Kruger Park Lion Debate: Animal Rights Activists Are Just Plain Wrong

[NamStay]

At the risk of sounding as if I want to have the last word, let me make a few brief points.

• Beginning at the end of the article by Ms Louw and Ms Pickover (the two representative of the minuscule animal rights bodies I referred to in my article), “Kruger Lions: Who really Cares About Conservation”, and the four questions they asked of me, let me reply as follows:

In my youth I culled game for farmers and game ranchers in the Lowveld and Karoo and later on my own game ranch, Bankfontein, and shot hundreds of wild animals who, in all likelihood, would otherwise have ultimately died of starvation or drought as their numbers had grown beyond what the finite land could sustain.

This contributed to conservation by allowing the remaining animals to survive and, subsequently, propagate and increase in number as opposed to all ultimately dying from lack of food and/or water.

The reasons I stopped hunting in my 70th year and my expulsion by WWF-Southern Africa have been traversed at some length and can be read on my website – www.peterflack.co.za – where they have been for all to see for some months.

• While I will not show point by point why the article by the two women is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst – because it is merely more of the usual emotional animal rightist propaganda rant, which has little or nothing to do with the facts but is designed to stir outrage and emotion – my failure to do so should not be construed as agreeing with anything they have written.
• I would like to return to one point, however, as someone who is passionate about wildlife habitat and wildlife. I have seen over the last 50 years or so how literally thousands of people have bought or converted previously eroded and badly maintained domestic livestock and/or crop farms and, with much time, effort and money, turned them into model extensive commercial and life style game ranches, which are home to a variety of game and wildlife such as birds, insects, reptiles and small predators, which are never hunted, at no cost to the government.
• These ranches cover some 21 million hectares today, which is almost three times the land covered by all national parks and provincial reserves in the country.
• Without the revenue generated by hunting, culling and game capture these properties would not be financially viable and would revert to domestic livestock and/or crops. How do I know? Because I was a game rancher for 20 years.
• Lastly, I have a question for the animal rightists. Why, given the huge amounts of money raised by them each year – a recent US report stated $605-million (over R8-billion) was raised by them in 2017 – have they not bought one hectare of wildlife habitat or one wild animal in this country on which to practise their preservationist policies to demonstrate to the world that it is a viable alternative to the current hugely successful, hunter-based South African and Namibian conservation models?

Source: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/art...-activists-are-just-plain-wrong/#.Wyj5p6czbIV

 

[flatwater bill]

Namstay.................................good points stated by the author...................only a few animals are helped by animal rights groups. Human animals. Those who collect the money from the snowflakes and the nut-jobs do pretty well for themselves. Thanks for the post.....FWB

 

[JPbowhunter]

I have very little interest in hunting lion, you could quarter the cost of a hunt and I really don't know if I'd bother. But I whole heartedly support the industry and if you look at things logically, even poorly so, management makes sense. Antis need the emotion because they have no other leg to stand on to justify their point.

 

[Hank2211]

I have very little interest in hunting lion, you could quarter the cost of a hunt and I really don't know if I'd bother. But I whole heartedly support the industry and if you look at things logically, even poorly so, management makes sense. Antis need the emotion because they have no other leg to stand on to justify their point.

There are no doubt many antis who are in this because they have an emotional attachment to animals, which borders on, if not passes into, the irrational. Many of us can develop emotional attachments to animals - think of the family dog - but we understand that this is, in fact, a dog and not a child.

But a material number of antis, and I would suggest the substantial majority when you're looking at those who actually run PIGs, don't really have any such attachment at all. This is about money. And you raise money by appealing to emotion, so, for example, the HSUS runs TV ads with sad pictures of puppies . . . because the money rolls in.

This is why Flack is right. These groups could spend money to actually preserve habitat, or wildlife, or buying permits to hunt black rhino, but they choose not to, because every dollar spent on animals is a dollar not available to them.

The interesting aspect of this is that these PIGs need hunters. Without Cecil, without Corey Knowlton and his black rhino, and without hunting generally, they would raise far less money than they do now. They need us they way humans need oxygen. They have no real interest in stopping hunting, regardless of what they say.

By the way, for those who might be wondering, a PIG is a public interest group. They used to be called NGOs or non-governmental organizations, but I like PIG better. The connotations of these groups and troughs is, well, entirely apt.

 

[Eric Anderson]

Thank god the antis werent in charge of wildlife preservation in the states 50 years ago. There would be nothing wild bigger than a rabbit. Hunters made sure there would always be deer, beer, turkey, ect.