Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa Education required, gentlemen

Zim just rescinded the ban on cats. I knew it would not last.

I don't why you think it sucks...? Money is necessary for conservation, period. Look at our wildlife conservation programs here in North America: they are funded almost entirely by hunting and fishing licenses, taxes on ammunition and sporting goods, etc. Just because the money comes from domestic wallets doesn't alter the fact that maintaining wild lands and wildlife costs money, and the only people willing to pay for it are hunters and fishermen.

I realize money is necessary for conservation. I pay way more than my fair share for tags or tag chances in 10 or so states every year.

I'm just saying that it sucks that money is the only reason Africans care about not letting elephants, lions, rhinos etc. go extinct. I am sure some exceptions exist, but for the most part Africans, especially those outside of South Africa and Namibia don't give a $hit about conservation.

Why the surprise?? Contrary to popular belief, the American Indian was NOT a conservationist either. Well before us palefaces slaughtered the buffalo, the Northeastern woods Indians nearly completely destroyed furred game and deer from the forests because of their own desire for European trade goods. Why should native Africans be any better????

I'm not surprised, at all. Is that question for me? Did my post convey that I was surprised at how Africans generally don't care about conservation? If it did I didn't mean it to.

Yes, we're on the same page here... you're right, it DOES suck that Africans don't give a rat's ass about wildlife. On the other hand, if I had been born and raised there under the awful conditions most Africans endure, wildlife conservation would probably by pretty low on my personal list as well.

Yep, and I can't blame them.

I've been to quite a few $hit hole countries, and people are way more concerned with surviving and putting food on the table than anything else.

Their culture is different as its no big deal to dump their used engine oil right onto the ground and not think twice...

You might have seen this posted by a couple of folks over on the 'Fire...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/opinion/in-zimbabwe-we-dont-cry-for-lions.html?_r=0


Best article yet I've seen on native attitudes towards wildlife.

It is true everywhere that people are most in favor of conservation when the costs don't accrue to them personally.

I've met people who were losing their crops to elephants at the time. And personally seen the effects of crop failures (in that case drought), it ain't pretty.

Birdwatcher

Let's look at this. Male lions do there breeding between ages 3-6 for the most part. A few might hold on a season or two more, but that's it. As they are forced out by younger, stronger males, any cubs are often killed so that the new Alpha male can start his bloodline. This strengthens the and diversifies the bloodline.

What happens to the male lions that are forced out? They don't breed anymore, and they have given their contribution to the propagantion of the species, so what to they do?

They sleep, they eat, but they no longer are breeding. Eventually, they will get old and weak, they will get injured fighting, and eventually the hyenas will bring them down and eat them alive.

I want all the Greenies out there to contemplate that - eaten alive.

Now then, tell me how taking a 6+ year old lionthreatens the survival of the species? Their job is done and the next generation is doing the breeding. Taking those lions instead of waiting for nature to take them has no effect on the species.

You are wasting your time with him Jeff. He continues to cite fixed studies on lion hunting, stating that hunting in Zambia and Tanzania negatively affected lion populations, again not discerning between sport hunting and indiscriminate killing by the locals to control them.

Great article:

So let me lay out some facts for you...


- Without hunting lions have no economic value for the local people or ranchers. In fact they're a giant menacing pain in the ass since they tend to eat the locals' cattle as well as occasionally the locals themselves. There's really no upside at all to having an apex predator like a lion prowling around your village or ranch; only bad things can happen. Yes, there are photo-safaris but unless you're near tourist areas and are set up for it, there's not much money in this. So the reality is that without any economic incentive to keep the lions around, the locals end up driving them out or just poisoning them.

And here to paraphrase Jack Dunphy the alternative to allowing hunting is not perfection - it's the alternative. With no hunting at all you won't get a Lion King-Simba happy existence on the savannah, instead you'll see a slow gradual extinction of lions as a species due to loss of habitat and eradication by humans. Lions will not die out from hunting - rather it will be because none of the locals want them around or care enough about their continued existence to protect them. Ultimately the lions will live or die by whether the local people allow lions to coexist with them.


But with controlled trophy hunting, the lions suddenly do have economic value. Because the hunting is so strictly limited hunters will pay a lot to be allowed to take a trophy - $30,000 and up. And $30,000 goes a long way in Africa. This money is split between the land owner, the local villagers, and the government. For the land owner and villagers this makes up on any losses they might have suffered from the lions, and it also means that they have a strong incentive to protect and maintain the local lions e.g. maintaining water pools, not putting up fences, watching for poachers, etc. The money from hunting is a major source of revenue for some remote villages. The revenue to the government helps pay for full-time rangers, park wardens and equipment to protect the lion populations.


- Africa is a huge place. Bigger than most people can really imagine. So to say that lions are endangered is both correct and false. Depending on where you are in Africa lions may be endangered or they may be actually over-populated. Due to their territorial nature both may be true - too many lions in one area but very few in another nearby region. Logistically it's not possible to move lions hundreds of miles away to open areas so you have to manage the population locally. And that means allowing controlled hunting.


- Adult male lions do not die peacefully of old age. They tend to die from injuries sustained in battles with younger males or from starvation from being driven out of their territory. Both of which tend to be unpleasant, lingering deaths. This is the reality of male lion life. Also only a few breeding males are needed in an area to maintain and grow a lion population. So a mature adult male like Cecil who was close to the average life span of a male lion in the wild (10-14 years) is the most expendable member of any lion population.


Zimbabwe has a population of lions estimated around 1,680 and on average 10-40 lions a year are taken through hunting which is approximately 1-2% of the population - less than the natural death rate of adult lions. But the permit fees from each hunted lion make a huge difference to the overall lion population. This isn't just theory - there are empirical results backing this up with elephant populations:


Anti-hunting groups succeeded in getting Kenya to ban all hunting in 1977. Since then, its population of large wild animals has declined between 60 and 70 percent. The country's elephant population declined from 167,000 in 1973 to just 16,000 in 1989. Poaching took its toll on elephants because of their damage to both cropland and people. Today Kenya wildlife officials boast a doubling of the country's elephant population to 32,000, but nearly all are in protected national parks where poaching can be controlled. With only 8 percent of its land set aside as protected areas, it is no wonder that wildlife in general and elephants in particular have trouble finding hospitable habitat.

But in Zimbabwe controlled hunting was allowed and hunting revenues shared through the CAMPFIRE program:

The numbers attest to the program's success. Ten years after the program began, wildlife populations had increased by 50 percent. By 2003, elephant numbers had doubled from 4,000 to 8,000. The gains have not just been for wildlife, however. Between 1989 and 2001, CAMPFIRE generated more than $20 million in direct income, the vast majority of which came from hunting. During that period, the program benefitted an estimated 90,000 households and had a total economic impact of $100 million.

The results go beyond the CAMPFIRE areas. Between 1989 and 2005, Zimbabwe's total elephant population more than doubled from 37,000 to 85,000, with half living outside of national parks. Today, some put the number as high as 100,000, even with trophy hunters such as Parsons around. All of this has occurred with an economy in shambles, regime uncertainty, and mounting socio-political challenges.

- Note that only hunters with proper permits and PH guides are allowed to hunt lions. The PH is responsible for obtaining all the permits and knowing all the local restrictions on hunting and knowing which animals can and can't be legally taken. So Dr. Walter Palmer was completely dependent on the PH and local guide when it came to shooting a lion. So if Cecil was shot illegally, the fault is all on the PH and crew. It's ironic that the person facing the most hate from all this (Palmer) is in fact the one most innocent of any charges of poaching.


So the bottom line is that if you actually care about the survival of lions as a species, you should support controlled trophy hunting. Hunters like Walter Palmer who paid $55,000 for the hunting permit have done far, far more to actually preserve real world lions in Africa than all of the hand-wringing celebrities and any of you reading this post. Ironically the weeping over Cecil and calls to ban all hunting of lions in Africa out of First World emotionalism may end up actually dooming them as a species. But everyone would still get to feel awesomely smug about their love of lions and general moral superiority from the comfort of their armchair .

Let us presume we are both on the side of science and solid data.

Most times when I post stuff on these boards its for general interest.

This "Birdwatcher is against lion hunting" mantra has been a flat puzzle to me from the beginning.

I posted links from the pertinent wildlife researchers indicating that in Zambia the proportion of male lions in hunted populations had fallen to 10% as opposed to an expected 30% of the population, and that an over-take of males in Tanzania was believed to be responsible for a decline in hunted lion populations there.

These are the sort of researchers and research projects that wildlife bag limits are designed around in the first place.

From one of these papers it was pointed out that a major benefit of legal hunting was the formation of privately-owned hunting preserves around the protected public lands, these apparently forming a buffer layer, patrolled by people who benefit directly from hosting hunts, between the wildlife on the preserves and the local populace who might otherwise poach.

I had never seen that mentioned here and posted that too.

Take me to task if you wish on this; having experienced corruption first-hand over there during three-years' residence living at the mud-wall village level, I questioned how much of the hefty trophy fees actually reach the grass roof level as intended.

And I wondered if providing goods and services for 100+ non-hunting eco-tourists for every one safari company-supported hunter (which companies in Zimbabwe apparently buy most of their supplies in South Africa) might actually benefit the locals more than co-opted and mis-directed trophy fees.

In another great link posted over on the 'Fire, THE Richard Leakey hisself (I got to hear him speak once), who would probably otherwise like the lion researchers be labelled an "antihunting POS" here, emphatically states otherwise.

Apparently the tourist lodges and such ain't benefitting the locals, and do create a noxious footprint. Question answered.

Birdwatcher

I apologize for this diversion if it is but it is at least tangentially related to the topic at hand. I'm truly seeking some insight from others here with African experience; I do have some thoughts but by no means have settled into any firm view.

I'll take Ghana as a a example if that's fair. Here is a country with some fifty years plus of independence from European rule. It does have the veneer of Christianity due to the Portugeese slave trade in centuries past and is largely without religious strife at the moment. In spite of that history of slave traders it is largely sympathetic to Christianity claiming a majority, say 75% claiming Christianity on paper. Yet the concept of stewardship (Christianity is the original and true Green Movement in the best sense of the phrase) is mostly completely lost on them.

Those fifty years of independence have Accra looking apocalyptic with scores of half-finished windowless, grey structures apparently abandoned midway through construction. Infrastructure is a maybe with pot holed roads and traffic lights working half time. There are large slums resting on garbage dumps with never quenched smoldering sending plumes of smoke up between dwellings. Water apparently is delivered in the city in liter size plastic bags which are strewn over the landscape and seashore. Garbage is everywhere in the city setting.

It's not that there aren't bright individuals. I know native Ghanian physicians who went to Russian medical schools after first having to learn Russian! Not an easy run-up there.

The vast majority are uneducated as free, public education stops with the ninth grade IIRC and are peddling pineapple, tilapia, pencils or what have you.. Ramshackle huts are everywhere along with the ubiquitous cooking fires much as five hundred years ago. This is even more the rule in-country where feral dogs roam in pack; rusty, banged up vehicles lie in the ditches where they died.

Ghana does have some natural resources such as rubber trees in expansive forests, gold, and raising tilapia commercially is huge for world markets. So there is potential for some wealth.

My question: and I will be deemed racist by some because of it. Is there something about the black race and inherent in their body politic that cripples them so with self rule? Or that never allows them above a very low threshold of modernity? We could look at many examples of this, Zim being perhaps iconic for this, for total collapse on most important measures of the quality of life.

Namibia is an exception--yet--as strong German influence is still present after only twenty some years of independence. The RSA probably too after centuries of Dutch rule but there are many troublesome signs developing in the RSA since independence. But on the whole in Sub Sahara Africa life is difficult, tenuous, and primitive for tha vast majority.

This of course directly affects all wild game as those living the subsistence life style in the bush are concerned with what protein can they next put over the fire or sell without giving a a wit generally of any game population five years down the road.

Why do "black nations" languish so?

Again, please pardon this side road topic.

I guess I didn't finish my thought about the collared lions. If they are out of the breeding cycle, who cares if they are taken by JG from Midland or a pack of wild dogs? At least JG would have contributed something to the conservation and anti poaching. At least JG would have been able to honor the memory of the lion years after he would have otherwise been fertilizer.

Lions don't live to be 70 years old and write memoirs. The recent taking of the 13 year old lion is a joke, that lion is a geezer and Mother Nature would have taken care of him within a year. A 13-14 year old wild lion is rare.

I don't see your posts as an attack on hunting, but some questions you pose the anti's have co-oped and perverted for their gain.

In Africa, everything must pay its own way. Maybe this will help someone out there who has never been to Africa or doesn't understand what dynamics are at play.

1.) Dangerous game and people cannot co-habitat. Lions eat livestock, elephants eat crops. If the wildlife eats the crops and livestock, people starve. People aren't going to starve without a fights, so they will poach (KILL OFF) the dangerous game and eat the edible game they can readily poach.

2.) The population of Africa has exploded. There is a whole lot less of "wild unsettled" land. Too damn many people. As people encroach on the range of wild game, you get #1 above.

3.) Wild, unsettled Africa now largely only exists in National Parks and Game Management Areas (GMAs). Most of these GMSs boarder the national parks. They serve as a buffer between settled areas and the park. You cannot have settlements right up to the edge of the park boundaries without #1 above.

GMAs allow animals to move in and out of the park without immediately getting hammered by the locals for food, and it prevents them from raiding right outside the park for food every night and running back in before dawn for protection.

The GMAs protect the animals and protect the people. Without them, more poaching, less animals. Conservation can carefully control animal populations both in the GMAs and INSIDE the park by setting hunting quotes for the GMAs. Overpopulation of let's say elephants will force some out of the park. Without GMAs, they become crop raiders and get poached by the score. In GMAs, they can be controlled.

Hunting and GMAs also fund the Game Guards and the anti poaching efforts in an effective way.

As to eco tourism and photo's only? It doesn't do much to maintain stabile populations. An area can only sustain so many before the vegetation gets decimated. Especially true of elephants. They can wreck the vegetation of an area when there is drought or overpopulation.

George, aside the fact the WHEEL was unknown in Sub-Saharan Africa until the 1500s and no evidence of a written language (as opposed to pictographs), maybe JJHack will chime in and verify his story about how he built framed wooden windows and doors for his employees' homes to keep not only the weather, but critters out. He left for the US and when he came back six months later, ALL the wood had been stripped from the frames and burned as firewood when all the had to do was walk another twn yards into the Mopane bush and get all the wood they wanted. The operative words here was the "walk ten yards"....

Jorge, that's my exactly my point. Obvious it's s complex thing but I guess the bottom line question would be why as a race are they not more industrious.

Birdwatcher will be along soon...

Dunno.

Jorge's explanation is a simple one that begins with the Germans near the top.

I see people as individuals, race being irrelevant on religious, biological and legal grounds.

In the classroom kids over there were far more mature and wanting to excel in their studies so as to get out of there.

Personalities in the classroom were pretty much the same as over here (extrovert/introvert, class clown etc...), some were smarter than me.

I will say that most University graduates, especially doctors, left to live overseas, for the same reasons we would. When I was there there were more Ghanaian doctors practicing in Germany than there were in Ghana.

Likewise, we Peace Corps teaches were brought in to alleviate a shortage created in part by Ghanaian teachers leaving to teach in Nigeria, the Naira being worth far more than the Cedi. Plus we would live in places most educated professional from there would not.

Actually Germans and Jews. Yeah so next time we need a Missile Program, we'll be sure to go to Zimbabwe to look for Rocket Scientists. How about that wheel and written language, not to mention the ripping of the window frames anecdote.

The Peace Corps was another of those do-good liberal programs that did more harm than good. Here we came to places for us to tell them, hey, if u get educated you can be just like us in the US which of course all it did was create false hopes and allowed the Soviet Block to say "hey if you let us in there we'll take it all from the evil rich Europeans and Americans and give it all to you", you know, like democrats... Oh, and you let those Ghanan doctors work on you... 200,000 years ago we all started the same....