This poor woman is being demonized for shooting a lion legally

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Granted that H&Hhunter focuses on elephants, but high odds are that it applies to lions as well.

http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=189864

If a wild animal has a monetary value to the local populace, they will act to protect it. If it has no value to them, they won't--and in Africa, the no-value aspect has led to unrestrained poaching. Where the high license fee money is split with the locals, protection exists and species remain healthy.

That holds true for game animals everywhere. No legally huntable animal in the US is endangered or even threatened. And it is from hunters' funding that we have more whitetail deer and turkey today than when the first Europeans arrived.

What I like or don't like is irrelevant to the reality of human nature and money.
 
"What a damning indictment of our society's behaviour if we need to rely on hunting revenue to preserve what we've previously all but killed off by other means."

Pond, you say that as an outsider that sees the lion as a commodity. You appreciate it as something pretty and worth keeping around. The locals see it as a wild, dangerous animal that is better off dead. Prior to regulated trophy hunts locals were poaching the animals to extinction and selling their hides to make a quick buck. It is self preservation at its base. Now those some people have an incentive to keep the animals around because lawful hunters bring in more money than they would otherwise see which has raised the value of the animals.

I don't know if trophy hunters care or not. They are for sure interested in having an fun and enjoyable hunt and they are willing to pay for that privilege which is what pays for that conservation so what does it matter? The fact that they spend all of that money to do it lawfully instead of just going out and shooting whatever they want tells me something. Most hunters do seem to care even if it is from the self serving motivation of being able to hunt again in the future.

You may not accept it but our own wildlife management plans work on the same principal.

You looked at 2 years of lion population. What have the last 15 years been like?
 
It was legal. If folks have a problem with it they need to direct their anger at those that make the rules, not those that play by them. Now odds are, it was a staged hunt and a planted lion. If you go to the Maroi Conservancy web page they book no hunts for Lion, not even "POR", nor do they have pictures of other successful Lion hunters on the site. They do list limited hunts for leopards(POR) and do show pics of successful leopards hunters. So again, the hunt was legal. The fact some are upset may be that it was a staged for T.V. hunt and was not all that ethical. The Maroi Conservancy charges $15,000 for Buffalo, that were not originally present in the area under their control. Wonder what the charge was for that lion........
 
When you can buy your meat at the local grocery store, it is a slippery slope to damn those hunters who do not eat what they kill as "trophy hunters."

The brutal truth is that we are ALL sport hunters
 
Funny how many against this hunt have no issue with sitting in a tree using bait to lure a deer in real close "because it is legal" yet is no where near as sporting as many other hunts. This was legal, it was determined as such by their version of Fish and Game - you side with the antis on this, then soon they will come to ban YOUR version of hunting as well
 
Only the hunter and the gardener are do-it-yourself types when it comes to food. Everybody else hires some other person to do the scut work.

Hey, me, too, when I shop at the grocery store. :D

Hunters have the strongest vested interest in the health of any and all game species. Absent a surplus, there is no hunting.

Doesn't matter what the species is: Rats, coyotes, cougars, deer, elk, elephant, antelope or lions. There is either a surplus in an area or there is no legal hunting.
 
There is a dynamic at work here with cats where hunting the large males can have devastating effects on the population. Zambia recently banned hunting of lions for this reason. They used to issue 1 hunting license each year for lion in the Mushingashi Game Management Area. The foreign hunter would come in and take the pride's male. A new male would move in, and the next hunter would take him the next year. One problem with this - as soon as a male lion takes over a pride the first order of business is to kill all the cubs of the previous male. This brings the females into heat so he can make cubs of his own. So every year all the cubs of the pride would be killed by the new resident male, until eventually they realized that no cub had been raised to adulthood for 9 years. That pride may well be doomed despite the belated hunting ban.

Quite a different scenario than deer, where the new buck doesn't kill all the offspring of the previous one.
 
I don't agree with killing animals for "a laugh". It is not an activity I can bring myself to respect.
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Who is laughing?

bottom line is that hunting even for trophies creates more value then if the native population would just hunt for meat or to protect their cattle


and PH are conservationist and nature friends, they wouldn't spend every waken hour outside if not. it is not something you do to become rich, it is a hard life
 
I don't accept the premise that trophy hunting is the only workable way to preserve nature we have.

I don't accept the premise that trophy hunting is the only profitable way to enjoy and protect wildlife.
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if you accept it or not doesn't matter, it is fact.

one hunter pays as much as a busload of camera tourists basically

it is a profitable way to conservate so why fight against it?

you are free yourself to buy your own land and manage it how you like, see how that works out...
 
I have no use for selective ethics in killing animals. Unless you're eating the mice and rats you catch in your traps, I don't want to hear it.
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All ethics are selective. While food may not be the reason to kill mice and rats, self defense is. Vermin carry disease. That exceptionally territorial and dangerous bear/seal/whatever may continue to come back to human populated areas because of the easy meal no matter how often they're relocated however far away.

While I certainly hope that a bear that is put down in that sort of situation is taken to a meat locker for some sort of Hunting For The Hungry program, I would be surprised if it was.

Generally speaking ethics change over time as well.

A hundred and fifty-ish years ago people were laying waste to entire fields of buffalo, the meat left rotting in the fields. At one point, they would shoot the Buffalo from the trains without even slowing down, or harvesting anything, meat, tongue or hides.

So all ethics are selective, and era dependent. Some people select a trophy as a valid reason to harvest an animal. Some don't.
 
if it works why stop doing it?

there is nothing that says that plain hippies will shoulder the work of the hunters.

Strange I have yet to see some enviromental/hippie out in the woods placing a saltstone, creating a wild-field doing any sort of wildlife managment, creating habitats etc etc

or help the cops track animals wounded in car-collisions...

When the enivermentalists think they are helping they are most often woefully wrong and inedequate, look at those frekkin sea-sheppards, prime example of IDIOTS, protesting the hunting of a perfectly acceptable harvest. look atr greenpeace who stopped trade with walruss tusks and crippled eskimo economy etc etc
 
Originally posted by Husqvarna:
and PH are conservationist and nature friends, they wouldn't spend every waken hour outside if not. it is not something you do to become rich, it is a hard life
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PHs are just guides and odds are like Guides all over the world. For every one that is a true conversationalist, there is one that is driven by greed and will do whatever it takes for his client to get an animal so he gets a tip. Ask some of those folks that guide Ted Nugent. The majority are probably a little of both. As for the ethics, there are hunters and there are shooters. Paying big bucks to shoot a basically domesticated animal or one that has been highly acclimated to human intervention in an fenced enclosure seems to be the trend for those folks with deep pockets with the goal a big picture of them, the animal and the tool of destruction. One reason they post the pic by phone on Facebook before they even get home. This isn't driving the preservation of an endangered species in the wild...this is driving the breeding and raising of animals solely for the purpose of being shot behind a fence......for big profit. While it may keep the animal from going completely extinct, it is not preserving the wild animal. It's only making them sheep.
 
Sounds like a typical, case of emotional and illogical reasoning to put the concern for the individual animal ahead concern for the species.

The people in the region are dirt poor and starving and outsiders want to lecture them on preserving wildlife when they are more concerned about preserving their children form starvation. They see the lion as either a threat to them or a threat to their food. They see poaching as a lottery. The only thing that saves any animal such as this from being totally erradicated by locals is giving it commercial value. Preserves are limited in size, and support a limited number of animals. Populations of all species within the preserve are carefully managed to an optimum level that their habitat will support. Excess animals can either be culled at the preserve's expense, or some foreignor will pay big bucks to hunt one. The guide will tell him which animal to shoot. He will pay for all kinds of local services for this hunt. What is chump change for a service to you and I might be the average annual income for a person here. For many species, the hunter is not even permitted to take meat or any part of the animal home. The meat and hyde are harvested and distributed to the locals. Everybody wins. The locals will put greater effort into protecting the species because the money the foreignor pays to hunt the animal legally, feeds a lot more people than the individual animal, and the desire to keep it continuous ensures preservation by the locals. The only thiing that could make it better, and increase revenue even more is if misguided countries would lift their ban on the importation of of legally taken managed animals. For example, when elephants are culled to keep populations within the habitat's capability, the ivory is destroyed and cannot be sold.
 
Just who do you guys think funds those conservation efforts that have so benefited African wildlife and tribespeople? Safari Hunters, through licenses, taxes, and trophy fees that's who. To say nothing of the jobs provided. Without the value given it by safari hunters, that lion would be nothing more than a pest, to be machine gunned, trapped or poisoned as a threat to some tribesmans cattle, or poached for the Asian aphrodisiac market. I say good for her, wish I could afford to take a lion like that.
 
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She should have posted her trophy hunt here on TFL instead of Facebook. "Why look for trouble. Even if her few friends do hang out on Facebook" ____O well.
 
In saying that, you imply that there are no better options presently used or available for use than PH. I don't agree.
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You said as much before in an earlier post, but I have yet to see some other viable options presented.
 
I think that trophy hunting isn't the only method of preserving and conserving wildlife in Africa, but to me, it seems as if it may be one of the most effective and visible.

I mean, anybody remember rhino wars on Animal Planet?

What makes more sense allowing trophy hunting or hiring mercenaries to go after poachers?
 
As I've said, trophy hunting has its uses however lions present a unique circumstance since once you kill the pride's male you indirectly kill all the cubs because the next male to encounter the pride will kill all the cubs. Not might kill, they will kill them. Every single time, every last one.

As far as I know all cats do this (including domestic ones) as well as other predator species like grizzly bears however lions are the only social cats and it's impossible for the lioness to hide her cubs from the males like others do since the males live in the pride.

If the lions need to be culled it makes more sense to cull the females, but this doesn't give trophy hunters what they want. You could also hunt the young rogue males who don't live in a pride because they're too small to drive off the resident male but this also would be unsatisfactory to most trophy hunters. They're not as easy to locate either since they wander.
 
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