Zimbabwe hunter 'crushed to death by shot elephant'

ScumLord wrote: »

I'm not a hunter, I don't go hunting but not really surprising to see more assumptions creeping in. I don't assume I know peoples thoughts better than they do. I don't assume I know how something should be run better than the people who live and work there, in a country thousands of miles away.

I'm aware of the fact I don't have all the facts so I'm not going to condemn a person, a people and a nation based on a few hundred words written by a sensationalist media. All I've really done here is play devil's advocate to your certainty and you've put a gun in my hand and created a story about me that couldn't be further from the truth.

You must do though, you (and others) keep talking about you need to live in the country surrounded by what you charmingly call vermin to understand why hunting is needed and a good thing for the environment.

You assume we who live in urban areas have little to no interaction with rural Ireland and therefore little understanding of how it works. So you all seem to feel this precludes us from having an opinion.

I for one have spent a lot of time down the country - my grandmother was born and raised in the west of Limerick, as far from the city as it's possible to be in Ireland, and we have spent many holidays there as a family over the years.

If anything my time down there has taught how beautiful and precious our wild places are and that far from trying to destroy them and kill everything that lives in them for our own selfish ends we should cherish them.

One of the big issues with the hunting malarky is that elephants are extremely intelligent animals. And they will learn and remember if humans shot their herdmates. One particular scenario that has happened repeatedly is that an elephant is shot and wounded, but survives. It may have a bullet lodged in it, which, particularly if it is near the tusks, can cause unceasing pain to it. Another scenario is when parent elephant is shot, but the calf survives. The calf, if it survives to grow up, is not socialised by the dead parent and is also..well, basically traumatised.

Those elephants can grow to become killers and elephants can be surprisingly effective killers. They can also be shown to have rudimentary planning abilities and also a surprisingly human-like predilection for revenge, such as an elephant herd that attacked a village after one of its herd was shot by a hunter. Maybe this herd were surprised with young and attacked. Maybe enough of them had experience of human hunters to know that a swift attack was the best defence against human predators, whether or not the hunters were actually going to hunt them. Hard to say.

Elephants are pretty peaceable by nature (unless in heat). It's us humans that create the issue of rogue elephants.