Logic and irrelevance.

A critique of the recently published article titled “The Ethics of human -animal relationships and public discourse: a case study of lions bred for their bones.”

• All cats have four legs
• my dog has four legs
• therefore my dog is a cat.

This is a syllogism which I frequently use in argument to expose the logical flaws in the hunting narrative which runs something like this:

• all conservationists wish to preserve wilderness
• hunters wish to preserve some aspects of wilderness so that they can hunt and kill
• therefore hunters are conservationists.

As you can see hunters’ claims to be conservationists are not even logical let alone factual.

Recently a herd of academics associated with Oxford University put out an article on the use of logic methodology, using the lion bone trade as a case study. They take a few of the arguments used to justify captive lion breeding for the lion bone trade as well as some opposing arguments and point to the lack of logic on both sides in seeking to make definite claims where only uncertainty exists.

I was looking forward to read the article because I offer a three- day course at the Karoo Wildlife Centre on animal advocacy with particular reference to lion farming, canned lion hunting and the lion bone trade. I hoped that I might get some useful course material.

I was disappointed.  Twenty-one pages of dense text was enough to give me a headache - and leave me no wiser than before.

I don’t know who this article was aimed at, unless it is a mere academic exercise. I can’t think of anyone in South African conservation who would derive any benefit from reading it.

Calling it a case study with reference to the lion bone trade is a misnomer because the few references to the lion bone trade were superficial - nothing new there - and completely overshadowed by the mentally suffocating mass of academic verbiage.

That would have been bad enough but the article has clearly suffered from a heavy edit to remove or restate anything which could cause the slightest offence to any person living on our planet or within our galaxy.

The result is political correctness run wild leaving a piece which is so bland as to be virtually non-existent.

If you want to learn about logic to improve your ability to see through false claims being made in politics or conservation, then read a book on how to identify flawed logic. I recommend a little book by Professor Thouless titled  ‘Straight and Crooked Thinking’ which is probably out of print, but there are others.

This article will not help you at all. And if you were hoping for some wisdom on the lion bone trade then all you will get is the realisation of how far away from the blood and guts and dust and flies of real conservation is the academic world.
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Don’t waste your time reading this article.
 
 

I refer to a report in the latest newsletter from that excellent conservation source Conservation Action Trust:

https://conservationaction.co.za/media-articles/parliament-slams-kruger-park-for-defying-directive-not-to-sign-agreement-with-neighbours/


​So here we have Kruger National Park conservation officials promoting and facilitating the hunting of Kruger Park animals in the adjacent privately owned conservancies, the association of private nature reserves. (APNR)

The hunting quotas approved by these ‘custodians of our wildlife’ are truly shocking; more than 7000 wild animals including 47 elephants.

And this after Kruger Park officials were expressly forbidden to sign off on this agreement by the Chairman of the Portfolio Committee for Environment Affairs of the South African Parliament, Philemon Mapulane MP.

Giving the finger to Parliament in this manner will surely cause outrage in Parliament.

The response of the defiant conservation bureaucrats has been to lie through their teeth, claiming:

1. they did not know they were doing anything wrong; alternatively
2. if they did, they don’t know what all the fuss is about.

This all follows on from the Colloquium held in Parliament in August last year. I declined to attend that colloquium and published a blog explaining why in which I wrote the following:

Add to all this the fact that the portfolio committee would be unable to change anything even if it wanted to. Conservation structures in South Africa have been utterly and completely captured by the hunting industry and any attempt to crack down on lion farming and canned hunting would be met with a torrent of lobbying and litigation:-
‘You gave us permits to breed lions for hunting and for lion bones’, they would argue, ‘so if you want to close us down we want compensation.’
So in short I regard this workshop is a total waste of time.

Nothing demonstrates the power of the hunters’ stranglehold on conservation better than this - defiantly going ahead and signing off on hunting quotas for over 7000 wild animals in direct contravention of a specific instruction by Parliament not to do it.

I have long been complaining that conservation in South Africa is nothing more or less than an arm of the hunting industry.

20 years ago when I first started campaigning against the hunting industry I felt like a lone voice crying in the wilderness, although I remember Ian Michler was also making a noise about it at the time. But our arguments that captive lion breeding had no conservation value, would sabotage our tourism industry, would lead to an increase in the poaching of wild lions, would stimulate wildlife trafficking and carry huge veterinary risks; were unfashionable.

Now, only 20 years later, a mere scantling of time in the SA government dimension, our arguments have been adopted wholesale by mainstream conservation right up to the 12,000 scientists of the IUCN.

Yet despite the public outrage, the pressure from IUCN, the directions from Parliament and the divisions caused within the hunting fraternity itself, hunting continues to be blindly promoted by what passes muster for conservation in South Africa.

This is why I have started to offer a three day course at my Karoo Wildlife Centre, for animal activists who need and want to be informed on how to tackle the hunting industry effectively. We march with placards; the hunters laugh at us. We expose the horrors of hunting on social media and the lame stream media; the hunters laugh at us. We drag a reluctant IUCN into the fray to support our condemnation; the hunters laugh at us. And now we drag the hunting industry before Parliament; the hunters laugh at us.

I believe that my course, if it is supported by an adequate number of dedicated animal lovers, is the best way to break the stranglehold on conservation enjoyed by the hunting fraternity.