as we are now when Cecil the Lion was shot by said dentist?
For all the animal rights people who say it's cruel to kill for trophies how do they justify letting Cecil kill antelopes while we film it for a nature documentary?
Why does nobody cry for all the fish that are fished out of the sea?

" If we condem or don't condone the dentist bloke who pulled the trigger then we condem ourselves because there is only a subtle difference as to why he wanted to kill a lion and why we want to hunt the species we hunt."......

Not ALL of us agree with that statement, i dont condone some rich bastard who puts an arrow in a lion, does not kill it outright, has 'somebody else' shoot the lion the next day after a nights agony then has the balls to have his photo taken next to the lion with his bow like he's 'The man'.....i dont support that type of hunting, never have, never will!!!!!!....just my 2c

I have a problem when people want to throw *all* hunters under the bus and label them "sport hunters". Those people don't want to accept there are differences. They don't think of conservation for a reason or that providing meat for people as a reason or for farmers hunting is a way of looking after their land. When I have said I go hunting, I have been called that I'm doing it for "sport". That makes no sense to me? When I think of sport hunting I do think of trophy-only hunters, of which I know none personally. But I know plenty of people who hunt as a part of their lifestyle, for learning valuable bush skills, being out in the land and providing for themselves. I can't make sense of people who want to label hunting as I know it as "sport"; if it has been the same way for tens of thousands of years, how is it sport?

Anyway all that aside the best way to defend hunters is education, pretty simple. Yet lacking in our society.

Originally Posted by Scouser

" If we condem or don't condone the dentist bloke who pulled the trigger then we condem ourselves because there is only a subtle difference as to why he wanted to kill a lion and why we want to hunt the species we hunt."......

Not ALL of us agree with that statement, i dont condone some rich bastard who puts an arrow in a lion, does not kill it outright, has 'somebody else' shoot the lion the next day after a nights agony then has the balls to have his photo taken next to the lion with his bow like he's 'The man'.....i dont support that type of hunting, never have, never will!!!!!!....just my 2c

Have you never in your entier hunting career wounded an animal that you didn't recover?