-WildCRU’s research is partially funded by the conservation group Panthera and the Dallas Safari Club

Oxford University researchers studying Cecil the lion before he was shot illegally were being funded by pro-hunting companies, it emerged yesterday.

The university’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) had been tracking the famous lion’s movements by satellite since 2008.

Its founder, Professor David Macdonald, said he was ‘horrified’ after Cecil was shot dead in Zimbabwe on July 1.

But WildCRU’s research is partially funded by the conservation group Panthera and the Dallas Safari Club, which support sustainable trophy hunting.

…Dr Luke Hunter, executive vice president of Panthera, claimed that while ‘far too many lions are being shot for sport’, hunting can ‘benefit lions’.

In a blog this year, he said: ‘In Africa, sport hunting is the main revenue earner for huge tracts of wilderness outside national parks. Many such areas are too remote, undeveloped or disease-ridden for the average tourist.

‘Hunting survives because hunters are usually more tolerant of hardship, and they pay extraordinary sums to shoot a male lion. The business requires only a handful of rifle-toting visitors to prosper which, in principle, helps protect those areas.

A spokesman for the Dallas Safari Club said it ‘absolutely’ supported sustainable trophy hunting.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3185524/Oxford-University-research-team-studying-Cecil-lion-funded-pro-hunting-groups.html#ixzz3i10HhIJO
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I’m sure everyone one is shocked the Dallas Safari Club supports sustainable trophy hunting. then there is this.

But Chris Macsween, a trustee of the conservation charity LionAid, said: ‘LionAid does not believe that there is any such thing as ‘sustainable trophy hunting’ of vulnerable and endangered species.

And Macsween and LionAid will never let any amount of facts separate them from their religious beliefs.

Anyway, I thought everyone would enjoy animal rightist and liberal heads exploding across the globe.

Why do they scare you. The fanatics and true believers on humanity’s side are every bit as ruthless as the zombies killing humanity. You just don’t hear about them because they haven’t gone active like the Left has.

This reminds me what Selco has written in his blog – that we leave with nutcases walking around with pleasant masks.

I thought perhaps you had led many lives 🙂 .

We can profile this dude. He is an envirofascist who lives on other people’s money, probably curried favor of Mugabe louts. Track a lion for 9 years and learn what? Give that man a grant!

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0542e184aff04d14a2fc1bc8cf4a2a40/man-who-studied-cecil-lion-9-years-talks-impact

Man who studied Cecil the lion for 9 years talks impact

Other hunters are taking a closer look at a practice that critics say is prone to corruption, fuels demand for black market wildlife products, and can be too hard to enforce on the ground, leaving lions like Cecil to end up as collateral damage.”

This gobbledegook is beyond meaningless. The critics quote themselves when they say “critics say,” trophies from controlled sport hunting never end up on black markets because the hunter never could recoup the $50k or more trophy fee, as opposed to the local villager who doesn’t pay for any license and would sell a lion skin for $10, and…

Ah, this big ball of nonsense is just too hard to unpack. The argument for hunting is based upon facts, the argument against it is based upon illusion. Do you want to see one practical way the tourist hunter’s fees go to prevent poaching?

I hunted problem elephants with Charlton McCallum Safaris a few years ago. No trophy, these were just crop raiders who occasionally killed people who tried to protect their corn fields. Or, really, they just killed people when they felt like it and someone was within reach.

http://www.cmsafaris.com/african-elephant-research/dande-anti-poaching.htm

“In 2010 Charlton McCallum Safaris took over the Dande East (’East’) and the Dande Safari Area (‘DSA’) we soon realized that rampant poaching was something that needed to be dealt with much more effectively. The National Parks staff in the DSA were doing a decent job. However the community scouts in the East, with no incentives and seldom getting paid were an ineffective unit.

The East was considered a depleted area, only good for early season crop raiding elephant bulls from Mozambique. The primary reason for this was that the previous hunting operator only hunted the early season for elephant. Then pulling out for the rest of the year leaving it wide open to uncontrolled poaching.

In 2009 CMS enlisted the help of Dr. Russell Taylor to carry out a ‘capacity study’ in the East. His theoretical results were amazing and he estimated that the area could safely hold 1000 buffalo, 500 kudu, 500 sable etc.

With this in mind as soon as our contract started in 2010, we immediately formed the DANDE ANTI POACHING UNIT (DAPU). To date our full time teams in the East have picked up over 5000 snares and have arrested over 60 poachers (in four years). The game has rebounded strongly which is extremely gratifying. In 2013 we took over Dande North (’North’) once again unifying it with the DSA and discovered the same sad story existed with the North. As of 2014 DAPU now supports both the East and North community scouts. The crux of the matter is that DAPU has now out grown our small company and we simply cannot afford to keep up the financial effort. Expenses and incentives paid out keep increasing, but we have to continue with our anti poaching!”

The safari companies that have their own long term leases hire their own biologists to help them improve the habitat, and they form their own anti-poaching units.

This is how it’s pretty much always been. It’s one reason most if not all African countries can’t protect their own wildlife. Not even SA, with its relatively advanced economy and a million visitors a year to Kruger National Park.

In many countries the safari operators were essentially deputized as game rangers, and they took over those responsibilities in their own areas. What else is Charlton McCallum Safaris doing?

“In 2011 the Dande Safari Area, like the rest of the country, suddenly saw a marked increase in elephant poaching. Our National Parks as keen as they are were under funded, demoralised and often unable to respond to situations due to having only one vehicle, in a deplorable state to patrol the whole area, CMS has taken the burden of:

1. Helping drop and pick up patrols.

2. Supplying the Rangers with rations for patrols.

3. Incentives for successful patrols.

4. Repairing the National Park vehicle and keeping it on the road.

5. Donating diesel monthly to keep the National Parks vehicle running.”

That’s right. They’re keeping the National Parks and Wildlife game scouts operating by doing what the government can’t.

If you want you can go to the link and learn how to sponsor an anti-poaching game scout.

The reason the government opened Problem Animal Control hunting to foreign hunters stemmed from pretty much the same cause. The government couldn’t afford to buy their game scouts ammo. Regular ammo in Africa is ungodly expensive. The price of big bore ammo that can deal with large dangerous game like elephant, hippo (yes, they’re fast, strong, and extremely dangerous and if you don’t believe me get between one and the safety of the river some morning when its returning from grazing), cape buffalo, and lion. You might not think you’d use the same rifle on lion as you would on elephant but they are not easy to kill. At least they’re not easy to kill instantly, and that means it can get to you and kill you before it dies from its wounds.

So while the local game scouts, whether National Parks or government-armed community scouts, might have rifles and a handful of ammo they could never practice with them. So they’d creep into a field at night when the elephants were feeding, shoot in the general direction of the elephant, and run. Thereby making the situation ten times worse.

I beg to differ with neo-neocon in one regard. A rifle doesn’t give the human hunter an edge over big game, particularly very large shock resistant mega fauna as you find in Africa. At best it evens the odds. And then only if you hit a vital area, which on an elephant are two surprisingly small targets. I won’t go into the details as I doubt most are interested. Suffice to say that if you put a bullet into the rest of the elephant, which is vast in comparison, you will only anger it and generally not injure it fatally.

Which is what the game scouts were doing. Which is why they opened this up to people like me. I did get my elephant, and he didn’t move from the spot I shot him. And it wasn’t a trophy hunt so I got nothing out of it except pictures and memories. And good memories they are, as the subsistence farmers who these elephants had nearly ruined (the one I shot was in a group of three bulls, and the other two headed for the horizon) got every bit of meat in recompense. So for the next week or so as we drove around sightseeing and just viewing the wildlife, we’d pass through village after village and outside every hut were racks and racks of my elephant, drying into biltong, the African approximation of beef jerky, to preserve it long term. That is, after the locals ate all the fresh meat they could.

So I fed hundreds of people. And the government took the tusks so the could legally sell it on the ivory market.

I understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, so go to the link and sponsor a game scout if you’re upset over Cecil.

“I’ve never understood the desire to hunt big game. If you’re lacking adventure and a sense of challenge in your life walk into any biker bar and spit in the beer of the biggest man there.”

I agree. You have absolutely no understanding when it comes to the desire to go big game hunting. If you did, you’d know that it has absolutely nothing to do with the juvenile impulses that immediately come to your mind.

Which, I might add, says nothing about me and everything about you.

As is the case with all the other amateur psychoanalysis, where apparently sexually insecure individuals project that big game hunters suffer from the same afflictions.

As Freud said, an umbrella is really just an umbrella. If you look at an umbrella and see a phallus then you’re the one with the problem.

Not me for carrying it. I’m not “compensating” for anything it’s just in case of rain.