Introduction:
For centuries there has been an unspoken war between humans and the other animals that inhabit our planet. The old common themes in this war being fear and food, and more recently trophy and status. In the early days of human evolution, Homo Sapiens early ancestors were fearful of prehistoric lions and tigers eating their young which inevitably led to the evolution to the human species we are now. Humans began hunting and killing animals for food and for sport. Hunting is not the only threat that modern species face. Unfortunately, climate change and the consequences of global warming have had many negative effects on animal populations as well. The population of polar bears is decreasing rapidly because of the melting of the ice in their habitats that is directly because of human-enabled climate change. While humans are not intentionally trying to wipe out polar bear populations, the consequences of climate change are predicted to make polar bears extinct by the end of the century. Another species that is suffering due to climate change is green sea turtles. These turtles are very sensitive to temperature changes at all of their life stages and because the temperature of our Earth’s oceans are changing consistently because of climate change these turtle populations are decreasing rapidly. While climate change is an important factor changing the species makeup of our planet, direct human killing of animal populations has also taken a tremendous toll on some of the Earth’s most beloved creatures. There are many animal populations that suffer tremendously at the hands of human’s hunting and poaching. Gut-wrenching images and stories have given the term “hunting” a very negative connotation for most people in our modern society. However, when hunting is done in the right and legal way it can be beneficial for both human and animal populations in both an economic and conservational sense.
The Long History of Hunting and Poaching
The practice of hunting and killing animals is not a recent phenomenon, humans have been hunting since the beginning of time. The very first human beings to walk the planet in Africa lived a “nomadic lifestyle and introduced meat to their diet about 3 million years ago” (https://www.alimentarium.org/en/knowledge/history-hunting). They began eating recently deceased animals before they began hunting after fresh meat on their own. Hunting in the early days of humanity was called “persistence hunting.” During the persistence hunt, antelope “is not shot or speared from a distance, but simply run down in the midday heat. Depending on the specific conditions, hunters of the central Kalahari [would] chase an [antelope] for about two to five hours” (https://www.kalahari-trophy-hunting.com/hunting-definition-history.html). This hunting technique is still used today by hunter-gatherers in the central Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa and is an example of a sustainable hunting technique that doesn’t decimate the animal population and allows the humans to survive off of the meat.
In the Neolithic era, agriculture emerged and livestock farming turned hunting into a secondary practice, only really used in times of food shortages or when farming conditions were difficult. Hunting during this time period was also used as part of “a defensive practice aimed at protecting farmers’ crops from animals that would destroy them” (https://www.alimentarium.org/en/knowledge/history-hunting). Hunting first appeared as a “privilege” or sport during the Antiquity period, right before the Middle Ages. At the time, crops and livestock farming covered most people’s basic dietary needs, but hunting offered a wider selection of meats to the privileged classes. Hunting during the Antiquity period also “had a dual symbolic and social significance: The elites in charge of the armies could demonstrate and prove their abilities as warriors through hunting” (https://www.alimentarium.org/en/knowledge/history-hunting).
Hunting formally became a symbol of status during the Middle Ages, being invited to hunt with the King was one of the court’s great honors. In Europe, “laws were devised to regulate hunting on royal territory. During that period, forest planning and the privileges granted for their use brought about a proliferation of animals which were harmful to the peasants’ crops. Hunting therefore aimed at eliminating such animals in order to protect the plantations” (https://www.alimentarium.org/en/knowledge/history-hunting). From then on, theoretical works were written about wild animals, hunting techniques, as well as recipes for royal banquets. During the Renaissance, hunting became a privilege of nobility and the right to hunt was directly linked to the right to land ownership. During this period, hunting with hounds became a lifestyle choice and once again, “post-hunt banquets were an opportunity to demonstrate social relationships in court” (https://www.alimentarium.org/en/knowledge/history-hunting). During the Renaissance, poaching (which had been relatively well tolerated up until that point) was “now severely punished and non-noble people were formally prohibited from hunting” (https://www.alimentarium.org/en/knowledge/history-hunting). During the discovery of the New World, the aristocratic privilege of hunting was abolished which led to a wave of widespread hunting which unfortunately damaged the forest ecosystems and caused some species to become extinct. This was especially prevalent when Europeans came to the Americas and saw animals they had never seen before such as bison. There are species today that are still suffering because of the widespread hunting during this period.
Under the reign of Napoleon I, hunting permits were introduced which placed limits on when and where hunting could take place. At the time, permits costed around the equivalent of one month’s wages, so hunting once again became a privilege for the well-off social classes. Unfortunately for the animals, the introduction of permits encouraged poaching, either for food or to sell animal parts such as fur or ivory.
In the twenty first century hunting is strictly regulated in most parts of the world. To obtain a permit, “the applicant must sit an exam, and follow other laws such as those governing firearms” (https://www.alimentarium.org/en/knowledge/history-hunting). In modern hunting practices there is also a difference between big game trophy hunting and hunting for food and birds. In many parts of the world, people still use hunting as their main source of obtaining meat and protein in their diets. For example, there are many tribes in Africa who survive off of hunting for antelope and zebra. In Alaska there are groups of people who survive off of eating animals such as elk. However, there is a huge difference in the way society views that type of hunting versus big game trophy hunting. For example, when Europeans and Americans first started visiting Africa on safari, they had never seen animals like giraffes or elephants before and sadly their first instinct was to kill those animals to bring back as “trophies.” In 1909, former United States President Teddy Roosevelt famously went on his own safari to eastern Africa and reportedly shot and killed over 500 wild animals including: seventeen lions, twenty-nine zebras, and eight hippopotami. But even then, President Roosevelt understood the importance of conservation. In one of his journals he wrote, “[My son] and I kept about a dozen trophies for ourselves; otherwise we shot nothing that was not used either as a museum specimen or for meat… the mere size of the bag indicates little as to a man’s prowess as a hunter, and almost nothing as to the interest of value of his achievement” (https://www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9067587/theodore-roosevelt-safari). Even though President Roosevelt understood the importance of conservation, hunts this big by Americans and Europeans decimated animal populations, especially for big name animals like lions.
Hunting Versus Poaching
In many societies and cultures people tend to confuse the concepts of hunting and poaching. The main distinction between these two concepts is that hunting is done legally with proper permits and regulated weaponry, while poaching is hunting without legal permission from whoever controls the land. Put simply, hunters can obtain a permit to hunt and kill a specific animal during a specific period of time on a specific piece of land. Poachers on the other hand, invade private property (potentially government protected wildlife parks) and kill numerous animals with unregulated weapons and no legal documentation of what animals they killed. While many animals in Africa suffer because of poaching, there are two groups of species that arguably suffer the most: elephants and rhinos. These animals are targets for poachers because of their beautiful tusks and horns that are made of ivory, a huge seller on the black market.
Between 1979 and 1987 the African elephant population decreased from 1.3 million to 600,000 individuals, with mortality being centered around the largest adults with the biggest tusks. Today, the African Wildlife Foundation, an international conservation nonprofit, estimates that as many as 35,000 elephants are killed each year in Africa, likely by ivory poachers. One study showed that in the “Ruaha-Rungwa region of south-central Tanzania, the elephant population is estimated to have fallen from more than 34,000 in 2009 to 8,000 by 2014” (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/elephants-poached-in-botswana). In many countries, especially Asian countries, ivory is a status symbol and has a lot of cultural significance, which makes some ivory purchasers not care about where their ivory is coming from and who is being killed to get that ivory. On top of that, many governments of countries in Africa do not have the money or resources to combat poaching for Ivory. Additionally, ivory poaching is so common in Africa because of how lucrative it is. A pound of ivory can fetch around $1,500 on the black market and one single male elephant can carry up to two hundred fifty pounds worth of ivory which would come out to about $375,000. In many countries in Africa people struggle to keep their families fed and $375,000 would go a long way to end a family’s suffering. The combination of demand for ivory plus how lucrative it is along with the lack of money and resources to stop ivory poaching creates a detrimental effect to elephant populations across Africa.
Besides elephants, two species that have suffered greatly because of poaching are the black and white African rhinoceroses. These majestic and prehistoric looking creatures used to have population numbers in the millions in Africa, but unfortunately because of poaching these animals are on the verge of extinction. Rhinos are very important in African ecosystems, as grazers, they have played a huge role in shaping the African landscape which ultimately benefits other animals and keeps a healthy balance within the ecosystem. Local African people also depend on these beautiful animals for fuel and income. Because rhinos are one of Africa’s “big five,” they are a popular site for tourists and ecotourism is a very important source of income for local people in Africa. The Black rhino is currently critically endangered in Africa because of large-scale poaching “from around 70,000 individuals in 1970 to just 2,410 in 1995 – that’s a dramatic decline of 96% over 20 years” (https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino-info/population-figures/). Thanks to persistent conservation efforts since then, the current population is around 5,500 individuals, however poaching is still their main threat. The number one reason why rhinos are poached is because of their horn which is driven by demand in Vietnam. In Asian culture, “powdered horn is used in traditional [Asian] medicine as a supposed cure for a range of illnesses – from hangovers to fevers and even cancer” (https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/rhinoceros/african_rhinos/). Rhino horn as no proven medical use or power, but still the number of rhinos poached in South Africa alone “has increased by 9,000% since 2007” (https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/rhinoceros/african_rhinos/) because rhino horn, like an elephant’s ivory, is a status symbol in Vietnamese culture. Poaching gangs in Africa have been found to use increasingly sophisticated methods including helicopters and night vision equipment to track rhinos stealthily even in protected areas of land. This means that African governments and conservationists need to match this level of sophistication in order to tackle the problem, which is unfortunately unrealistic because of the lack of money these groups and governments have. There is no simple solution to tackling the problem of poaching for elephants or rhinos, but perhaps if more people became well versed in this major issue threatening these majestic species, more money and attention could be brought to end the suffering of these animals.
Trophy Hunting: Canned Versus Humane
In the summer of 2015, the world was enraged to learn that a beloved lion named Cecil was killed by an American dentist named Walter Palmer in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. The thirteen-year-old black maned lion was shot with a bow and arrow and then tracked for eleven hours and inevitably was shot and killed. The news of the lion’s death spread almost instantly across the globe as Cecil was a regular favorite of visitors of the park. Late-night talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel even cried and discussed the killing on his show and asked his viewers to donate to the research group that had installed a radio collar on Cecil and had been observing him for years. This killing sparked a large debate across the world about the ethics behind hunting and killing big game animals in Africa. Palmer is said to have paid $54,000 to kill the animal, making the hunt legal in Zimbabwe, however, after so much public outcry many countries changed their laws on the import of lion trophies. Both Australia and France flat out banned hunters from taking lion trophies across their borders. The United States, the biggest importer of lion trophies, added new protections for lions under the Endangered Species Act: “hunters now can’t bring back their trophies unless the animal came from a country that uses hunt fees to bolster lion conservation” (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/cecil-african-lion-anniversary-death-trophy-hunting-zimbabwe). On top of that, more than forty airlines – including American Airlines, British Airways, Delta, and JetBlue – banned the transportation of trophies of the big five species (lions, rhinos, elephants, leopards, and Cape buffalo). Although the killing of these animals feels inhumane and disgusting when people first hear about them, legal hunts are arguably good for the conservation of these animals. What most people do not understand is that most of the large sum of money that people like Walter Palmer pay to legally and “humanely” shoot an animal like a lion goes right back into conserving the species and maintaining the economy in the respective countries which in turn helps with conservation. Additionally, most of the meat from these animals does not go to waste and is given to people in African villages, a practice that does not happen when an animal is poached. In a hunt like the one Palmer took place in, hunters spend hours tracking and finding the animal they paid thousands of dollars to kill in a vast land space where they could very well find nothing. Canned hunting on the other hand is a very different story.
Canned hunting is the very inhumane practice of killing animals that have been raised in captivity. The term first came to public attention in 1997 because of a TV documentary created by the broadcaster, Roger Cook. Another documentary came out in 2015 called Blood Lions which also brought awareness to the horrific practice of canned hunting. The documentary shows how there are farms and ranches in South Africa where animals like lions are born and raised and then released into a patch of land barely bigger than those in zoos and safari parks but small enough where they can be easily found and not escape. Hunters pay thousands of dollars to go through a catalogue and pick out a specific animal they want to kill and then they go out and shoot the animal in a short amount of time, taking away every aspect of the hunt that people like Walter Palmer pay for. In South Africa there are/were twenty-four lion hunting facilities with an estimated 637 lions from 2016-17, and there are around 300 centers where the lions are bred just to be killed. Unfortunately, lions are not the only animal that is killed in this disgusting way. Cheetahs, leopards, tigers (not native to South Africa), pumas (not native to South Africa), and jaguars (not native to South Africa) are all also bred to be slaughtered (https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/the-truth-about-canned-hunting-what-is-it-and-how-is-it-regulated/). Canned hunting farms can also be found in the United States where people pay to hunt native species such as white-tailed deer and wild hogs and even non-native species such as scimitar-horned oryx and even kangaroos. This type of hunting is barely regulated and most of the money made goes into maintaining the canned hunting facility instead of conservation. While regular trophy hunting gets more news time and attention, the real problem of canned hunting flies more under the radar even though it’s a thousand times more wrong and inhumane.
Conclusions
As an avid animal lover and conservationist, the idea of shooting and killing animals never made much sense to me as well as many people in the general public. However, growing up in Texas taught me a lot about hunting and its long history. I remember learning about Native Americans in lower school and how when they would hunt bison, they would use every single part of the animal but when the Europeans came these animals were murdered senselessly and wastefully in huge numbers. The main lesson I took away from those stories was the idea of respect when it came to animals and what they could give us as humans.
Even as an avid animal lover I respect and understand hunters who kill wild animals for food and use every part of the animal possible. The concepts I always struggled to understand were poaching and trophy hunting. I was fortunate enough to go on my dream safari in Africa the summer after my senior year of high school and I took the opportunity to talk to our safari guide, who was born and raised in Kenya, to learn more about these two concepts. I learned that poaching is indeed horrific and severely frowned upon but happens because of lack of economic opportunities for people in Africa and these people are ultimately forced to get involved in poaching only for financial reasons. Trophy hunting on the other hand is not as horrific as I had originally thought. I was taught that most hunts are humane in the sense that both the animal and the human have an equal chance, many people fly all the way to Africa and spend thousands of dollars to search for days and never find the animal they were looking for and that money still goes back into that country’s economy as well as conservation. If the hunter gets lucky and finds the animal he or she is looking for, all of the meat from the animal goes to feed villages who are in desperate need of food. However, canned hunting is still incredibly inhumane and wrong. There is no possible way to justify breeding animals such as lions just to be slaughtered for trophies in an unfair fight where the animal does not stand a chance. Unfortunately, many people do not understand the difference between fair trophy hunting and canned trophy hunting or that canned hunting even exists. The most viable solution for animal conservation is to ban canned hunting but continue legal trophy hunts for the sake of the economy as well as animal conservation.
Tackling the complicated problems of poaching and hunting will not be easy and results will not happen overnight. The only way these animal population numbers will grow is through lots of money and time put in by African governments. Unfortunately, this is not even the biggest problem the animals on our planet face. Every single day populations of species are being affected by global climate change on top of hunting and killing. Our beautiful and bountiful planet is under siege because of humans and the only possible way to slow it down is through awareness, habit changes, and law changes. It is important that people understand the gravity of the situation the animals on our planet face and hopefully increased awareness will enact change.
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