
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