“Bearing in mind that climate change is helping to remove animals and in 50 years time probably humans as well, now is the time for us to get into a position without being hypocritical. We are all hoping that Boris [Johnson] will see that cruelty is what we’re talking about — bullying bastards are involved and people who are vain sticking lovely dead animals on their walls.”
One of the inevitable burdens of growing old, the writer Paul Theroux has said, is hearing the same old arguments over and over again, made by people who think they’re the first to think of them.
Which brings us again to the issue of trophy hunting as a panacea for environmental degradation and species extinction.
This has come up now because the newly re-elected UK government is once again considering a ban on the import of some — but not all — animal trophies. The old, entrenched forces on either side of the divide have dug in yet again, knee deep in the big muddy.
It’s a pointless debate either way, because, as Greta Thunberg will be only too happy to tell you, politicians — especially populist politicians — don’t believe in promises. They tell people what they think people want to hear, change their minds on a whim, and can’t be trusted as far as you can throw a lion bone at them.
The debate persists because, let’s face it, people like to argue and — Greta and her climate supporters aside — they’re not that interested in doing anything, particularly if doing something comes at a personal cost or minor inconvenience.
A well-known lion researcher and Oxford-educated field biologist working in Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park recently faced a social-media backlash for stating the case for trophy hunting as a way to protect Africa’s increasingly threatened population of wild lions. She ended up being disinvited from a conservation conference in the UK, despite citing her Oxford degree and years of field research as qualifying credentials. This researcher’s position, backed by the hunting lobby, is that private land needs to provide an income if it’s not to be redeveloped for condos or a new superhighway, and charging fat dentists from Minnesota major dollars to shoot a lion helps pay for the land’s keep, and allows other animals living there to be left alone. It’s the old, “If it pays, it stays” argument. If landowners can’t make money off their land, the reasoning goes, it will fall into neglect, and everyone loses — the land owners, the animals, and the land itself.
When I weighed in with a contrary comment of my own, I had an owner of a neighbouring hunting blocks — the accepted lingo for hunting concession areas — take me to task for not acknowledging the financial risks involved. “We don’t have any animals,” he said. “What are we supposed to do?”
Perhaps the reason you don’t any animals is that they’ve all been shot out, but that argument is likely always to fall on deaf ears.
Never mind that one of the most compelling arguments in favour of tourism, as opposed to hunting, as that once the tourists have spent
their money and gone home, the lion or elephant or what-have-you is still there, but why spoil the beauty of an argument with petty details?
I mentioned the Oxford researcher to another leading authority on lion behaviour — arguably the leading authority on lion conservation, an academic who has been banned from Tanzania for his troubles, and his outspoken comments about government corruption — it’s odd how funds earmarked for conservation always seem to vanish under mysterious circumstances — and he replied, via Facebook message, that, “She’s wasting her time” trying to work with the hunting lobby.
And then there’s Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who unloaded just this past week in The Guardian about what utter contempt he holds trophy hunters — “Bullying bastards!” — in, and how, at age 75 and one of the leading British explorers of his generation with several endurance records to his name, he is fed up with the same discredited arguments being made time and time again.
But don’t take my — or Sir Ranulph’s — word for it. Here’s some supplemental reading which represents different points-of-view in the debate. Read them and judge for yourself what you think sounds right and feels right. Emotion v. reason, right v.wrong — take your pick. I know where I stand, and it’s not with the fat dentist from Minnesota, nor the idiot sons of an American grotesque who strides atop the world stage at the present moment in time.
That’s just me speaking personally, mind — as well as correctly and objectively, to borrow a line from the late-night comedian John Oliver.
https://www.conservationconversation.co.uk/single-post/Prof-Craig-Packer-on-Trophy-Hunting
Ranulph Fiennes. Photo ©Stefan Rousseau-PA