I used to be full on against hunting. I
didn't understand the concept of hunting for an animal or hunting to
eat something when you could just go to the store and buy the damned
thing. Then I started reading about hunting and hunters years ago and
it changed my mind. Yeah, there are people that hunt illegally and
poach which makes people think that hunting should flat out be
illegal. Look. If some folks did something so bad that everyone
should stop doing it I would remove all cars from the road and if I
couldn't do that you would have to lock your phone in the trunk when
you got behind the wheel.
I should also point out that I do not
hunt. I have never hunted. I have no desire to hunt and fear a time
in my life where I have to track and kill and then properly cook
something I have hunted. I assure you that if you gave me a cow and
told me to make a burger I would die from some disease that we
thought no longer existed. “How the fuck he get rinderpest?!” I
eat meat regular and not always from places that talk about about
humane the animals are treated. Know why? Shit's expensive and I
don't know if the places are even straight up honest about their
practices. The only way I could be 100% sure is if I was hunting and
eating the animals myself. “But what about people who hunt not to
eat but just to kill?!” Good question, stranger.
There are multiple reasons why people
hunt. I used to say it was just to kill something because someone is a
fucking psychopath and since they can not kill a human for fun
(yet...) they go and shoot animals. Turns out that there are some
people that kill animals and eat them. You can get hundreds of pounds
of food from some animals which is fucking nuts to me. Nuts in a good
way. I had a deer burger a couple years ago and saw where it came
from and everything. Shit was good. Tasted different than a beef
burger and I didn't have that same heaviness I normally get known as
The Itis. People who hunt and eat animals can't just grab their gun,
find an animal, and kill it. You need permits also known as tags.
States have their own laws regarding tags so you can't walk out with
twenty dead deer and bears. You get a license to hunt and it is
regulated. Are there people that get around this? Of course! Humans
are terrible. But there is regulation. I did not know this when I was
still on board the hate train. They also hunt because they don't want
to take part of factory farming and all that other shit I am super
comfy with.
Some people hunt to control populations
of animals. There is a thing called invasive species. There are spots
in this country where pigs or wild boars are out of fucking control
and they end up ruining crops. There are other animals whose
populations are too high for the area and they can get dangerous
attacking humans. “But this is their land!” Yeah...no. It's ours
now. Deal with it. There are people trying to protect coyotes and
mountain lions as they enter cities until they eat their pets. Then
they are a problem that someone needs to do something about.
There are also trophy hunters also
known as canned hunting. They will go places that are usually closed
in and “hunt” an animal, pose next to it online, and get all of
the backlash for it. The thing that I did not know about trophy
hunting is that in most of the places it happens the huge sums of
money go to the places it takes place at. That's a lot of places in
one sentence. People will pay tens of thousands of dollars to kill an
animal that is old and dangerous. Yeah. Turns out when animals get
old they can't go chasing after the food they could in their youth
and end up attacking our slow ass human bodies. In the US close to
$200 million in federal taxes from hunters are used to wildlife
management programs per year. The most famous case in recent years in
terms of trophy hunting was after Cecil the lion was hunted.
People were outraged! Here in America
people who had only seen lions on TV or zoos were upset that this
dentist had the nerve to kill a well loved animal. A well loved
animal no one knew existed until this shit even happened. The
dentist, Walter Palmer, legally killed the lion. No one likes to talk
about that though. But...he shot it and followed it outside the area
where it was legal for him to hunt and kill Cecil. This all happened
in 2015. In 2013 49 lions were hunted and killed as trophies in
Zimbabwe. “Well, he didn't need to take that photo and pose with
his kill.” Sure. And you didn't need to take that picture of that
delicious burger. While people here flipped their shit over this lion
Zimbabwe gave close to no fucks about it.
One newspaper, The
Chronicle stated “It is not an overstatement that almost 99.99
percent of Zimbabweans didn't know about this animal until Monday.
Now we have just learnt, thanks to the British media, that we had
Africa's most famous lion all along, an icon!” In the New York
Times a Zimbabwean born man named Goodwell Nzou said “In Zimbabwe
we don't cry for lions. In my village, surrounded by wildlife
conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved or granted an
affectionate nickname. We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads,
wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about
African people.” Nothing is ever as clear cut as it seems. Zimbabwe
has lost a lot of money in tourism dollars which now means because a
lion that was hunted and killed has wrecked the lives of people. Less
money from trophy hunters and visitors means that there is no money
for wardens and people who fight poaching which means that poaching
increases.
An associate professor named Robert B.
Weladji in Concordia's Department of Biology and associate researcher
with the Zoo de Granby said “People are very sensitive about
Cecil's death, which was tragic, but it's not so simple. If you let
the higher trophic level of the food chain - top predators like lions
- grow uncontrolled in population, that has a serious effect on the
lower trophic levels, the herbivores. It can be disastrous in terms
of ecosystem functioning. Lions give birth to up to four cubs and
have a shorter gestation length, so they reproduce at a faster rate
than most herbivores of their size, and they don't have natural
predators. That's why legal hunting is not always killing for
killing's sake. It's one way to manage the ecosystem, in this case
the Bubye Valley Conservancy.”
Then there are poachers that are total
shitbirds that will just hunt and kill things regardless of any form
of laws or decency. These are the people that will get rhino horns
and elephant booty holes because they think it will help get their
dicks hard. Fuck those guys. The problem is that I used to lump them
into the same group of people I mentioned above. To me all the people
that hunted did it just to kill something. I now know this is not
true at all. I learned and changed which is something that people
need to start doing more often. When something happens that causes
outrage online I sit back and gather information. I do not have one
dedicated news source so I check all over the place. There should be
almost nothing in life that you are never gonna change your mind
about. You should also realize why you are so upset about something
and how your actions can affect people. I'm sure when people were
outraged about something and actively fight it to know what effect
you're having. I bet people who figured they were helping in regards
to Cecil never thought about what would happen to the people who
lived where the lion did. I remember years ago reading about one
woman who mentioned how many people she knew that were killed by
lions and other animals and how she did not shed a single tear for
Cecil but sarcastically added she was glad that Westerners felt
better about themselves.
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