1. What motivates you to practice hunting in Africa?
2. When it comes to conservation, how does hunting fit in?
3. What is done with the animals afterwards?
4. What is your relationship to the animal?
5. What can you say about the effectiveness game management?
6. What are the locals opinion on hunting?
7. What would you say to the people against hunting?
1. It is the hunting meca of the World with so much variety. It has that historic and cultural feel, like walking in the footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt, Earnest Hemingway, and many others from that romantic period... At least jut a little bit. It is a new adventure and exciting to plan, embark upon, and experience.
2. It is absolutely vital! Take the elephant for example. in much of Africa, where there are elephants, there are too many and they need to be managed.. Kruger National Park for example is on the tipping point, or beyond, with it's carrying capacity of elephant. There are large areas of Kruger that are mostly wasteland as the elephants have eaten or destroyed the vegetation. They have tried odd but PC practices to control them, such as birth control... Can you imagine getting a condom on this guy?
Now joking aside, they seriously spent millions trying birth control! I believe on the female side though;
But let's discuss elephant in wild places like Zimbabwe, were the US government has banned the importation of trophies from legally hunted elephants in an effort to force the Zim government to do more, or at least provide more information regarding the status of their elephants... This was apparently inspired by the poisoning of a group of elephants in area of Zimbabwe without hunting. Imagine for a moment that you are a villager living there.. You grow corn as a staple of your families diet, it is a subsistence farming endeavor. You have a small family plot that you cultivate by hand, you store the harvested corn in a homemade corn crib on stilts to keep the animals away from it, but you have no way to prevent elephants from destroying your fields or your storage.
The poisoning was initially reported as 300 elephants... I do not believe the US government made any real attempt to confirm this, later reports had it at 130, and more recently half that.. There may be others on here who have the facts, I don't... But I do believe it was an act of reprisal, not poaching.
Field in early stages of being cleared to plant corn.
Now of course some might think they can just go to the local Wal Mart to buy food?
So imagine if you will, this happens in a hunting area such a Zimbabwe C.A.M.P.F.I.R.E. area. The villagers will report a problem with elephants. A professional hunter will be contacted and requested to shoot one elephant out of the herd. That will most likely cause the rest to "get out of Dodge" so to speak. elephants are intelligent! They will get the point. and the meat will go to feed the people effected by the crop raiders. Additionally, hunter dollars go into a pool to reimburse the local populace for damages from wildlife... AND the locals get the meat from the hunted animals, this is in addition to the problem animal control ones I spoke of above, in fact with enough hunting in the area, it is unlikely there will be problem animals in the first place as the animals learn to be wary of humans. There is also employment for the local villagers in the hunting operations... And the hunting dollars go to pay for drilling wells, building and maintaining schools, building, maintaining and stocking medical clinics. In other words, the locals want hunters there!
So this all creates value to the wildlife. Most importantly the wildlife has value to the local community. This helps to get them to tolerate living with these large, dangerous and destructive animals. Additionally the hunting outfitters pay for an provide anti poaching patrols.
To be continued....
