If there’s one thing that is sure to divide the bleeding heart liberals from the rest it’s the issue of trophy hunting. Full disclosure here – I find trophy hunting abhorrent, but as someone who has an innate love for the bush and its wild beasts we need to have a greater understanding of what one means to the other.

Dear old Cecil and Walter Palmer may have taken up most of our social media feeds the past few weeks, but there were often some rather uneducated pot shots taken at those who participate in legal, above board hunting for sport. I use that the term ‘sport’ rather lightly of course, shooting an unarmed animal with a powerful weapon is akin to telling Bismarck du Plessis to run full tilt at your grandmother and then dancing with joy when she gets steamrolled.

All jokes aside trophy hunting has had (and continues to have) far-reaching benefits for those who seek to preserve our natural heritage. This below from TimesLive details what the consequences of a ban on trophy hunting would mean to different parts of Southern Africa:

Let’s go back to Hwange National Park. The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, responsible for managing the park, derived most of its income for wildlife conservation from trophy hunting. With minimal revenue from the central government, it is now in trouble. The number of staff at Hwange has been radically cut, and there is little money for cars or equipment. Bush-meat poaching is on the rise and the rangers are ill-equipped to combat it.

In Namibia, more than half of the community-owned conservancies (covering 20% of the country) have collapsed because the revenue from non-hunting sources is not enough to keep https://safemdonline.com/priligy.html them viable. Namibia’s innovative communal conservancies have been responsible for dramatic increases in wildlife outside of national parks, including elephant, lion and black rhino over the last 20 years, with income from trophy hunting and tourism encouraging communities to turn their land over to conservation.

Communities retained 100% of benefits from sustainable use of wildlife, including tourism, live sales and hunting – almost R18-million in 2013. This money was spent on schools, healthcare, roads, training, and on employing 530 game guards to protect wildlife. Now it is gone.

That’s not exactly the prettiest of pictures now is it? What about the consequences of such a ban here in South Africa itself?

On the private game reserves that covered 20million hectares, though, revenues from wildlife have collapsed.

So imagine a future where lions are no longer bred on farmland , and those that remain in national parks are shot as problem animals as soon as they leave the park. Speculative? Yes, but it has happened before.

Bans on trophy hunting in Tanzania (1973-78), Kenya (1977) and Zambia (2000-03) accelerated a rapid loss of wildlife due to the removal of incentives for conservation. Anecdotal reports suggest this might be happening in Botswana, which banned all hunting last year.

All of the above does little, at least for me personally, to answer what would possess someone to fly all the way to our shores for the sole purpose of shooting a beautiful animal like Cecil. Perhaps we don’t need to understand that madness, for it will always remain beyond me, but we should at least better understand the ramifications of a blanket ban on all trophy hunting before we so eagerly click share.

[source:timeslive]