Off Topic Thread too point uh

.ak wrote: »

There's legal hunting of Rhinos? I thought all sub-species were on the endangered lists?

Fairly sure there's no legal hunting/culling of Lions anyway.

you can legally hunt any of the big 5(elephant, lion, rhino, buffalo, leopard) in south africa, in private hunting areas where populations are controlled and managed.

tophy hunting as a Conservation tool has a lot of merits.

personally i'd only kill an animal for food if ever.

.ak wrote: »

To me, to be honest, that sounds like a weak enough merit.

I'd love to see the actual breeding program numbers from these ranches.

But in general, I have no problem with hunting... I do a lot of big game fishing... but I suppose that's quite different. You're fishing for fish that you're allowed to, and where the animal is killed it is eaten afterwards and not wasted.

But the idea of killing something for it's horn, or skin, or head... I just don't get it.

A 2005 paper by Nigel Leader-Williams and colleagues in the Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy asserted that the legalization of white rhinoceros hunting in South Africa motivated private landowners to reintroduce the species onto their lands. As a result, white rhinos increased from fewer than one hundred individuals to more than 11,000.

Leader-Williams's study also showed that trophy hunting in Zimbabwe doubled wildlife areas relative to state protected areas. The implementation of controlled and legalized hunting led to an increase in the area of suitable land available to elephants and other wildlife, which "reversed the problem of habitat loss and helping to maintain a sustained population increase in Zimbabwe’s already large elephant population."

A scientific study in the journal, Biological Conservation, states that trophy hunting is of "major importance to conservation in Africa by creating economic incentives for conservation over vast areas, including areas which may be unsuitable for alternative wildlife-based land uses such as photographic ecotourism."

Financial incentives from trophy hunting effectively more than double the land area that is used for wildlife conservation, relative to what would be conserved relying on national parks alone, according to the study published in Biological Conservation.

Trophy hunting has been considered essential for providing economic incentives to conserve large carnivores according to other research studies in Conservation Biology, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Wildlife Conservation by Sustainable Use, and Animal Conservation.

Organizations that support trophy hunting as a tool for conservation include The National Wildlife Federation, The Wildness Society, The Izzaak Walton League of America, North American Wildlife Foundation, Outdoor Writers Association of America, Ducks Unlimited, The American Forestry Association, Wildlife Legislative Fund of America, Wildlife Management Institute, and The Wildlife Society.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, trophy hunting "provides an economic incentive" for ranchers to continue to breed those species, and that hunting "reduces the threat of the species' extinction".

According to Richard Conniff, Namibia is home to 1,750 of the roughly 5,000 black rhinos surviving in the wild because it allows trophy hunting. Its mountain zebra population has also increased to 27,000 from 1,000 in 1982. Elephants, which are gunned down elsewhere for their ivory, have gone to 20,000 from 15,000 in 1995. Lions, which were on the brink of extinction "from Senegal to Kenya", are increasing in Namibia.

On the contrary, Kenya, which banned trophy hunting in 1977, has seen a 70 percent decline of wild animals according to Laurence Frank, a zoology researcher at the University of California at Berkeley and director of the conservation group Living with Lions. Because the government has no incentive to protect wild animals, effective enforcement on protecting animals has been a disaster according to Frank.

The National Wildlife Federation supports hunting because "under professional regulation, wildlife populations are a renewable natural resource that can safely sustain taking."