7,000
we’ve got 6,738 signatures, help us get to 7,000
This girl posts loads of photos of herself with endangered animals that she kills and shows them off on facebook. She is proud that she hunts defenseless wild animals to hang on her wall. This needs to stop now and we need to make a point for other poachers out there!
The YouTube series, titled “Game On,” features Jones and a friend setting out on hunting trips together. The first episode, a poorly-made jaunt to Lake Charles, La. for a crocodile hunt, begins with the line, from Jones’ friend Taylor Altom: “I want to shoot a gator in the face.” The pair travel through the swamp in search of alligators for a weekend with the help of a local hunter.
WARNING: Disturbing Images
(Kendall Jones/YouTube)The episode, which can be seen at this link, ends with Jones shooting an alligator who was caught on a baited hook in the head as her guide holds it up about six inches away from her. She’s careful to thank her Remington, a nod to the show’s sponsor.
(Kendall Jones/YouTube)The American alligator was taken off the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Endangered Species List in 1987, and is actually faring pretty well. But hunting methods like baited hooks have been criticized before as inhumane ways of killing the animals. During alligator hunts, a short wooden peg is usually attached to a line, baited with beef or roadkill and then thrown into the water or tied to a branch to lure the alligator. Because take isn’t allowed after sunset, it’s possible that alligators will have to spend the entire night on a line before they’re shot with a gun or bow and arrow.
When Jones was attacked for hunting big game in Africa, a petition started by a Cape Town native calling on her to be banned from hunting in African states gained over 150,000 signatures. Another petition asked Facebook to remove her grisly hunting photos — which they eventually ended up doing. No word yet on whether YouTube will do the same thing.
Answer: Well, nothing really, yet. They just happen to be three of the more popular
keywords, and I hoped that if I used them in a title I’d tempt more of you to read some of the recent posts that have been overlooked according to this blog’s stats.
Why, for instance, did an article about Kendall Jones’ trophy hunting pictures receive over 22,000 reads here, whereas posts about climate change, elk or mute swans have only been looked at by a few dozen?
I’m trying to figure out what makes people tick.
Maybe there just aren’t enough hunting accidents involving trophy hunters to keep people reading, so here’s one that someone made up:
The Texas cheerleader criticized for posing with endangered species she hunted in Africa on Facebook is now showing her softer side.
Kendall Jones, a cheerleader for Texas Tech, posted photos of herself this week posing with a dog and a baby deer in an effort to show her love for animals.
The college sophomore was the target of widespread criticism and a Facebook petition after she posted photos of herself posing with lions and cheetahs that she had killed while on big game hunting trips in Africa.
Cheerleader Fights Back Against Critics of Her Big Game Hunting
“I hope a lion eats you,” Zane Blackwell wrote on her Facebook wall.
“You are a piece of garbage,” Jackie Yaeger wrote.
Jones defended herself on her Facebook page by saying that she hunted the animals on safaris in Africa that, due to their high cost, actually help fund conservation efforts and protect the animals from poaching.
She declined comment to ABC News.
Today, she posted images of herself with a baby deer and yesterday posted one of herself with her chihuaha, Nemo, which she says is one of 40 dogs she’s rescued.
“Out driving around the ranch today in the Ranger and look who we bumped into! Coyote was within 30 yards but we ran him off. Guess he wanted to celebrate #WhitetailWednesday too!!! #SupportKendall #HuntersCareToo,” she wrote today on a post that included an image of Jones with a baby deer.
Jones says on her page that she has been hunting since she was a child with her father and first hunted in Africa in 2008 at age 13, where she shot a white rhino. She describes shooting an elephant, a buffalo, a lion, a leopard, and a hippo on subsequent African hunts.
Completely by accident, I happened upon on another site and found an angry comment to my recent post entitled, “Kendall Jones, Just another Pretty Psychopath.” The female commenter claimed to be upset by the use of the word “males” as though it were an insult to people of the male persuasion. A great book by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Roots of Human Violence (which I included on my recommended reading list at the back of my book), would not have a title if it were taboo to use the M-word.
But it turns out the reason for her comment was that she was offended as a “feminist hunter.” My grandmother’s two older sisters were suffragettes who marched on Washington D.C. and got themselves arrested for the cause of furthering women’s rights. If it hadn’t been for them and women like them, this commenter still might not have the right to vote. But one thing they didn’t do was hunt.
Although it’s a sure-fire way to get attention, it makes no sense to objectify and exploit one group of oppressed (non-human animals) while championing one’s own cause (feminism). It flies in the face of those who actually do fight for the rights of others. I imagine most animal rights activists, like Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, would agree—the term “feminist hunter” is just another oxymoron.
>While most of these hunts may have been legal, they certainly were not ethical. Many of these hunters claim to be “pro-conservation,” but they clearly are not “pro-animal” as in the end their trophy kill is no less lethal or brutal than poachers who are similarly robbing the planet of their wildlife.<
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-flocken/no-cheers-for-trophy-hunting_b_5551404.html
by Jeff Flocken
This week, a 19-year-old Texas college cheerleader caused a stir when she posted photos online of her posing with imperiled African wildlife that she had hunted. An elephant, a lion, a leopard and a tranquilized white rhino — which she claimed was conveniently in need of being knocked-out for research purposes — all being propped up and posed as dead or unconscious trophies for her photo collection. Not surprisingly, the onslaught of comments overwhelming condemned her bloodthirsty escapades.
This is just the latest in a series of high-profile incidents where a trophy hunter attempted to flaunt their participation in this killing sport — under the unlikely guise of conservation — and it backfired. The King of Spain, Donald Trump’s sons, the CEO of GoDaddy, aspiring TV hunt-show host Melissa Bachman and the winner of the Dallas Safari Club auction to kill one of the last black rhinos in Namibia, are just a few examples of animal killers who found out that they are in the small majority of our population that are willing to tolerate killing charismatic and endangered species for sport.
While most of these hunts may have been legal, they certainly were not ethical. Many of these hunters claim to be “pro-conservation,” but they clearly are not “pro-animal” as in the end their trophy kill is no less lethal or brutal than poachers who are similarly robbing the planet of their wildlife.
In this modern day and age, saying that we have to kill something in order to save it is just no longer acceptable. There are ways to help communities in Africa living among (and, sometimes in conflict with) wildlife, that does not necessitate killing the animals. IFAW and other wildlife conservation organizations and animal protection groups are working with local communities on-the-ground every day find real solutions.
Elephants, great cats, rhinos are all struggling to survive in the face of shrinking habitat and unsustainable exploitation. There are fewer than a half million elephants left in the wild, less than 35,000 lions in Africa, and only around 5,000 black rhinos left. As their populations decrease, they unfortunately become more valuable as a trophy. Setting a price tag on the head of magnificent animals because they are rare and worth more dead than alive is the same philosophy that is driving the insatiable markets behind wildlife poaching.
Luckily the world is finally paying attention to the horrific global wildlife trafficking problem. But how can we be incensed and shocked by other nations illegally killing their wildlife for money in order to survive, when we knowingly watch Americans dump piles of money to go and kill these same animals for mere sport?
It’s easy to see why this young woman and the others like her have stirred up such great emotion. Trophy hunters personify an ugly stereotype of Americans who travel abroad and pay to do whatever they want. This is not how I, as an American, want to be seen or known around the world. Hopefully, the small number of Americans who still revel in this kind of vainglorious exploitation and killing of living things for fun will disappear before all the animals do.
Jeff Flocken is the North American Regional Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
In way, I suppose we could feel sorry for Kendall Jones and people like her. Although
she’s old enough to follow her daddy’s example as a conscienceless trophy hunter, she may too young and inexperienced in the ways of the world to understand how men really see her. Girls like that must not get that males— especially during hunting season, when their blood is up with the urge to kill—don’t really see them as equal hunting partners. They objectify them just as the girls objectify the animals they target.
On the other hand, as a cheerleader in Texas you’d think she’d be used to being leered at, drooled over and thought of only as an object. It would appear that killing animals and taking trophies of her own is a classic case of the mechanism known as transference of victimhood. (Transference of victimhood is a common coping mechanism for those who have been abused themselves or for those who feel their 
over-inflated egos have not been stroked enough.) Men have used this mechanism for as long as the human species has existed, taking out their aggressions on “their” women or anyone else they think they can pick on. Serial killers and other misogynists kill or attack random women as surrogate victims, to compensate for their perceived inadequacies.
Sport hunters, out hoping for a trophy set of antlers to boost their flagging self-esteem, objectify not only the animals, but also the women of a given area. Pretty young girls are seen as “fresh meat” and a beautiful woman is a potential conquest.
In trying to please their daddies, young girls sometimes want to be like them, though most aren’t obsessed with killing every beautiful animal they see and trying to pass it off as “conservation.” Perhaps, after years of intensive counseling, Kendall Jones will grow out of it. Until then, let’s hope she continues to bury her mothering instincts. The last thing this world needs is a brood of trophy-hunter wannabes out trying to impress their murderous mommy.
Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-texas-hunting-facebook-20140702,0,2940032.story
Reuters
July 2, 2014
Kendall Jones, 19, a cheerleader at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, set off a social media storm after she posted a series of photos of animals she killed, smiling in one picture as she hugs a lifeless leopard hanging limply from her arms.
“We remove reported content that promotes poaching of endangered species, the sale of animals for organized fight or content that includes extreme acts of animal abuse,” the company said. It did not provide specific information about the photos removed.
Comre Safaris, a company in South Africa that organizes licensed hunts, said the number of animals killed by Jones fell within a quota set by the country’s wildlife department.
Jones defended her actions, saying in a Facebook post she took inspiration from former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, a hunter and conservationist.
“How can it be possible that someone can love the earth, and take from the earth in the name of conservation? For some folks, they’ll never understand. For the rest of us … we were born that way. God Bless Teddy,” Jones said.
But criticism was heavy, with one post branding the hunts barbaric garnering 20,000 comments. More than 130,000 people signed an online petition asking Facebook to remove Jones’ photos, saying they promoted animal cruelty.
“You can see the thrill in her expression and eyes from these photos that she enjoyed the KILLING of these animals,” read one post.
Many cash-strapped African governments allow a small number of big game animals to be killed each year, using the money from the sale of hunting licenses for conservation.
The hunts are held under international guidelines meant to ensure they do not adversely affect overall species numbers.
Global animal lovers are up in arms over a teenage Texas girl’s love of killing big African game, so much so that they’re even demanding she be banned from posting pictures of herself smiling alongside her trophies online.
Nineteen-year-old Kendall Jones claims photos of dead hippos, elephants, lions and other beasts on Facebook are a testament to her hunting skills and dedication to game preservation.
But critics are appalled by the teen’s beaming social media and are calling Kendall sick and depraved for killing the rare animals and boasting about it online.
Scroll down for video
Conserving by killing? 19-year-old Texas cheerleader Kendall Jones really likes to kill rare animals in Africa. While she pays for her legal hunts, her critics says she’s not the conservationist she claims to be
Loves to hunt: Jones faces criticism over her claims that she’s a conservationist. The Texas Tech cheerleader’s smiling poses alongside dead rare African animals have won her particular ire
An online petition to force Kendall to remove her page because it promotes animal cruelty had gained over 40,000 signatures in just a week.
‘For the sake of all animals,’ reads the petition as it implored animal lovers to sign, ‘especially the animals in the African region… where hunters are going for fun just to kill an animal!’
Jones, whose Facebook indicates she ‘is looking to host a TV show in January 2015,’ maintains she is doing what’s best for the preserves, where there isn’t always space for even threatened species like elephants or lions.
‘Controlling the male lion population is important within large fenced areas like these,’ Jones writes. ‘Funds from a hunt like this goes partially to the government for permits but also to the farm owner as an incentive to keep and raise lions on their property.’
Jones’s photos show her posing with bagged zebras, hugging a dead leopard, and smiling beside elephants she’s killed.
One particular photo, in which she’s posing alongside a an extremely endangered rhinoceros, has her critics especially steaming, but the Texas Tech cheerleader says it was alive and well.
‘The vet drew blood, took DNA samples, took body and head measurements, treated a leg injury and administered antibiotics. I felt very lucky to be part of such a great program and procedure that helps the White Rhino population through conservation,’ she wrote.
Big 5: Jones says her first kill was a rare African white rhino, part of her quest to bag the Big 5 African game animals (rhino, elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard and lion)
and if you haven’t read enough about her yet, here’s a link to all 226 articles that come out today: https://news.google.com/news/story?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&ncl=dud2BbJ6yB4ChAMWM48-BLgzTe7YM
Exposing the Big Game 