This Sunday morning in the San Diego Union (of Sep 8, 2019) I found this article:
Our government needs to stop issuing these permits. So do those of other nations, including China. To be fair to Trump, he has issued “only” two such permits during his tenure. Obama issued three since 2013. My question is, what do those trophy hunters have that makes our government bow to their pressure?
There are only 5,500 black rhinoceroses living in the wild, half of them in Namibia. And they are allowing some of them to be killed by trophy hunters. In what universe do you have to live for this to make sense?
The argument is that the money from trophy hunting funds the anti-poaching efforts. Scary as it seems, it’s probably correct, but I believe it’s still misguided.
I call bullshit.
If there were a properly conducted crowd-funding campaign to collect $400,000 to offset this one Michigan man’s permit, I believe it would be successful. If only 400,000 people around the world put in just one dollar, it would be accomplished. I’d put in a lot more than one dollar.
I really think we need zero tolerance for all big-game hunting, both trophy hunting and poaching. We need to make it so big game hunting is socially viewed as disgusting, so nobody can get away with it anymore. Those hunters with heads of big game in their lodges in Michigan, Montana and Shanghai need to be embarrassed about the trophies, not admired. Only once the practice is socially unacceptable in all rich countries will this stop.
I know that this is not likely to happen, and we will kill those last 5,500 rhinos.
Then where will the Chinese get their placebo rhino horn powder?
Who will shame them? Women? Men can’t be shamed about “manly” things, can they? and women who like hunters won’t. I guess for me it’s pick my battles: I can’t take on one more figgin’ thing. It’s hard enough to observe without absorbing: I know several people who are quite broken now and turning off their computers for a month at a time; even political pundits take 2-week vacations and try to detox from the constant churning out of shit by Trump and his Administration. I feel up to my nostrils standing in the flow.
This is actually a problem larger than Trump. We have been supporting trophy hunting for a long time, and Obama also gave special permits to individual hunters. It’s a world-wide issue. Unfortunately, when you read human history, you see that humans always drove other species they encountered to extinction. We’re still doing it now, albeit much faster. A good book to read might be “Sapiens” which discusses this issue at various points. I have a review of Sapiens in this blog.
Terrible behaviour on all counts.