#poprelics

I mean, why? How? It’s not “hunting” by any traditional sense. The animal isn’t killed for food, or clothing, or functional materials of any kind. It isn’t killed to cull the herd, or put down a dangerous or diseased threat to local fauna. It is killed for one reason: pleasure. Some people, or at least these sentient creatures who wish to pass as “human”, still believe that it is ok or socially acceptable to just snuff out the lives of other creatures and cut off body parts to decorate their homes with. They leave the carcass in the dirt, skin and head or horn or tail or ear in a bag. This type of hunting was virtually unheard of before the mid 19th century, when wealthy and bored Europeans needed something to do in between revolutions. While that may be a forgivable if morbid pastime in the 1800s, we now have football, and Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”. This isn’t something our ancestors did, it’s something the guys we kicked out of our country for taxing our tea used to enjoy a spot of from time to time. Cavemen ate their kills. Hell Jeffrey Dahmer ate his kills. I’m not saying Jeffrey Dahmer is more civilized than a modern trophy hunter, I’m just saying yeah ok, he is.

And it’s “hunting” like Disneyland’s “Thunder Mountain” is riding a train. These massive animals are rousted from their sleep in the middle of the night, blinded by bright lights, and lured with food into an area where a person is hiding within a few meters wielding a device that can kill the largest land mammals on Earth with a single shot.

That’s not a sport, it’s just an outlet for sociopathy.

Trophy hunting also reverses natural selection, since trophy hunters seek out, and often pay huge sums of money to bag the largest creature, or the one with the biggest horns or antlers or tusks. When carried out over many generations, like say with African elephants, this has resulted in a “positive” trait of tuskless elephants, which now make up 30-40% of many elephant populations. Elephants without tusks are more susceptible to death via infighting and inability to defend their young from predators. So it’s not just that these trophy hunters are eliminating prime examples of a species, it is that their actions are transforming the species into a sub-prime version that, while protected from ivory-trophy seekers, makes them much less protected from everything else.

And those sums of cash, which trophy hunters like to trumpet as a valuable conservation tool, aren’t. The vast majority of the cash paid to kill animals goes to the safari companies that sponsor the executions, and fees to the local governments that allow them. On average less than 3% of all monies spent decorating homes with animal parts, goes to any part of local or national conservation efforts.

Trophy hunting is accelerating the extinction of entire species, not preventing it.

I guess I’m just stunned and embarrassed and ashamed that this, this selfish pitiful violent thing, is part of us as a species. It is part of who we are, whether we do it or not our neighbors do, so we all have to own it. This sad useless shortsighted thing that we allow and that some still do, this wasteful murder of the best examples of the largest and rarest creatures to walk the earth, is what it means to be human.

The Last Mouse and Cat on Flickr.

Raptor Moon on Flickr.