Controversy: Timbavati Rhino Hunting (South Africa)

This is an open letter from Timbavati Game Reserve Chairman Tom Hancock regarding the limited hunting of selected rhino in that reserve. A recent controversy erupted when it was ‘discovered’ (although it has proceeded quite openly for years) that amidst the current and alarming rhino poaching crisis in South Africa, white rhinos were being legally hunted in this flagship reserve along the western boundary of Kruger National Park. Accusations flew and social media exploded with vitriol.

1)      Should an individual’s personal revulsion to rhino hunting translate into ban or cessation? I understand someone’s personal aversion to hunting, or hunters, but do these sentiments equate to sound conservation polices? Ironically, some of the most respected and erudite conservationists say no, antipathy to rhino hunting should not translate into bans because properly conducted it is a tool that has served the species very well.

2)      It is clear that illegal horn traders have fronted as ‘legitimate’ clients with shady outfitters and there is no doubt that this ‘loophole’ is a serious threat to the industry and credible conduct. I agree that this is a serious problem, driving any current benefits towards a zero sum outcome.

The letter makes their case quite simply. Draw your own conclusions:

Book Review: "Game Changer- Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa's Wildlife" by Glen Martin.

They tell of the baby elephant that was saved in a specific locale, but they don’t tell of the scores of other elephants in the region that were killed because of crop depredation or land tenure disputes. IFAW’s methods have thus proved effective in saving individual elephants, and for this their strategy is sound. Setting up elephant rescue centres is doable. But the larger mission implied in their work – “saving” Africa’s elephants – remains unfulfilled and may in fact be sabotaged by IFAW’s own work. The lavishing of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the suckling of baby elephants while locals see their maize crops razed and their cattle stomped flat by irrate pachyderms sends the familiar, loud , and dissonant message to rural Africans: too bad about you; this cute little elephant comes first.(Glen Martin, pg 200).

Alongside biology, pecuniary incentives and conservation sociology are ever more important core foundations in wildlife management and in the efforts to conserve Africa’s – and the planets’- wildlife. In Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife, Glen Martin provides a thought provoking analysis of what he describes as the ‘ascendancy of animal rights based conservation policy’ and how it is driving the decline of many of Africa’s great game populations. The apotheosizing of Africa’s mega fauna as ‘untouchable’ has had perverse outcomes in many areas once rich in wildlife. While the reasons for decline in wildlife can stem from poaching, Malthusian population expansion and agrarian conflict, Martin highlights exactly how and why a hands-off legislative approach further compounds these threats and often provides a disincentive for local-level conservation efforts. If the people that live with and share the landscape with wildlife are divorced from conservation decision making processes, denied compensation for wildlife conflicts, edged out of wildlife-based incomes and generally  shut-off from legal and sustainable use they not only lose conservation incentives but often see wildlife as a menace to other land-based livelihoods. Simply put, the old adage of ‘if it pays it stays’, albeit often bandied about a bit casually, often underpins the most effective conservation policy.

The zealotry for bone.

I saw this video posted online some time ago and it got me thinking about the issues of highly selective trophy-based management, as well as the ethics and politics surrounding it. Manipulating wildlife through selection is not new. The act of leaving a certain buck to breed trophy offspring is a common practice and certainly on the ‘lesser-end’ of manipulation; the animal also remains functionally wild. At the more objectionable end is the use of livestock breeding practices to farm fantastically bigger horns and antlers. I personally don’t mind the former but I think we lose something innate to hunting (and to being an honest hunter), when we embark on the latter, when we seek domestic trophies purely for the inch value. This is not the conservation of endangered species through intensive management and domestic captivity; it’s the acquiescence and surrender to the Record Book Religion.

Book Review: "The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance" by Tovar Cerulli

http://www.tovarcerulli.com/

Excerpt from the book: “…I saw beauty in my food. In salad greens, I saw the tiny, delicate leaves that first sprout from earth and seed. In strawberries, I saw the rain falling on Joey’s fields a couple miles down the road, and tasted the sun that warmed and fattened the fruit.

But in those same crop fields, I also saw missing forests and prairies. In tofu, I saw the rifles and shotguns used to plug deer in soybean fields. In grains, I saw the birds, mice, and rabbits sliced by combines. In cabbage, I saw caterpillars killed by insecticides, organic or not. I salad greens, I saw a whitetail cut open and dragged around the perimeter of a farm field, the scent of blood warning other deer not to eat the organic arugula and radicchio destined for upscale restaurants and grocery stores in San Francisco. In Joey’s kale and berries, I saw smoke-bombed [woodchuck] burrows.

Even in the vegetables from our garden –broccoli and green beans, lettuce and snap peas – I saw the wild grasses we uprooted, the earthworms we chopped with our shovels, the beetles I crushed between thumb and forefinger, the woodchucks I shot, and the dairy cows whose manure and carcasses fed the soil. In my own life and in the lives around me – heron and trout, hawk and hare, coyote and deer – I saw that the entire living breathing, eating world was more beautiful and more terrible than I had imagined. Like Richard, I saw that sentient beings fed on sentient beings”. Pgs246/7.

The above passage, for me, is an appropriate précis of the overarching lesson conveyed in Tovar Cerulli’s well written and though provoking book – The Mindful Carnivore. Through the personal narrative of his conversion from vegan to hunter, Cerulli paints a coherent picture of the ethical and biological rationale for this seemingly about-face decision.  What appears to be a transition between incompatible beliefs is shown to be the outcome of the same path to environmental enlightenment.

Towards objective hunting ethics?

“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do”

- Potter Stewart

I embark on writing my thoughts about hunting ethics with some trepidation. Far from being prosaic, there are few discussions surrounding hunting that can be as fierce as those concerning ethics. Often these debates descend into a quagmire of subjectivity and opinion; proponents of widely varying ethical views predictably claim a right to their doctrines and challenge others to disprove their definitions of sound and acceptable conduct. While hunting ethics can be a horribly messy issue with ample room for debate at their margins, there are certain fundamentals that I believe the vast majority can, and do, agree on.

Meat eating anti-hunters: a logical house of cards?

Bear burgers - 'horrible', superior
 or morally indifferent to beef? 

I have, on occasion, had chance to debate the morality of hunting with anti-hunters of the most nonsensical kind (at least to me) – those who will readily tell you that hunting is ‘bad’, all while tucking into a hotdog. I am amazed how the adherents to this argument fail to see that this is a clear invitation to repudiate this house-of-cards logic.


In my humble opinion, the ethics of eating animals is bifurcated insofar as you think it is either indefensible to kill and eat any animal, or you believe that it is in fact morally acceptable to eat meat. If you are an adherent to the former, then any accusation towards hunting as ‘wrong’ or cruel has some philosophical foundation. Of course it is not automatically granted immunity from debate under these conditions. However someone who does not eat meat or use products from dead animals, by virtue of this view, has a certain degree of absolution from the immediate cause of death of food animals (even this though is specious, as most food production results in significant numbers of animal deaths).

What gives me the right?

“What gives you the right to kill a deer”? This was the challenge recently posed to me by a non-hunting friend. She wanted me to explain what gives me, or anyone else, the right to take a life while hunting. Far from being an exhaustive essay on animal rights and the morality of taking an animal’s life, I thought I would try and answer that question from 3 different positions and in a logical and succinct manner.


So what does give me the right to kill an animal and eat it?