Good opinion piece in the Wall Street journal today on hunting. I'll try to get the link

https://www.wsj.com/articles/x...s-his-kin-1504132892

I read it this morning after my run; very good. Get ready for the letters to the editor; I think I will write one.

Excellent!

What an enlightened piece.

Mark

This is the opinion piece
Cecil the lion became an internet icon two years ago when he was killed by Walter Palmer, a Minnesota dentist on a trophy hunt. Now Cecil’s son Xanda has met the same fate. Last month a hunter shot and killed the 6-year-old lion near Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. The identity of the shooter has not been released, and it’s easy to see why.
In 2015 Dr. Palmer was set upon by a social-media mob. Activists claimed that he killed the lion illegally. Although Dr. Palmer never went to trial, trophy hunting certainly did. He needed armed guards to protect him from angry protesters outside his home. “Rot in Hell,” read one of their signs. “There’s a Deep Cavity Waiting for You,” read another
The general public particularly milennials—detests trophy hunting. We see the anti¬hunting sentiment at Stanford University. One of us, Matt, is from South Africa. At 10, he had his first hunt a male impala and hated it so much he vowed never to do it again. Kit, a native New Yorker, was against hunting before she went to South Africa to investigate for herself. Today we both realize that trophy hunting is vital to African conservation.
Imagining Cecil and Xanda suffering, or their heads hung above some tough guy’s fire¬place, is cringe-making. Perhaps one day, tourists taking pictures of wildlife will be enough to sustain Africa’s wilderness, no hunting required. But until that day, the alternative to regulated trophy hunting is worse. It’s counterintuitive, but banning the practice would mean the systematic slaughter of wildlife, trampling of unique ecosystems, and possible extinction of rare species. Sacrificing a quota of lions to hunters keeps many others alive.
Quotas are set below population growth rates. Since 1968, when regulated hunting of white rhinos was introduced in South Africa, the population has risen from 1,800 to 18,000. Namibia’s wildlife numbers have grown six¬fold since the ’60s, when private landowners first were given rights to use the animals for economic benefit.
Across Africa, at least 538,000 square miles—twice the size of Texas is used for hunting, according to a 2006 study. That includes 13% of South Africa’s land, on which live about 1.7 million animals. Tourism cannot simply replace this activity, since it’s geographically concentrated and requires paved roads, accommodations, catering, multilingual staff, Wi-Fi. The antihunting lobby needs to explain how they’d keep these wild animals from losing their homes and how they’d replace thousands of jobs if hunting were banned.
Take Xanda and Cecil’s homeland of Zimbabwe. The Savé Valley Conservancy there is home to around 1,500 elephants, 160 rhinos and 280 lions. Without hunting revenue, Savé Valley would regress to what it was in 1990: a collection of overgrazed, dusty cattle farms, no elephants in sight.
“For the people in our village, the wildlife is dinner or it is danger,” says Isi, a high school math teacher in South Africa. Isi’s sons play on junkyard hills of Coca-Cola cans, in a neigbborhood of three walled brick houses and fields of yellowing crops. It’s hard to convince poor Africans of the need to conserve animals when they themselves don’t have food, shelter or financial stability. They want to do exactly what America’s settlers did: Convert habitat to farmland and kill wild animals either for meat or like backyard pests. Who can blame them? After all, elephants trample crops and lions eat cattle.
On the other hand, when an aggressive black rhino can sell for $350,000, which is what one hunting permit fetched in a 2014 auction, the rest of the herd begins to look like a precious resource. Africa's inconvenient truth is that wild spaces rarely occur without the presence of an economic incentive. Besides, the antihunting backlash in rich countries leaves a sour taste in the mouths of many Africans, after centuries of Westerners telling them how to run their affairs. The conservation scientist Rosie Cooney calls it “green neocolonialism.”
This isn’t to say environmentalists have nothing to do. For starters, the public could help eradicate bad practices like “canned” hunting, in which captive bred lions are killed in small enclosures. Wildlife advocates could help create a scientific and legal consensus on reasonable quotas and the definition of a “huntable” lion. These issues are unaddressed, in part because the topic is taboo.
The Spanish government is expected soon to unveil a robust certification system distinguishing good hunting reserves from bad ones. That’s a great first step. The next one should be getting na-ture-lovers to put their money where their tweets are by donating to wildlife preserves or taking an eco¬tourism trip to Africa.

I have this conversation with tourists coming to Namibia very often. They simply cannot understand why hunting continues. My response is - "Those concerned about stopping hunting can end the practice tomorrow morning." This results in raised eyes and happy faces. I continue... "If you want to stop hunting simply purchase every hunting quota that is tendered, supply the local communities with cows, goats, chicken and sheep to account for the lost of game meat and provide the funds equal to the loss of jobs associated with hunting. This will eliminate trophy hunting tomorrow. Of course within a few years, many areas will overpopulate so you will need to get into the game capture business and purchase millions of hectares of land and food to keep all of your rescued animals alive."

The conversation quickly turns to where's the best place for dinner tonight.

Liberals/pseudo-intellectuals/snowflakes/anti-hunters only want to tell everyone else how to live and act. They sure as hell don't want to get their hands dirty or do any heavy lifting. That's soooo beneath them. Rules are for everyone else.

Fun times.

quote:

Originally posted by Opus1:
I have this conservation with tourists coming to Namibia very often. They simply cannot understand why hunting continues. My response is - "Those concerned about stopping hunting can end the practice tomorrow morning." This results in raised eyes and happy faces. I continue... "If you want to stop hunting simply purchase every hunting quota that is tendered, supply the local communities with cows, goats, chicken and sheep to account for the lost of game meat and provide the funds equal to the loss of jobs associated with hunting. This will eliminate trophy hunting tomorrow. Of course within a few years, many areas will overpopulate so you will need to get into the game capture business and purchase millions of hectares of land and food to keep all of your rescued animals alive." Fun times.

Perfectly summed it all up in ONE short paragraph!

quote:

Originally posted by Opus1:
I have this conversation with tourists coming to Namibia very often. They simply cannot understand why hunting continues. My response is - "Those concerned about stopping hunting can end the practice tomorrow morning." This results in raised eyes and happy faces. I continue... "If you want to stop hunting simply purchase every hunting quota that is tendered, supply the local communities with cows, goats, chicken and sheep to account for the lost of game meat and provide the funds equal to the loss of jobs associated with hunting. This will eliminate trophy hunting tomorrow. Of course within a few years, many areas will overpopulate so you will need to get into the game capture business and purchase millions of hectares of land and food to keep all of your rescued animals alive."

The conversation quickly turns to where's the best place for dinner tonight.

Liberals/pseudo-intellectuals/snowflakes/anti-hunters only want to tell everyone else how to live and act. They sure as hell don't want to get their hands dirty or do any heavy lifting. That's soooo beneath them. Rules are for everyone else.

Fun times.

Outstanding logic! And well put together.

.

Perhaps the best one paragraph rebuttal ever!