killing to conserve

rebecca francis is the latest in a long line of female ‘trophy hunters’ to cause uproar on social media- posing beside the (soon to be) carcass of a bull giraffe. rebecca’s personal website is a litany of self-indulgent, boasts detailing the long list of lives she has extinguished. but underneath this gruesome blood lust lies an important issue of whether hunting can big game can paradoxically be good for conservation.

the argument goes that if you allow private enterprises to breed and sustain big game in southern africa you can then charge wealthy, white, westerners to come in and kill  the animals- with the proceeds going into anti-poaching efforts and local communities. i don’t know if you’ve watched louis theroux’s animal hunting holiday documentary but if the cold hard logic of the ‘hunt to conserve’ argument persuades you, you should give it a go.

despite being a vegetarian, i find there is a certain, quiet dignity about a traditional african hunter tracking his prey through the hot arid desert to sustain his family or community. i can abide by that. what is truly grotesque though is some overweight red neck in army fatigues riding on the back of a four-by-four taking pot shots at tame lions. I could walk onto a hunting reserve tomorrow having never shot a gun or a bow before in my life and be guaranteed to kill something.

opposition to controlled big game hunting is not restricted to moral arguments. jeff flocken, north american director for the international fund for animal welfare, wrote in july that lion hunts ‘are unsustainable and put more pressure on the species.’ flocken noted that about 600 lions are killed by ‘safari’ or ‘trophy’ hunters a year. about 60 percent of those animals are killed by americans, he added. flocken states that trophy hunters tend to be most interested in killing big males, which he said could impact evolution of the species by eliminating some of the healthiest genes.

the underlying feature of this discussion is man’s bizarre inclination to dominate the earth on which we live. the capitalist urge to commodify everything means that big game conservation (and conservation more generally) is viewed through the prism of money and profit. we have become a society which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. we, as a species have to view animals as entities in their own right and not just as facilitators of our own selfish pleasures, whether that be eating or hunting. only then will we be properly equipped to seriously tackle species conservation.