Thread: Defending hunters

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?