Most safari outfitters offer a menu of game that clients can choose from. It's like shopping from a catalogue.
Looking down these lists is slightly surreal. Everything is on offer, including porcupine ($250 - is it possible people really hunt these?), warthog ($300), on through a multitude of indistinguishable deer-like species, up to the big ticket items: $8,000 for a hippo, $14,000 for a buffalo, between $25,000 and $35,000 for a male lion, and between $50,000 and $100,000 for a rhino.
It was all quite weird, but I became intrigued by the element of pretence in what was being offered - the outfitters were selling an old-fashioned idea of man-against-nature while secretly working the scenery in the wings. There was a whiff of theme park about the whole thing.
Read more on safari hunting in South Africa here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7329425.stm
And for the third time , I invite IceClass to post a guest post on either Polar Bears, Wildlife Management in Arctic Canada, Problems with NGOs etc.
Personally my kind of a " hero" is in the old movie " the Deer Hunter". Robert de Niro aimes with his high powered rifle to shoot a deer , but when he has the deer in the scope perfectly , he takes away the rifle and lets the deer run away.
Tolstoy was also part of that turgid, idealistic intellectual soup that spawned Stalinism and the Kulak genocide. The left all "cared" for the poor but that did not stop them exporting millions of tonnes of grain to pay for the importation of Stalin's "modernisation" while millions of the people in the countryside who they supposedly "cared" for died of starvation or were murdered as 'saboteurs'.
And despite all the evidence of a century of comprehensive failure, we still have isolated pockets of the "Bimbosphere" flogging the same old bull$hit.
Leo Tolstoy:
Not long ago I had a talk with a retired soldier, a butcher, and he was surprised at my assertion that it was a pity to kill, and said the usual things about it's being ordained. But afterwards he agreed with me: `Especially when they are quiet, tame cattle. They come, poor things! trusting you. It is very pitiful.'
This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that a man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity -- that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself -- and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life
Apologies, read : "War and Peace"
Jennifer has posted this in the first thread:
" "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." Tolstoy via Jim. "
To Russel,
Tolstoy really was a remarkable man , behind such masterpieces such as " Anna Karenina and War and Piece".
He was also a vegetarian. He couldn't bear to eat his animal friends...
Thanks Travis, I really appreciate how you come in, right on cue, with your perfect demonstation of the ignorant urban green, so full of his own $hit that he just can't get the message. You are a perfect demonstration of those people for whom the word "care" does not come with any action attached. You simply "care" about animals as a statement of ideological position.
But it may interest you to learn that for most people the word "care" comes with both an action and an obligation. We "provide care", we "give care" and we "take care". And in farming wildlife we "provide care" that recognises that the alternative to our actions in delivering care is actually indifference.
You claim you 'care' for wildlife but you take no action, and certainly provide no funds that would assist in the delivery of care to wildlife. When millions of kangaroos are enduring a slow, miserable death in drought, you are never there to help and you are never there to minimise the harm done to the landscape while they desperately scavenge for food.
Clearly, the only action word that could be attached to your concept of "care" is the action of omission. You simply "don't care", because you never actually "provide care". But you have somehow managed to steal a temporary monopoly on the word based on its most vague and indeterminant meaning.
>Despite all the evidence his brain rut still dominates with its underlying position that killing by humans is a threat to the long term survival of the species.
And I said this where Mott?? Which species? You're losing it buddy. Get your glasses on and hearing aid in - canned hunting is about killing by humans for profit. Do they hunt guinea pigs and prawns this way? What sort of camo gear do you wear for that? How do you mount a chook's head on your wall?
>And even when it is time for humans to collect on their part of this contract by obtaining meat for their on-going contribution, it is generally done in the most "humane" way possible.
Haven't you mentioned in the past that farm animals are not always killed humanely, as a justification for the cruelty of whaling?
Hey, be my guest and keep spinning sht Mott. It keeps me amused.
Ann > So Russel, what kinda of a looser are you that have to buy sex???
hehe, I do buy it in a way, I am married ;).
Jokes aside, the point I am trying to make is that just because it's not your choice to do certain things is no reason to deny that right to everyone else, unless of course your branch of politics is totalitarianism.
As for your disbelief that I could in any way relate the taking of life to childbirth, I commiserate you on just how disconnected you have become from the cycle of life and nature's ways. I assume then to be consistent with your philosophy, you are fruitarian.
>Those who truly care for animals...They "farm" them."
Pfffttt. LOL!!! CLASSIC! You are too funny!