Hunting - profit or loss for SA?

By

Chris Mercer.

Hunting protagonists would have you believe that hunting benefits South Africa by creating jobs and bringing in money.

For example, the Dept of Environment recently told the media:

‘In 2012, the income generated by trophy hunting from fees and daily rates was about R807 million.’

It astounds me how uncritically African governments accept that hunting is an economic and employment benefit to the country.

Would you be stupid enough to buy a company without seeing the whole Balance Sheet?  Would you blindly accept the profits without taking losses in to account?

The claim that hunters create jobs and income requires us to assume that all the hunting farms were vacant land before being used for hunting.

That is simply not true.   All those ten thousand hunting farms in SA used to provide jobs for workers to produce crops and livestock. All those farms used to provide food for the nation. Now they produce living targets for the hunting industry. Is this progress?

Let us take the wool industry, for example.

We know that the amount of wool produced in SA over the last 20 years has declined by 50 000 000 kg. (Fifty million kilograms)

Let’s break that figure down. Taking an average flock of a 1000 ewes, that means a loss of 12,500 farms. Notice how that correlates to the increase in game hunting farms to more than ten thousand.  Each unit could give 4000 kg of wool a year and employ three workers.

So converting to game farming (hunting) has resulted in the loss of more than 37,000 jobs in the wool industry.  Some of these would have gone to the game industry but not all - the skill set is different. Many of the so- called game or holiday farms do not have any employees and are only used for a weekend get away, and for hunting.

So the hunting industry has caused severe losses to the wool industry.

The loss of crop farms to hunting would be even greater in terms of food supply, upstream and downstream benefits to the agricultural economy – and to jobs for farm labour.  The cattle industry has also suffered.  The number of farmers on the land has declined drastically, while farm labour is now a paltry one third of the one and a half million farm workers who used to be employed. 

Is this progress?

Is it not time for the Department of Agriculture to produce a proper Balance Sheet on hunting?  Measure accurately the losses and expenses flowing from the change in land use, and then we can test the veracity of the extravagant claims on jobs and benefits made by hunters.

Livestock was, and is, subject to humane slaughter regulations, whereas hunting is a toxic industry whose whole business model is routine cruelty to helpless animals. 

Is this progress?

  

SA CONSERVATION – THE MORALS OF AN AL QUAEDA TERROR CELL

Set aside the emotion and reconsider canned lion hunting, the SA government has asked.

http://citizen.co.za/210483/canned-hunting-is-legitimate/

The SA Department of Environment stated at a media briefing on 12th July that canned lion hunting was ‘legitimate’ if you ‘set aside the emotion’.

Conservation bureaucrats proudly informed the Press how much money the industry and government was making out of turning live animals into dead ones.   Not a trace of shame for the failure of protection that those figures prove.

The Department clings to the fiction that lion farming in SA is not adversely impacting the 3000 or so ‘wild’ lions in SA game reserves.  It ignores the thriving trade in lion cubs, where wild lions in neighbouring territories are poached in order to capture the cubs which are smuggled across the border for sale to unscrupulous lion farmers.

Presumably activities like this which fall outside the permit system do not exist, and who cares if lions ‘in a wider scale’ i.e. a ‘broader African context’ are wiped out to feed the SA lion farmers with fresh stock.

Few people realise that SA Conservation authorities have divested themselves of most responsibility for protecting our wildlife.   Citing the Convention on Biodiversity, and NEMA, they’ll tell you that they are merely required to count numbers of different species.  They’ll confess that they have no interest in, or mandate for, wildlife protection beyond maintaining species numbers.  Animal welfare is outside their mandate, and anyway the Department has formally ceded all control over hunting methods to the very people who are killing our wildlife daily – the ‘recognised hunting associations’. (See Norms and Standards for Hunting).

So if they admit they are not required to protect wildlife, then what on earth are SA conservation structures spending our tax moneys on?

The answer is: sustainable use i.e. an internationally sanctioned licence to kill and abuse wildlife.

What is ‘sustainable use? Answer: a euphemism for hunting. So, we challenge you to ‘set aside the emotion’ and take five minutes to look at this video, which shows you just what your tax money is being spent on promoting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcuDILOo6x4

As you can see, sustainable use is to conservation what pornography is to art.  Sadistic, vicious cruelty to helpless animals on an industrial scale is official SA government policy for wildlife.

But it is ‘legitimate’ because DEA ‘sets aside the emotion’ and focuses on the money.

Do these ‘conservationists’ not realize that if we set aside our emotions, everything harmful becomes ‘legitimate’.  The Holocaust would be ‘legitimate’.  Child labour and human trafficking would become ‘legitimate’. An Al Quaeda terror cell would be ‘legitimate.’

When we set aside our emotions, we set aside our ethics and moral standards. Emotions – our intuitive response to decide what is good or bad - are the very basis of civilization. Our emotions are what separate civilised people from ignorant savages. The emotion of compassion is what civilization is all about.

On its own admission, SA Conservation policy on canned hunting is based on the morals of an Al Quaeda terror cell. 

Call to Action:

Please write to SA Government departments and CITES demanding a change in policy to protect and not abuse wildlife.

http://www.cannedlion.org/global-march.html

If you were under the naive impression that CITES was anything but a massive waste of money, then read this and weep.

An excellent exposition of how and why CITES is so utterly useless.

A lengthy, technical piece by an independent legal researcher, but well worth the time to read.

No wonder the number of endangered species grows by the day.

http://www.slideshare.net/ChrisMercer1/cites-a-model-of-bureaucratic-ineffectiveness

The failure of South African mainstream media – and why we need Australia's help.

What on earth is the Italian Senate doing debating whether to ban the import of lion trophies?  Surely protecting our wildlife heritage is our responsibility, not that of foreign media and foreign lawmakers?

Parliamentary motions to protect SA lions by banning the import of African lion trophies are pending in Australia, UK, Italy, and the EU Secretariat.  In SA it was left to a minority party, the IFP, to file a motion to ban canned hunting. 

Why is our media coverage of conservation issues so poor in SA?  Why are journalists generally so ignorant of conservation matters?  Rather than investing time and effort to really research and get their minds around wildlife matters, uninterested  journalists are content to publish quotes from “recognised” authorities and NGO’s.  The result is that mainstream media becomes lamestream media – a mouthpiece for government and hunting industry propaganda.
In turn, the result of that is a Parliament that is deceived into believing that our wildlife heritage is safe and in good hands. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And when they are not peddling misinformation from complacent authorities or special interests, the SA media simply misses the boat completely.

 On March 15th 2014 a global march for lions took place in 62 cities around the world.  This international service delivery protest against the institutionalised cruelty to wildlife which is SA conservation gained little traction in SA.  This just happened to be the biggest protest worldwide for animals that has ever been organised.  Newspapers around the world covered the marches, in graphic detail.    

A press conference organised in Cape Town on the eve of the march failed to attract a single reporter. Shame on you all, SA journalists.  SATV was there, but produced such a vague piece that no one even knew who was marching or why.

Now we see major action being taken in foreign countries to protect African wildlife.  Look at these articles in the Australian media:-
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/south-east/berwick-mps-petition-aims-to-stop-importation-of-slaughtered-south-african-animals/story-fngnvmhm-1226977417631?nk=c004f2741008afbf15ef9bd0049123e7

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-04/push-to-ban-australians-from-canned-hunts/5572158

Why is the foreign media so much more concerned about protecting SA wildlife than the South African media?

Why are foreign Parliaments so much more advanced in taking action to protect our lions than our own Parliament, which has done nothing at all to ban canned lion hunting? 

Why are we getting emails from 8 and 10 year old children in Melbourne, Australia asking us how they can help save SA lions?   Where are the South African children who want to help? 

Could it be that they don’t even know there is such a thing as canned hunting, because of the failure of journalism in SA?   Why do we allow  people like Melissa Bachman and Kendall Jones to come to South Africa to shoot arrows into tame lions?  How can the SA press be silent on this issue? 

Ben Trovato is the exception, with his witty article:

http://bentrovatowhippingboy.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/an-open-letter-to-kendall-jones-femme-fatale-of-the-african-jungle/

Will South African journalists and law makers do something about an industry that is reviled all over the world or will they, as usual, leave it to other countries to do it for us.