There seems to be some problems with the fallout from the social media skewering of a trophy hunting dentist from Minnesota that occurred roughly a month ago. It seems conservationists in Africa are feeling the effects and journalists who should have known better are suddenly having come to Jesus epiphanies.
No more talk of "beloved" and "noble", now the words are more like "sustainable" and "populations" and "complex relationships" when discussing African big game hunting.
It's widely known that big game hunting in Africa conserves species and habitat, even poorly run programs such as in Zimbabwe are better than not having hunting at all. The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, the people who actually run the parks get almost all their funding from trophy hunting. No hunting no park rangers to enforce any wildlife laws, more than likely no more wildlife.
Kenya which banned hunting back in the 70s is almost done with lions, no more, they are expected to be extinct within five years. You see people do still hunt there, that didn't stop, all that stopped were laws regulating hunting. Now all hunting is poaching mostly to sell in the market or for the trade in endangered wildlife parts.
“There’s only two places on the earth where wildlife at a large scale has actually increased in the 20th century, and those are North America and southern Africa,” said Rosie Cooney, a zoologist who is the chairwoman of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group. “Both of those models of conservation were built around hunting.”
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Above Nelson Mandela who went on a hunt with the game wardens from kaNgwane's wildlife department and developed a passionate interest in conservation while hunting in the Park.
Despite having more if it's mega fauna intact than just about anywhere else in the world Africa is having conservations problems. Rhino horn is worth so much money that it can corrupt just about anyone. Poachers give away cell phones asking only that someone give them a call when they see a rhino and get a hundred dollars simply for the sighting wether it leads to a horn or not, or they'll pay rangers hundreds of dollars to patrol in a different place for one night. One can make many months wages without risk.
I've heard that when coming within ten or fifteen kilometers of the border of Zimbabwe in the Kruger National Park South Africa one already begins to see many snares. Snares are simple, effective, lethal, and known the world over. Animals killed or captured then killed, by snares, are sold for meat in the market. Large predators are simply killed.
I have my own reasons for not liking trophy hunting, which I'll discuss later, but for now it suffices that trophy hunting from a conservation perspective is unarguably good, and all the major international long established wildlife conservation orgs agree. Many orgs would just as soon agree very very quietly to protect donor dollars, but they agree.
What of the funding from photo safaris? Regular tourism is a net good, and it contributes lots of money to eco lodges and other basic services, but the money from entry fees to parks is tiny. Photo tourists would never pay tens of thousands of dollars to walk 8 hours in the heat and maybe not see an animal. Hunting brings money to areas with no tourism, and the large fees charged by African governments go directly to pay the wages of rangers and security.
Photographers need a high concentration of animals in one predictable place. There is no infrastructure nor demand for services in the remote locations hunting often occurs. Currently more than half the wildlands in southern Africa are in private reserves whose uses include hunting. Photography hardly needs any of the current land devoted to habitat.
The irony is that those petitions and all the recent hoopla might well kill far more wildlife than trophy hunting, and harm not only individual animals but whole species of far more endangered fauna.
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.
http://alumni.berkeley.edu/...
What do Africans think?
Those reporters who ventured all the way to Harare got kind of a WTF? answer from the man in the street when getting the obligatory cab driver interview.
A Zimbabwean wrote an op ed in the NYT which was widely circulated for the obvious truths it told. Far from mourning a lion's death, inhabitants of local villages look upon the death of a lion such as Cecil as a very good reason to celebrate and hold a party. I realize this might come as a surprise but lions regularly kill people living in the periphery of their habitat.
The American tendency to romanticize animals that have been given actual names and to jump onto a hashtag train has turned an ordinary situation — there were 800 lions legally killed over a decade by well-heeled foreigners who shelled out serious money to prove their prowess — into what seems to my Zimbabwean eyes an absurdist circus.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The juxtaposition of insanely wealthy (by third world standards) liberal animal rights supporters such as on Daily Kos signing petitions and donating to stop income generating and lion protecting trophy hunting, with the daily struggle for survival of the people in one of the poorest countries in the world is irony carried to the extreme. What of that 14 year old boy killed recently near Goodwell Nzou's village? What is that life worth? A lion? Two lions? All lions?
It's impossible for me to weigh the two lives on the same scale. I like 14 year old guys. They are really men, and face severe tests of bravery and fortitude, here as well as in rural Africa. My son is almost of that age. That young man had people who cared deeply for him. I have a very difficult time saying even all lions are worth more than one unknown to me young African guy out gathering firewood.
It shouldn't be for us westerners to say what is of more value.
What is my opinion on the whole thing? Since I am a powerball lottery winning away from ever hunting in Africa it's too easy for me to condemn the deed. I have no reservations about waiting beside a dead animal for a predator to approach it, I do the same as do most all predator hunters. It's technically not even baiting. I prefer firearms, others the bow and arrow, it's a personal decision weighing such factors as lethality as well as the challenge.
I do value hunting on my own here in the US. There is a pleasure in knowing the area and habits of the prey I hunt.
My strongest opinion is on traveling anywhere for vacation. Look at my sig line. Travel to Africa for any type of tourism is something we need to learn to do without, and Africans will need to find other, less carbon intensive, ways to generate income. In that sense both the trophy hunter and the snapshot taker are doing equal harm to the environment. I try to vacation locally if my vacation doesn't require visiting family.