Really quite a contentious issue. Nobody seems to be ethically or morally bothered by murder, instead it looks like a purely pragmatic approach. Oh, what folly, millions of years of evolution bring majesty into our surroundings, and we as humans feel that we have the final say in who stays and who gets eaten. I pray our human family grows more compassionate and kind toward fellow humans and toward all life on the planet. We should be conserving the majesty, and we should not be funding it via means that undermine that basic tenet. Perhaps I speak nothing new, but it is important for people to know that if we truly looked at the situation, killing is unnecessary. If you really want to go big game hunting, why not use a tranquilizer gun? To say you are helping conserve nature while actively destroying it is nothing short of hypocrisy and deceptive wording. To me it's not really a gray area. It's the difference between evolving nobly and devolving.

Problem is, the result of this hunting is ranches where big game animals are grown just to be shot.

And 'hunting' big game with modern high-powered rifles and scopes is barely more than a level-1 vidgame. Seriously, you're virtually guaranteed to bag something, and the biggest risk is a sprained ankle with your guide as backup.

The best solution is to sell expensive packages to hunt the most dangerous game of all -humans- specifically, poachers.

Your big fee gets you deputized, mostly goes to protect the park, and you go on a real hunt of something that has a fighting chance, and you'll genuinely improve the animals' chance of survival if you succeed.

Haha open hunting season on poachers! That's a hilarious idea, although practically not at all implementable.

> if we truly looked at the situation, killing is unnecessary.

Man is an omnivore; omnivores eat other animals; killing other animals is therefore necessary to embrace our true selves.

> To say you are helping conserve nature while actively destroying it is nothing short of hypocrisy and deceptive wording.

As a man, I am part of nature.

I don't enjoy killing, but I very much enjoy hunting, cleaning & cooking my food. I never feel more alive that when I'm in the field, earning my meal with my own eyes and hands.

Humans have the ability to reason. Just because Stacy is a lady with a vagina does not mean she must bear children to embrace her "true self."

Because humans have miniature canines does not mean they have to imitate carnivores with full-size canines. Humans can be omnivores, or herbivores, or carnivores, all by reason and choice. Our dental structure and shape lends far greater evidence to a plant-based diet (molars with which to grind down leaves) than to meat eating.

I'm not trying to say that being an herbivore is for everyone, but killing does have consequences, some seen and some unseen, and at the very least one should warn a brother.

I think it is more of a pragmatic solution than an ethical one.

Some people want the species to survive, some people want to hunt them, both parties meet in the middle. It's certainly better than the fate of the Dodo and the Great Auk.

Still rings like "let's use the floorboards of the ship to build the walls"

Eventually compromising on how many lions can be hunted to save the lions just leads to no more lions.

Of course, I understand that this article is mostly informational, it is stuff that is going on, and probably would not even come into community attention without a write-up. I'm thankful for the intel, but I cannot agree with the conclusion

> For some, the hunting-antihunting debate boils down to Western environmentalists trying to dictate their agenda to Africa—a form of neocolonialism, as Marnewecke puts it. “Who gives anybody the right, sitting in another continent, to preach to us how we should manage our wildlife?”

Just because from your view point killing an animal is murder, does not mean everyone agrees. No one is ethically or morally bothered, because, one animal killing another is a foundational part of our ecosystem.

Just another day I was seeing a picture of some people riding on an elephant's back in the recent Nepal flood: https://i.redd.it/a1hbn1nfosiz.jpg

And there it is, someone jumping in commenting about how you're not supposed to ride on the elephant's back. I guess one can always take the moral highway when they are in an AC cooled room with 1Gbps internet arguing about what other people should do.

>one animal killing another is a foundational part of our ecosystem.

At the same time though, our """ecosystem""" wasn't designed in billions of years to take our guns into the equation. Human has the ability to conquer pretty much every (big) animal there is on earth. Give me an AK-47, some generous supply of bullets, and let me hunt whatever whenever I want, I'd sure be able to clean out a very significant part of a jungle. It would not have happened if I had to wrestle with the bears for their meat.

Are you saying that since humans are more efficient killers we should no longer be able to hunt animals? These hunters are not destroying entire populations of animals, they're paying an exorbitant amount of money to hunt one animal, and probably an older one at that.

What I was trying to say was the original argument of the stronger eating the weaker ones is part of nature/the ecosystem, therefore, it is natural, thus it can't be easily labelled as unethical, is not a totally sound one.

The argument based on the premise that it is natural to do so. There is nothing natural about dominating another living with a gun that you can shoot at a ridiculous range. It doesn't matter how much money you bring to it, maybe that bear is destined to die of old age if it wasn't for the human shooting him down.

We don't know for sure what's the impact of hunting an old bear or a rhino down (I'm aware that there are some arguments about it being a good thing), but sure that wasn't what nature did for billions of years.

Does the good triumph over the bad aspect when you pay for a kill? Maybe, possibly. Is it ethical? Debatable. Is it part of nature? No.

It's one planet and one wildlife. Until that fact is noticed, there will be much conflict.

There is one planet, yet an average American child's impact on the environment is 35x an Indian and the American child consumes 53x goods and services more than a Chinese child [1].

Hey, do they get a chance to ask the American one to not destroy the Earth, or only the American one can lecture them to not hunt some food?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumpt...

After watching enough shows about lions on Netflix, I can't see how anyone wants to preserve these creatures in the wild. They are mind glowingly brutal animals, whose very existence is predicated in mauling other animals. If you care about animal suffering, don't let lions out to terrorize livestock.