O
Omega
Guest
It is called canned hunting: keeping a young animal to have it shot by rich tourists (trophy hunters) when it is an adult.
The Guardian paid a visit recently to a lion farm in South Africa that has 50 lions.
According to the British newspaper yesterday there are now more lions held in captivity in the country than live wild, and there are more than 160 such farms legally breeding big cats in South Africa.
Tourists pay to pet the cute cubs, the juveniles and fully-grown are kept out of sight. The cubs are taken away from their mothers just an hour after birth and bottle-fed by humans.
Animal welfare experts say breeders remove the cubs from their mother so that the lioness will quickly become fertile again.
The breeders sell the adults, they'll be shot.
The Guardian:
Link to a video (10 minutes) from The Guardian: Lions bred to be shot in South Africa's 'canned hunting' industry
The Guardian journalist Patrick Barkham is not the first that reports about the hunting tourism. Louis Theroux made a documentary (one hour) a while ago.
Here's a scene (6 minutes) from it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDyLNkM-Dgk
I see little difference between pulling the wings from a fly, blowing air into a frog until it explodes, or shooting a tame lion (that has learned as a cub that people can be trusted) - just for fun, just for ego boosting, just because you can.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) incorporated animal cruelty as a diagnostic criterion for Conduct Disorder (CD) and Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD).
I doubt those trophy-hunters will get any psychiatric label.
Too many people think hurting or killing an animal is no big deal, because it's 'just' an animal.
I think our four legged fellow occupants on this planet deserve to be treated with respect. Just because they do not express themselves the way we do does not mean they are things.
Homo sapiens? Homo arrogans.
What's your opinion in this matter? What do you think of hunting just for sports?
The Guardian paid a visit recently to a lion farm in South Africa that has 50 lions.
According to the British newspaper yesterday there are now more lions held in captivity in the country than live wild, and there are more than 160 such farms legally breeding big cats in South Africa.
Tourists pay to pet the cute cubs, the juveniles and fully-grown are kept out of sight. The cubs are taken away from their mothers just an hour after birth and bottle-fed by humans.
Animal welfare experts say breeders remove the cubs from their mother so that the lioness will quickly become fertile again.
The breeders sell the adults, they'll be shot.
The Guardian:
A fully-grown, captive-bred lion is taken from its pen to an enclosed area where it wanders listlessly for some hours before being shot dead by a man with a shotgun, hand-gun or even a crossbow, standing safely on the back of a truck. For he pays anything from £5,000 to £25,000, and it is all completely legal.
(…)
Breeders argue it is better that hunters shoot a captive-bred lion than further endanger the wild populations, but conservationists and animal welfare groups dispute this. Wild populations of lions have declined by 80% in 20 years, so the rise of lion farms and canned hunting has not protected wild lions. In fact, according to Fiona Miles, director of Lionsrock, a big cat sanctuary in South Africa run by the charity Four Paws, it is fuelling it. The lion farms' creation of a market for canned lion hunts puts a clear price-tag on the head of every wild lion, she says; they create a financial incentive for local people, who collude with poachers or turn a blind eye to illegal lion kills. Trophy-hunters who begin with a captive-bred lion may then graduate to the real, wild thing.
Link to a video (10 minutes) from The Guardian: Lions bred to be shot in South Africa's 'canned hunting' industry
The Guardian journalist Patrick Barkham is not the first that reports about the hunting tourism. Louis Theroux made a documentary (one hour) a while ago.
Here's a scene (6 minutes) from it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDyLNkM-Dgk
I see little difference between pulling the wings from a fly, blowing air into a frog until it explodes, or shooting a tame lion (that has learned as a cub that people can be trusted) - just for fun, just for ego boosting, just because you can.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) incorporated animal cruelty as a diagnostic criterion for Conduct Disorder (CD) and Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD).
I doubt those trophy-hunters will get any psychiatric label.
Too many people think hurting or killing an animal is no big deal, because it's 'just' an animal.
I think our four legged fellow occupants on this planet deserve to be treated with respect. Just because they do not express themselves the way we do does not mean they are things.
Homo sapiens? Homo arrogans.
What's your opinion in this matter? What do you think of hunting just for sports?
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