How would you feel if a coyote, mountain lion, or a wolf made off with your pet dog or cat? However, safely living side by side with grizzly bears, wolves, elephants, or lions can be very challenging. Seeing animals in their natural habitat while on vacation is a truly amazing experience. This has brought these animals into conflict with people. The unfortunate reality in many areas is that virtually all of the places left that can sustain populations of large and dangerous animals like African elephants, lions, and rhino are already at, or exceeding their carrying capacity. Human encroachment has slowly but steadily reduced the amount of land left that is suitable for those animals to live on. Of these two threats, habitat loss is the most serious and that’s what we’ll discuss first. Why Trophy Hunting Is Actually A Good ThingĪs you may have heard, there is big money involved in trophy hunting. That’s true: wealthy people pay tremendous sums of money to go hunting.įortunately, this money is essential for fighting the two primary threats to wildlife these days: poaching and loss of habitat. He obviously had lived a long and interesting life and it’s unlikely he would have made it through that winter. The pronghorn buck in the photo below is a prime example: he was extremely old and his teeth were worn nearly completely down. This is a more noble and fitting end than dying on some lost and lonely ledge where the scavengers will pick his bones, and his magnificent horns will weather away and be lost forever. The true trophy hunter is a self-disciplined perfectionist seeking a single animal, the ancient patriarch well past his prime that is often an outcast from his own kind… If successful, he will enshrine the trophy in a place of honor. Especially in the case of the very old animals that are often pursued by trophy hunters, they may be so old that they would not have survived the next winter or dry season, dying of exposure or starvation instead.Įlgin Gates said it best in his description of trophy hunters: Normally, trophy hunters target older animals that may be past breeding age. However, it also preserves the beauty and majesty of the animal, which lasts much longer and can be enjoyed by many more people in a trophy room or museum than it would in the wild. This helps memorialize the memory of the hunt (and all of the experiences that went along with it) for the hunter. Most hunters then eat the animal and keep the trophy (the hide and/or the antlers/horns) and preserve them as some sort of memento of the hunt. Trophy hunting is the selective hunting of a particular wild game animal, usually older males, because that particular animal has a desirable characteristic, such as large antlers/horns. In this article, I’m going to provide a detailed description of what trophy hunting is and why it it is so important for the future of wildlife on Earth. What would you say if I told you that trophy hunting actually has real, scientifically proven benefits for wildlife? Would you believe that well regulated, sustainable trophy hunting can be beneficial for protecting vulnerable animal populations from poaching and for preventing habitat loss? While hunting organizations claim that killing individual animals can actually benefit overall animal populations, that can’t really be true, can it? At first glance, it seems obvious that trophy hunting is bad for the environment. Due in part to widespread outrage on social media to incidents like the Cecil the Lion scandal, many people include trophy hunting in this list of threats to wildlife as well. Wildlife faces many threats these days ranging from poaching and climate change to loss of irreplaceable habitat. I think most people would probably agree that protecting the environment and preventing threatened species from going extinct are both important goals. If you care about protecting endangered species, then you need to learn the truth about trophy hunting. What you’ve heard about trophy hunting is probably wrong.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |