Hunting Lions in Africa

[Tula]

I read on CNN that Cecil's brother, Jericho, has been confirmed alive....hopefully this is true.

Our family freezer was full of venison, rabbit, fish etc that Dad had caught / hunted. Today, I eat meat and fish, sparely. We're big peanut butter eaters!!!!

 

[JBtheExplorer]

View attachment 84451 unfortunately this stuff goes on all the time and is not much publicized. My family and I were in Africa this year and we "hunted" lions, leopords, and all sorts of animals with our cameras taking great shots

For me, the saddest part of this entire story is when they reported he had the proper permits for hunting, he just hunted a protected animal. In other words, its legal to kill a lion with the proper permits. It's not news to me, but every time I hear it, I cringe. Bad enough that poachers are killing animals daily, but legal killings on top of that? I can't believe it continues to be allowed. So many animal species will be gone in our lifetime. We're already losing species all the time, whether we know about it or not.

It's amazing, in a bad way, how quickly we're destroying the earth. It seems unbelievable that we're ruining it as fast as we are, even impossible.

 

[CometKeith]

Again I don't like what Walter Palmer did one bit but I think the conversation needs to change. Game hunting and the selling of animals is allowed in many African countries. They use the proceeds to help support their conservation efforts in their game parks. The costs of running the parks are very expensive. Some of the things I saw when I was there were the digging of water holes deeper so elephants do not go without water in the hot summer months. Other things were seeing rhinos that had been tranquilized so their horns could be poisened so poachers would not kill them for their horns. I think the international community needs to be willing to help pay for the costs or running the parks so these practices of hunting and selling animals can be eliminated. This all costs money and who is going to pay for it? The lion that was killed was a tragic mistake because he was a celebrity in the park but if it was another lion that was killed it would have gone largely unnoticed. Lions in Africa are not endagered species. Almost 2000 lions have been brought back to the US as trophys in the last 5 years. Also we don't see it but lions can be very dangerous in certain parts. it is not unusual for people to carry rifles for protection. Some of them need to be eliminated for the general safety of the people living in the villages because the habitat of these animals is quickly shrinking and they have no place to go. Instead of the government killiing the unwanted big cats they give licenses for big fees for hunters to do the dirty work.