Here we go again. Having failed last year to legislate a ban on the import of hunting trophies, UK MPs are trying to ram through a similar bill while once again ignoring African voices and conservation scientists. It is a campaign based on lies and distortions, bringing to mind the rejection of science by climate change denialists.. These include red deer stag hunted for sport in the Scottish highlands at places like the Royal Family’s rural estate in Balmoral.
And the facts speak for themselves. The biggest threats to African megafauna such as lions, elephants and rhinos are poaching, habitat loss and fragmentation, and human/wildlife conflict, with climate change an emerging threat. As Dickman and other conservation scientists such as Craig Packer have noted, much of the remote habitat in countries such as Tanzania is ill-suited for other kinds of wildlife revenue such as photographic tourism.The comparatively rich wildlife in Tanzania, where hunting is allowed – compared with Kenya where it was banned in 1977 – is one of many examples.
I wrote about this issue roughly a year ago when MPs first voted in favour of the ban, pointing out that some animals are more equal than others.That effort eventually withered and died in the House of Lords, but the emotions stirred by the issue remain red-hot. So here we go again, with a second reading of the new bill debated in the House of Commons last Friday.
Opposition to trophy hunting, it must be said, is perfectly legitimate and people in the free world are free to speak their minds. Some people – mostly drawn from the urban middle classes in affluent, developed economies – simply abhor hunting. And trophy hunting touches a raw nerve in ways that hunting for meat consumption does not.
As Botswana’s president said, it is “condescending”. Not to mention hypocritical, when you think of those 350,000 deer mowed down in the UK each year – an average of about 1,000 a week. Jared Kakura is a Californian urban animal rights zealot with a proven and abiding hatred of private enterprise. It makes no difference whether you kill an animal to grow veggies, build a city, for a trophy and then eat it, or kill it for meat and keep a trophy. It’s life.Your argument that animals hunt and kill each other in order to survive and keep the balance in check means that animals have no rights and are just commodities in your mind is very egotistical and ignorant.