…hunting clubs are free to regulate themselves, to decide for themselves what is ethical. And their committee decision have the force of law. The very industry which has so ill-treated wild animals has been given the power to decide how wild animals should be treated. Like giving paedophiles the right to decide what they can do to children…

USA TROPHY HUNTERS IN AFRICA – MONSTERS OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION

They call themselves conservationists. But all they conserve are their sordid commercial interests and their sick hunting culture.

Spreading out like a deadly cancer from their HQ at Safari Club International, these insidious weapons of mass destruction infect the vulnerable third world conservation structures in Africa.

The strategy of all Big Business is to seize control of their own regulatory authorities, and Big Hunting is no exception. Using stalking horses like WWF, they take over and paralyse conservation authorities in Africa, perverting conservation policies to their own brutal ends.

This evil cult – for that is what it is when stripped of its propaganda whitewash – already controls the Internation Conservation organisations like CITES and IUCN. Let’s see how:

CITES:

CITES lists all big cats as Appendix I – except lions, who can be freely hunted under Appendix II. Why are lions excluded from Appendix 1 protection, when everyone knows that their numbers have declined by about 80% in the last five decades and that lions are clearly headed for regional extinction?

Answer: because the hunting industry lobbies, campaigns and threatens when necessary , to keep lions huntable.

Compare lions with jaguars. There are twice as many jaguars in central American jungles as there are lions in the whole of Africa.

Logically, lions should be listed as Appendix I, and jaguars left huntable under Appendix II.

But U.S. hunters have no interest in jaguars. Who wants to suffer the discomfort of struggling through foetid jungles, being bitten by leeches and mosquitos, in order to hunt jaguars? No one, it seems. So Big Hunting is quite happy to see jaguars placed on Appendix I.

Lions are a different commercial proposition altogether. Every US hunter wants to enjoy the pampered luxury of 5 star lodges in the healthy African savannah. So lions will go extinct because as long as there is a lion left to kill in Africa, Big Hunting will keep lions from being listed as Appendix I.

To hell with the numbers and to hell with conservation.

IUCN:

This is the organisation that has contributed so significantly to the decline of wild lions by adopting the hunting industry’s policy of sustainable use. This made real conservation – i.e. the preservation of natural funcioning eco-systems, irrelevant.

And when the EU was considering whether to require import permits for, inter alia, lion trophies, Dr. Rosie Cooney and the whole IUCN sustainable use gang lobbied furiously to prevent it, arguing that this would “inconvenience” the hunting industry.

TANZANIA:

Tanzanian lions are being hammered by US trophy hunters. When Dr. Luke Hunter of Panthera published research showed that the trophy hunting of lions was adversely impacting the survival of lions in Tanzania, his research permit was suddenly withdrawn. Similarly when Dr. Bernard Kissui was due to give his presentation to the Tourism Authority of Tanzania at Arusha recently, he let it be known that his talk would also refer to the damage being done to wild lions by trophy hunting. Shortly before he was due to talk, he received a threatening phone call, and felt nervous enough to delete all reference to trophy hunting out of his presentation.

Big Hunting brooks no interference!

SOUTH AFRICA:

Having wiped out wildlife populations in S.A. the hunting industry now claims credit for getting tens of thousands of farmers to stop producing food for the nation and turn to game farming in order to creat a ghastly parody of conservation – wildlife as alternative livestock. They kill off the wildlife, then bring back the lost numbers by taking the ‘wild’ out of wildlife – and have the gall to describe their obscene substitute as ‘conservation.’

For example, look at the TOPS (Threatened or Protected Species) regulations in SA. Unbelievably, hunting organisations are granted self-government. They can themselves: – ‘define criteria for the hunting of listed threatened or protected species in accordance with the fair chase principle;’

It means that the hunting clubs are free to regulate themselves, to decide for themselves what is ethical. And their committee decision have the force of law. The very industry which has so ill-treated wild animals has been given the power to decide how wild animals should be treated. Like giving paedophiles the right to decide what they can do to children.

The Protection Racket.

To protect the huntiing fraternity, SA government structures are a mouthpiece for hunting propaganda. They’ll tell you ‘canned hunting is illegal.’ They lie.

They’ll tell you that tame lion hunts “take the pressure off wild lion populations” and that if canned lion hunting were banned there would be an increase in wild lions being killed.

They lie. Actually the opposite holds true. Lion farming causes an increase in the poaching of wild lions.
Whistleblowers have come forward in Botswana to relate how, using 4 x 4 vehicles, they have chased down wild lion prides to the point of exhaustion, shot the pride adult lions, and captured the cubs for sale to unscrupulous S.A. lion farmers. The captured cubs are smuggled across S.Africa’s porous borders. Lion farmers need a constant supply of wild lions to prevent in-breeding and captivity depression in their lion stocks.

Besides, CITES scientists realized long ago that allowing captive breeding of predators for their body parts would cause an increase in the poaching of wild animals. That is why CITES decision 14.69 bans tiger farming for their body parts. So, if tiger farming is banned because it would cause the extinction of wild tigers, surely lion farming should be banned for the same reason?

Lion bone trade.
South Africa officially issued permits for the export of 1,300 dead lions from South Africa to China, Lao PDR and Viet Nam in just 5 years from 2008 to 2012 inclusive.

The SA lion skeleton is sold for US$ 1500 to a Laotian syndicate, who sells it on.
In Vietnam a 15 kg skeleton of a lion is mixed with approx. 6 kgs of turtle shell, deer antler and monkey bone and then the boiled down in large pots over a three day period.
This yields approx. 6-7 kg of tiger cake, which is worth US$60,000 – $70,000 in Vietnam.

To promote canned hunting, SA government conservation officials give permits to lion farmers to export lion bones to known wildlife crime syndicates in Asia. They seem blind to the threat of extinction to wild lions caused by the lion bone trade.

Unfortunately for lions, the Asian traditional medicine practitioners regard the bones of wild lions as being more “potent” than those of captive – bred ones. So the law of unintended consequences will apply here: as the existing lion bone trade (a spin-off from canned lion hunting) allows more and more Asians to become invested in the growing trade, so the demand for wild lion bones will grow. Prepare for a poaching frenzy of wild lions every bit as egregious as the existing slaughter of rhino.

So, US Fish and Wildife, what will you do? The case for raising the status of lions to endangered is overwhelming. Do you have the courage to break the stranglehold of the hunting bullies? If you do not, then lions will go extinct in Africa.

Chris Mercer  March 31st 2014

Campaign Against Canned Hunting. http://www.cannedlion.org