Untrained animal advocates/animal rightists are a danger to the animals they wish to protect and a menace to conservation.

There! There is a statement to cause an explosion on social media. But it’s true.


Imagine that you are on trial for your life. You don’t have any money to hire a trained lawyer. But along comes a well-meaning friend and offers to represent you at your trial. You, naturally, want to know if he is qualified. Nope. No qualifications.
You naturally want to know if he has any experience as a trial lawyer. Nope. No experience.
“Well,” you ask:  “how can you possibly help me? Having the best of intentions is meaningless. I need a top-class trial lawyer.”

Substitute animals for yourself, and untrained animal rightists for the well-meaning friend and that is exactly why our wildlife is in such trouble.

The people who wish to protect them haven’t a clue how to go about it effectively. And make no mistake the animals are on trial for their lives. The hunters are the prosecutors and indeed the judges. And to represent them, the animals have …. only you.

So how do you become an effective animal advocate. Well, you have to qualify yourself in that particular area of conservation. In our case that is the plight of the lions caught up in the awful lion farming and canned hunting industry.

You need to be able to mobilise effectively against an entire industry backed up by the best public relations brains in the world. You need to motivate animal lovers to join in the struggle and to become effective advocates themselves. You need to be able to debate the issues intelligently on television or radio and to be able to counter the pro-hunting arguments.

In short you have to become a thought influencer.

How do you do that? Answer: with a great deal of time and effort and commitment.

First, read as much as you can on websites such as ours to educate yourself on the issues so that you can make an intelligent contribution to any debate. Gather useful statistics that you can throw at opponents. Learn the arguments and the counter-arguments. Regulators are obliged by law to publish new regulations for public participation. This is your opportunity to give input. So do your homework and submit input that would be useful and persuasive to a regulator.

Now I’ll spell out some specific actions you should take, illustrated with case studies and examples.

                             ************************
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That is an excerpt from one of the five lectures that make up the course on advocacy. Details here:
 www.cannedlion.org/volunteers.html

​One point of interest to me: all the people who have applied to attend the monthly 3-day courses are from outside SA. What does that say about South African animal lovers?

Oh dear! Oh dear!
How hope springs eternal....

So much hype developing around the forthcoming CITES conference.
The same hype I saw and warned against when the SA Portfolio Committee of Parliament held the Colloquium on lion farming last year. 
And as I predicted, that initiative is now mired in bureaucracy in the form of a 'high level panel' (!!)

​Better read this before you get too excited. Sorry to rain on other peoples' parade yet again...
​
CITES and Sustainable Use

Imagine that you are sitting in a plenary session of CITES in Kuala Lumpur or some other exotic conference venue for international talk shops. You are one of 5000 people in a vast hall, each with your own special interest and agenda. Next to you is sitting a Japanese piano maker.  He has no interest whatever in the conservation of lions. He is merely there to ensure that he can continue to get his hardwood supplies from Indonesia. It is quite impossible for you to speak or be heard. There are just too many people and to many different and often conflicting agendas.

Now you can see why CITES was doomed to fail from the start. CITES is not a conservation body. It is a trade organisation. How on earth did we come to a situation where a trade organisation dictates policy to conservationists around the world? How bizarre!

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-01-17-cites-the-trade-system-that-doesnt-know-that-it-doesnt-know/

So flick through the links below just to see for yourselves what a useless, toothless piece of international bureaucracy CITES is, and why you should not waste your time trying to get this species or that moved from this Appendix to that.

In the real world of wildlife trafficking, CITES is a joke.

Other than CITES, which we can discount, the hunting industry is further protected by the international conservation policy known as sustainable use. This has been adopted by most countries as part of the Convention on Biodiversity.

For the hunting industry the doctrine of ‘wise use’(!) Is an international licence to kill. For the wildlife it is a disaster and you should be campaigning for a brand new conservation paradigm.

http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/cites-and-other-dangerous-illusions
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/a-cry-for-preservation-of-wilderness
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/a-deplorables-view-of-mal-investment-in-conservation
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/pouring-cold-water-on-sustainable-use
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/cites-the-apologists-fight-back
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/several-good-reasons-to-abolish-cites
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/lions-and-treaties
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/cites-a-model-of-bureaucratic-waste
 

​Letter to SA banking institutions
Att: Dept of Corporate Social Responsibility
Re: canned lion hunting
 
We draw your attention to the recent policy decision by Nedbank to withdraw funding from captive lion breeders in SA.  http://m.traveller24.news24.com/Traveller/Explore/Green/major-sa-bank-refuses-to-fund-any-canned-hunting-programmes-20161027
The decision to cut off funding to an industry whose sole purpose is to produce living targets for a depraved hunting fraternity follows a growing trend. Our national Department of Tourism no longer promotes cub petting (a profitable spin off) and major tourism associations in EU like ABTA, publish guidelines for their members to discourage visits for cub petting, and volunteers from paying to pet lion cubs at lion farms posing as ‘wildlife sanctuaries.’
Australia, France and Netherlands have already banned the import of lion trophies, and most major airlines now refuse to transport hunting weapons and wildlife trophies. If you provide funding to lion farms, you should be aware that:

• They have no conservation value
• They impact adversely upon the survival of already reduced wild lion populations all over Africa
• They feed the fraudulent lion bone trade to Asia
• Their whole business model is built upon routine cruelty to lions at all stages of their lives, right from being removed from their mothers unnaturally at birth, to their brutal deaths by bullets or bow and arrow.

Because of the existential threat to wild lion populations throughout Africa, the IUCN recently passed a ground-breaking Motion 009 calling for lion farming and canned hunting to be banned. The considered advice by this pre-eminent global conservation authority, 1,300 organisations and 16,000 conservation scientists, have been treated with contempt by Minister Edna Molewa and her DEA. She gave no reason for doing so, but we know the real reason: regulatory capture.
State capture is all the news currently, but in truth, regulatory capture by powerful industries like hunting has been the norm for decades. Conservation has not been spared. Hunters control conservation structures in SA as completely as if they owned them.
If government is thus paralysed, and the 8000 captive lions in SA are doomed to a life worse than death, then it is up to corporate South Africa and a public that loves wildlife, to take a principled stand.
We urge you to emulate Nedbank’s ethics and  to withdraw funding from lion breeders and all the accessories, the hunting operators, the taxidermists who prefer to live off bloodshed than to find honest employment.
We leave you with some of the views expressed by Australian MPs in the Parliamentary debate which preceded to ban on import of lion trophies.
Sincerely
Chris Mercer
Director, Campaign Against Canned Hunting.
MEMORABLE QUOTES FROM THE DEBATE ON CANNED LION HUNTING IN THE AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENT.
Jason Wood MP:
I spoke in this place in May last year about the appalling practice of canned hunting and today I rise with the knowledge that my words back then are resonating increasingly in our community, in our parliament and around the world. People see this practice, as I do, as cruel and barbaric.
Many believe that hunting of endangered species has economic and conservation benefits for countries involved. This is simply false. A report written by Melbourne economist Roderick Campbell from Economists at Large showed that revenue from trophy hunting represented only two per cent of tourism in Africa and that this tourism revenue is only a small fraction, considering that it is $200 million whereas the economy is $408 billion. Sadly, there are only 7,000 to 8,000 lions left in captivity, 160 of these in privately owned canned hunting reserves.
 
Mr Entsch MP:
It is not often we quote a thrash metal band in this chamber, but Megadeth's song, Countdown to Extinction, highlights the practice perfectly:
Endangered species, caged in fright
Shot in cold blood, no chance to fight
The stage is set, now pay the price.
An ego boost, don't think twice
Technology, the battle's unfair
You pull the hammer without a care
Squeeze the trigger that makes you 'Man'
Pseudo-safari, the hunt is canned
 
Ms Parke MP:
I believe that canned hunting is another example of animal cruelty in which Australia is currently complicit by allowing the importation of hunting trophies. By not acting to prevent the importation of hunting trophies, we are effectively supporting an activity which is both cruel and unethical, a form of barbarism that has a direct impact on endangered species we have committed to protect.
 
Mrs Prentice MP:
Frankly, I call this sport un-Australian. Australians pride themselves on living by the creed of a fair go. Where is the fair go for these animals?
 
Ms Hall MP
Trophy hunters are attracted to a situation where the animal is in an enclosed space and has some level of trust of human beings. I am not a person who supports hunting, but, to my way of thinking, this is quite a brutal and inhumane--
Interjection by an honourable member: Cowardly.
Ms HALL:  - and cowardly attack on defenceless animals.
 
Mr Kelvin Thomson MP;
It is barbaric killing for macabre trophies.  The idea of killing animals for sport is frankly barbaric and medieval but, if people really want to do it, then at least we should have a level playing field. The lions have teeth and claws; so give the hunter an appropriately sized knife and fire up the lions a bit before the contest by not feeding them for a couple of days. That would be fairer.

Cape Town artist Hilda Beukes donated a big oil painting (1,3m high by 90 cm wide) of a lion to raise funds for the Campaign Against Canned lion Hunting (CACH). The painting was put up on the wall of the new Post House restaurant on the R62 in Ladismith, W. Cape. 
​
The coffee shop is popular with tourists and we expected the painting to sell to a Rand rich tourist. Somewhat to our surprise, it was bought by a local Ladismith resident who fell in love with it.
In a flyer that Hilda gave us along with the painting, she relates the story of how the painting came about.

Hilda Beukes writes:
My husband took me to a 'conservancy' in the Free State for my birthday so that I could take photos.

I went out that morning very early on my own just when the sun came up and I was trying to get the attention of two cheetahs in one camp when I caught a slight movement to my right. He was stalking me through the trees. Very eerie feeling…. When he saw that I’ve seen him he casually strolled right up next to me by the fence so close I could touch him and he got up on an old tree stump and just started posing the whole time making eye contact.

I didn’t even want to take photos, we just talked with each other for almost 2 hours then I suppose he got bored. He wasn’t aggressive or threatened by me at all. It was an amazing experience and we really shared a moment.

The encounter just touched my heart and it was something I just couldn’t walk away from ever since.