Yes, it would seem that a ban on hunting in any third world country is pretty much just for show. Money talks and shame on those rich individuals that just have to have an endangered animal. As for those people arrested in Missouri, they were obviously conducting canned hunts on basically penned-up animals. I suggest that the tiger in India would have been better off if the government would have just kept hunting legal but highly regulated.

Nickudu,

Some years ago when the Indian government went on with it's usual blatting saying that the tiger's last home was in India, I wrote to the editor of one of our magazines to say that I was certain that if this were true, the tiger would soon be extinct. The problem, though, is not hunting (most hunters, myself included, are law abiding people who wouldn't even dream of shooting anything that was proscribed for hunting) but poaching for body parts and that is done by corrupt forest officials and tribals who sell tiger penises, skins etc to Tibetans who in turn smuggle them through China to Japan, Taiwan etc.

Today, statistics have shown that the world's largest tiger population is in zoos and private collections in the US and I am now convinced that the tiger is safe. It's sad, though, that the country that the animal is most closely associated with will soon see the last of them in the wild. India is a conservation basket case.

mehulkamdar

you are absolutely right about the trade in body parts.

I visited a Northern border market inside Burma in the "Golden Triangle" a few years ago and there were numerous stalls openly selling leopard skins, and other body parts and also claiming to sell tiger pizzles etc in wrapped packets.

Now I don't know if they were real or fake ones but the locals didn't like video cameras or photos being taken. The good thing about modern video cameras is they have zooms.

Melhulkamdar,

Part of the trouble is that few, if any, NEWS entities make any distinction between the two, sporthunting and poaching. "Hunting" does very nicely for them.

The Japanese have been raping the worlds seas for centuries without regard for outside pressures to relent. The Chinese have been raping the natural world for centuries in the name of archaic suedo-medicinal practices, perpetuated, these days, solely by profits. As the rhino horns evaporate, it now elk horns and blackbear gall bladders being illegaly sought throughout the world and when those sources are diminished, some other unfortunate species will suddenly be deemed as posessing special medicinal or aphrodisial properties. Sickening all, as these are such intellegent people, generally. Sickening all, as the world just watches.

[ 03-20-2003, 15:52: Message edited by: Nickudu ]