The incentives are bad. I can pay a park ranger $12/hour and once a year they may have to cull the herd. Along comes a guy with $55k for a long weekend to do that very same thing. Now instead of culling the herd by neutralizing it in a way that keeps it alive and with the distant possibility of breeding again, the herd needs culling to keep the organization afloat not to ensure the health of the group of animals. Lions don't fucking eat money. People who figured out that you can get somewhat rich by letting people kill lions will often decide that lions need killing.
I would tend to believe that some do. You'll get some people who are passionate about saving the wildlife, and you'll get others that succumb to the financial reward of the black market. Park rangers are people, after all; some are good, some are bad.
Here's an article where the guide actually explains his view of what happened. The headline is focusing on the part of the story that will keep the social media outrage going, but the story is mainly about the guide's account. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...ant-next-but-couldnt-find-one-big-enough.html
What is going to be interesting is that Zimbabwe is now requesting that the dentist be extradited back to Zimbabwe. http://news.yahoo.com/killer-cecil-lion-extradited-zimbabwe-says-090055378--finance.html I say send him back... but I don't think that comes from the "oh my God you killed Cecil" thing, but from a "you broke laws in a foreign country" stance. It's also interesting how of the two guides, one was released on bail, one wasn't charged. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/07/30/zimbabwe-cecil-lion-dentist/30886959/
It's because there's probably a lot more to the story. And I'm willing to bet that the dentist was far more culpable than just being, hurr durr I didn't know he was so special. I make that judgement based on his shady ass hunting track record. The other "funny" part is that his previous sexual harassment law suits are being used in his character assassination as well. Mostly by feminist groups. Which I think is "hilarious" because when information like that is used against other people when calling for public judgement against someone, they are the first ones up in arms to call it unfair or racist or something. When its this guy, its totally fair game?
I'm no ballistics expert, but... aren't some of those animals, like, WAY TOO FUCKING BIG to be shooting with a bow and arrow? My understanding is that, even if you have some insane draw weight and a crazy looking arrow head, you're still looking at like bear and elk as being your biggest targets right? I mean, I guess those animals die eventually from an arrow shot (they did for him, after all), but the only way to truly drop them is with a rifle, right?
I'm not going to defend Palmer, as I think he's a poacher. So, there's that. But I'm tired of the anthropomorphism/idealistic morality play you're doing. Lions are not easy animals to live with. They are huge predators that have killed people, but they also do enjoy eating cattle. If you’re a poor farmer in Sub-Saharan Africa, you are not going to like lions very much. You’re not going to be sitting by the campfire at night in awe of the roaring lions. You’re not going to be proud that all these Westerners love lions so much that they will raise an internet lynch mob to get someone who poached one. Instead, you’re probably sitting by the fire with a gun or a spear, hoping that the damned things don’t show up and take a calf. And you certainly hope they don’t kill your children while they sleep. Most of the people engaging in the lynch mob who are also excoriating hunting have never lived anywhere near large carnivores. Even those of us who live near black bears honestly don’t have a clue. Black bears are timid creatures that have killed very few people in recorded history of this continent. We have no clue what it’s like to live with large predators. Predators would be a constant worry for our ancestors living in hunter-gatherer camps, and even in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, predation by the game-starved wolves was a constant worry. Most Westerners live in cities, and the city has an insulating affect. Most people have never seen an animal kill anything, unless they see it on television. And what most people see on television is pretty sanitized. Sir David Attenborough readily admitted that the most gory parts of predatory sequences had to be clipped from his documentaries. Most Westerners think of lions as being really big cats. Which is exactly what they are. However, even a domestic cat can be a fierce predator to a mouse or a songbird. And when you scale up a cat to the size of a lion, you are the mouse or the songbird. We have a very distorted view of what lions are about. The Lion King posits that the lion cub Simba gets presented by the mandrill Rafiki on top of Pride Rock and all the subject animals, which are mostly things that lions eat, are just elated to see their new prince. In truth, most of these animals would be avoiding a lion with cubs, and in the case of African buffalo, they would be actively seeking out the cub to trample it to death. It is certainly true that lion numbers have dropped in recent years. In 1975, there were an estimated 250,000 lions in Africa. There are now 25-30,000. Were those lions all killed by trophy hunters? Even if we accept that some were, there is just no way there are that many trophy hunters in the world who would kill that many lions. No, what really got the lions is that in many countries where they are found populations are on the rise, but the economies are not growing fast enough to keep up with the population growth. Millions of people are being forced to farm and raise stock in the last redoubts of lions, and the lions start to cause problems. If you are a poor person living in Africa, you have every reason to want lions dead. Lion poisoning is becoming quite common in Kenya and in other parts of Africa. Poisoning does in entire prides of lions, but it takes care of the problem from the perspective of the poor farmer. If we Westerners truly value lions, then we have to think of ways to make the lives of people living in those regions better. One way to do this is to create some sort of economic value for lions, and the best way to do this is to allow some limited, managed hunting. Now, hunting like this can be abused, and it is certainly true that a lot of the money spent on this kind of hunting doesn’t stay in the communities, but it is still enough of a payment to give people incentive to keep lions alive. Managed hunting, by definition, is not the same kind of hunting that seeks to make animals extinct. It is a kind of hunting that we’d recognize in our own country, especially if we paid some attention to the conservation policies of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt began a conservation revolution in this country. Before his time, we saw wild animals as either commodities or nuisances. When we began to conserve them as game animals, they were seen as creatures with value that extended beyond that animal’s life. Using this conservation tool, we’ve seen all sorts of species rebound from near extinction. The cougar that was wiped out in the East is making a strong comeback in the West, where it is still hounded with strictly regulated hunting (except in California, where the cougars carry off dogs on a pretty regular basis). But the US is rich country, and most of Africa is not. Land and resources are being stretched. If we do want lions to exist, we either say that the lives of Africans don’t matter or we say that we have to use trophy hunting as way of generating funds and adding value to the people who otherwise would be better off without them. No country in Africa would ever set up such a draconian conservation policy that would deny people the right to graze their cattle on public lands or on private property. They might deny it in a park, but outside the park, they are much more likely to look the other way if a lion gets killed. Westerners look upon the lion situation with self-righteous ignorance. We can’t be bothered to elect politicians who will actually do a thing about climate change, which is driving extinctions left and right, and we can’t be bothered to stop having children or curbing our rapacious desire for new stuff. But we can tell the poor nations of Africa that they must save their lions– just don’t ask us to pay for it! Cecil the lion was named for Cecil Rhodes. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps you’ve heard of the Rhodes Scholar program at Oxford that was funded through his estate. Rhodes was champion of British imperialism and a diamond magnate in Southern Africa. He was instrumental in getting a chunk of southeastern Africa added to the British Empire which were called “the Rhodesias”. Rhodes wound up ruling that region as a part of the British South Africa Company. Yes. It was essentially a corporate colony, which Rhodes ruled over as the CEO. The region of the Rhodesias became a land of white landowners with large numbers of landless native Africans working on the plantations and mines. Southern Rhodesia became independent under the racist regime of Ian Smith. Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter, would pose with two flags on his jacket. One of these was Ian Smith’s Rhodesian flag, and Rhodesia, Ian Smith, and Cecil Rhodes have long captured the imagination of white supremacists. So, Westerners have named a lion in honor of a brutal imperialist. The West has grown fat off of Africa. First with the slaves. Then with the gold and the ivory and the diamonds. And now when the Africans try to live in basket-cases we’ve left behind, we excoriate them for killing lions. We excoriate them for poisoning them, and we excoriate them when they try to raise money for conservation by selling a few tags to trophy hunters. The West has forgotten what it has done to Africa. And the West is now so far removed from that natural world and its processes that it cannot have a reasoned moral discussion about how to best save the African lion. It’s all turpitude and high-octane ignorance masquerading as morality.
This is a Gir Forest lioness killing a nilgai antelope in the Gir Forest, India. She's of the subspecies of Panthera Leo known as the Asiatic Lion. (Panthera leo persica) Her kind have to be kept away from the domestic water buffalo, camels, sheep and goats of the local Maldharis who have to ever-watch their herds, and erect great thorned-wood fences to keep out the cats, who can in a pinch grab a hundred or so odd pound goat, kill it quietly and then leap with the goat in their mouth back over a five foot or taller fence with ease. They've also killed and eaten humans in addition to stock. See here: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...on-humans-on-the-rise/articleshow/7668219.cms These lions are the ones mentioned in the ancient Mesopotamia texts and the Abraham-based religious texts, and they lived from Israel, Persia and other Middle Eastern countries all the way to India. Now they are only 523 of the animals left. There used to be lions in Southern Europe in historical times (like the prides who attacked Xerxes's baggage camels) and Caspian Tigers in parts of Europe, as well. They were killed because the same thing we're trying to avoid now in Africa happened; people got fed up with their livestock and the odd person falling prey to big cats. If you want to conserve something, you need to incentive it for the people who have to deal with it every day. Ecotourism is just as legitimate a business, but to act like it alone will save the big cats from extinction is folly. I'd rather see a few fall to a bullet or arrow than have to point to these majestic animals as dusty taxidermied specimens in a museum and say, "Grandpa was alive before people thought that shit could be ideal for everyone if we lived elsewhere and more or less told people having to live alongside these beautiful animals that ate sheep, dogs, cattle and even men at times that they'd have to suck it up and lose money and livelihoods to them."
Not quite sure why you went on such a long rant about how lions are dangerous animals, I've never anthropormorphized them. They're big, they're deadly and they're dangerous. My contention is, and remains, that it is untrue for hunters to state that they are conservationists solely based on the fact that they hunt. My problem is the argument - not the activity. I personally don't like hunting - especially in the fashion that this lion was killed - but that's a different discussion, and not the point I've made. The reason the argument matters, to me, is if you believe it - and apparently a lot of people do - then somehow money is able to definitionally change one activity into another. For instance, people that are convicted of domestic violence in many states are required to pay a fine to the state. Some of that money is earmarked for domestic violence prevention programs. Following the argument that has been asserted about hunting and the money involved, and applying it here, seems to yield the result that people that are convicted of domestic violence are actually preventing domestic violence because the money they are fined is earmarked by a third party (the government) for that purpose. That is incredibly ludicrous. Killing an animal is the opposite of trying to save that animal. I'm not really sure how to put it more clearly than that. Yes, people immediately pull the focus out and focus on the species - so now logically we're to accept killing them is the same as saving them. Still not buying that argument. Ultimately, I have said nothing about whether the animals in question should be saved, how they should be preserved, how the money should be raised, or spent. Again, look over my posts. My bitch at this point is solely the argument in support of hunters being conservations because they hunt. They may well be conservationists because of other things they do - but engaging in the activity of hunting - by definition - does not make you a conservationist.
>They hunt >They pay for the right to do it, well into thousands of dollars worth of USD >They want more animals to perhaps hunt in the future Please, continue explaining to me population dynamics. Do you know how minute a sport-hunted animal is on the population loss every year? Lions fight each other, lionesses and lions both, for territory. They will bite, claw and fight to the bloody end of one of them. They have intra-guild competition with spotted hyenas, cheetahs, leopards and African Painted Dogs. All of these animals will readily attack and kill a rival of the other if they can, a critically injured adult lion who is lying down on its side is most likely to be picked apart by one of these rivals or even another lion to death. Male lions to take over prides fight the resident males and then try their damndest to eliminate their defeated rival's genes by killing all of the cubs he sired, to put the females back into heat. http://africageographic.com/blog/hyena-lions-head/ Some lions fought, a lioness died in the fighting, and the spotted hyenas began to feast on the remains. The whole idea of conservation is the same as a letting a few big fish go back into the lake every year and having quotas that once met close the fishing or hunting season or whatever have you; keep the population healthy. But since a lion is a mammal, a big cat, it is easier to anthropomorphically-project or idealistically project. You know what there is way more of than sports hunting tourists in Africa? These sorts of tourists: But to the same end; African people will leave them un-poisoned, un-trapped and un-shot quite a bit more if they can make money off of them.
I don't know the intricacies of African hunt/conservation but in America hunters play a real and tangible role as conservationist outside of the fact that hunting license and tag fees can entirely fund state departments of wildlife. Since hunting has declined to the point where a majority of hunters are rural, they tend to be the ones that own and tend to the lands. There are resources to help create the necessary habitat for game animals provided by the state departments. It's all intermingled. In the case of deer, the states' records on population, for the most part, come straight from hunter's observations.
https://np.reddit.com/r/baltimore/c...oar_to_a_level_unseen_in_43/ctnk69q?context=3 I like this perspective very much, but it begs an interesting question: does poverty "break" a culture or a community? One of my coworkers lives in West Baltimore (aka where the Wire was supposed to be filmed). She said that these "bad" neighborhoods exist in a state of equilibrium that gets upset with a massive police incursion. So, police come in and often arrest the people who are keeping what passes for peace and an uptick of violence ensues as a new equilibrium is established. Given some of the recent events, it makes sense that these neighborhoods would see police as a disruptive rather than stabilizing presence. Then, the objective would be to minimize any public exposure to avoid being a target.
This is somewhat uninformed. Engaging in the act of hunting actually does promote conservation, depending on the context. In the vast majority of hunting in Canada and the US, we have, for the most part, eliminated the apex predators for deer. As a result of this, if deer are not hunted, and just left alone to do their thing, within a few short years you will have a very serious overpopulation problem on your hands. Case in point, around Point Pelee, the Southern most tip of Ontario: animal rights activists who considered themselves self-proclaimed conservationists successfully eliminated deer hunting around the area... "don't shoot Bambi!" within 2 years, deer had over-saturated the local environment, and there were more deer than the land could sustain as a result, deer were stunted (looking more like dogs than deer), were infesting the local towns scavenging for garbage, etc they had to cull over 1000 deer, paying big money for professionals to come in for a few weeks to try and set things right they've since brought back hunting, and even then they still have to cull deer: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/100-deer-to-be-culled-at-point-pelee-national-park-1.2894437 When hunters go out and get their tags, those tags are controlled by the REAL conservationists responsible for the populations, and they determine how many does and overall numbers can be hunted based on their science and recent hunting/population stats. Sure, the hunters might be clueless as to the details of the conservationist efforts behind those tags, but by hunting, they are actively part of that conservation process, at least in Canada... we are actively educated and targeted by the Ministry as to our responsibilities as hunters to that effort: keep numbers down report back on sick animals, providing samples to the Ministry when possible provide skeletal and skin samples for analysis to ensure the health of the herds That's the Canadian context, as I've lived and breathed it as a hunter of over 30 years. Africa? I have no fucking idea, other than what I've read online and seen on Ted Talks. I have no experience in that context. Hunting may not make you a scientifically trained and accredited conservationist, but it can be a key part of the conservation effort.
A big mature lion is 400-420 pounds a big mature bull elk is 900-1100 pounds and has a much thicker hide. The key for archery hunting is shot placement, more specifically ethical shot placement. You want to double lung them so they die quickly, which is probably a relative term as the animal being killed probably does not think so, and you really want a broadside shot to make that happen. It is also pretty hard to drop things with a rifle unless you get a head or neck shot or a direct heart shot, and when you are shooting a few hundred yards it makes it more difficult. So yes lions would be a viable prey for archery, just not dentists with bows.
Well come on, that guy was reportedly an expert shot with his bow. It sounds like this one wasn't a good shot, but everyone has bad shots sometimes. It's unfortunate for him and the lion that this one wasn't on the mark.
It's just a sad fact about hunting. It sucks it took 40 hours but I mean I can't get too worked up at him unless it was some crazy shot he shouldn't have taken the the first place.
In one of the stories I read soon after the news came out, it said he was using a crossbow in a certain hunt and it was pictured. But the bow in the picture was a compound bow. I think the writer just didn't know the difference in that case.