What We Need To Learn from Trump’s Overturning Obama’s Ban on Importing Elephant Carcass Trophies
Shown here: Donald Trump, Jr., in one hand, showing off the tail of a elephant he’d just killed in East Africa, in the other, the knife he’s used in dismembering the corpse.
A Zimbabwean emissary to the climate conference in Bonn commented this morning, that until he learned about Trump’s lifting of the Obama-era ban in importing elephant trophies, he was positive that there was nothing further that the current administration in the U.S. could do to horrify him.
I feel for him. We’d all like to believe that pure evil has a limit, and that just maybe it’s been reached.
Sadly there is no evidence whatsoever that we’re anywhere near that limit, if it exists at all.
Craig,
For myself I’ve never liked killing animals, even for food.
Like most Australian farmers I’ve hunted and killed feral pigs, dogs, cats, rabbits, goats, deer and even some kangaroos in years when they over-breed and need culling. It’s a nasty, distasteful duty, but environmentally essential.
I don’t believe I could possibly enjoy killing even a sick or wounded Elephant.
However, it’s no good for animal rights groups to simply throw up their hands in moral indignation a screams of outrage, without understanding the reasoning behind the action taken by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Craig, when will the US stop insisting on a prohibitionist approach to everything ? Doesn’t the failure of such programs over the last hundred years mean anything? obviously not !
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service quite rightly points out that due to corruption and incompetence the current ban isn’t working. Wildlife numbers are decreasing while poachers are multiplying.
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is suggesting a alternative. It believes a a well funded and well organized hunting industry would help preserve animal stocks and provide the necessary investment and incentive to eliminate poaching.
Sadly, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may be right. it really might be a choice of being morally pure and letting these animal become extinct, or compromise to keep the herds alive.
While I sympathize with your sentiment, some times cruelty is a part of responsibility .