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Comment by bradyo | Hacker News Reader

What if we provided the proper funding and... didn't hunt them.

Who's "we"? Who's volunteering to replace the large sums of money wealthy foreigners are willing to pay to shoot a lion?

This also glosses over the whole curropt government thing which prefaced the OPs argument above. Which is why its one of the few feasible means to help protect them.

Corruption or not, having a lucrative reason to leave animal habitats alone and try to keep the animals alive (or even encourage the species to increase in number, which has happened for some species) means that people are more likely to do that and less to despoil the land for other purposes.

It's not just that. If you pay to shoot a lion, it's not going to be a young lion that will sire a lot of children. It will be an old lion that is actually reducing the potential population growth. This is a good thing if we want to increase the number of lions.

Hunting is a necessary evil. In terms of US conservation locally, hunting is fairly highly regulated. It is actually needed in a lot of areas where people go hunting for deer due to natural predators no longer existing. If it wasn't for hunters, there would be large population growths of deer to the point where they begin to kill off other species that rely on the same food sources as well as starve themselves.

In the past, before things were so regulated, it wasn't unusual for populations to be decimated by humans. Passenger Pigeons are now extinct; Deer, Bison, and Elk in certain areas were killed off. Heck, in Ohio, Deer were reintroduced after being decimated, so they would run-a-muck if there was no hunting unless they were to reintroduce wolves to the area (good luck getting people to agree with this).

All of this is due to humans creating imbalances in nature that conservation is now trying to keep in check, and hunting is necessary for certain species which no longer have natural predators, or in the case of lions, to ensure males that will sire more children get a chance to.

Here's some Ohio History on Fauna: https://ocvn.osu.edu/news/ohios-wild-history-frontier-fauna-...

TLDR -- unchecked hunting bad, regulated hunting good

> It will be an old lion that is actually reducing the potential population growth. This is a good thing if we want to increase the number of lions.

Maybe...but nature actually does a pretty good job of taking care of the old lions. But your point stands in other situations.

If we're assuming that international organizations are powerless to fight rampant local corruption, I have trouble understanding how those wealthy foreigners' money is going to support conservation efforts instead of fattening the pockets of those same local officers.

Are we to believe that these hunters are so ethical that they will stay around for months after they've shot their lions, to make sure the money they have already paid is used to benefit local villagers?

If you're a corrupt official, why would you want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg?

...Because the golden eggs in my hand today is better than the goose that might be someone else's tomorrow? Fisherfolks across the world had absolutely no problem "killing the goose", depleting the stocks and denying there was any problem right up until entire sectors collapsed.

I fail to see why the same won't happen here.

A lot of the threat to animals is the destruction of their habitat; allowing lucrative trophy hunting creates an incentive to not turn a giraffe's habitat into a golf course or luxury resort or whatever. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070315-hunt...

The case of fisheries seems more complex because there you have multiple actors each of whose actions will have little effect on the overall fish population but who cumulatively can devastate it.

This is exactly what happens, I've seen it first hand. The land is kept is more of a natural state to preserve it for hunting. Some are hunted for trophies etc., but the numbers that are taken are controlled so that you have another batch the next year.... keep in mind that many of these places are huge (100's of acres) with high fences etc. and becuase each animal has a dollar value, more common species usually start at $400 (Bleisbok) and can go up to $50,000+ for Cape Buffalo the economic incentive to preserve the speces is pretty strong... and lucrative.

And what if we all stood in line at the Red Cross giving blood every day at the rate which they desperately need it? And what if we just funded every charity on earth with every penny of taxpayer dollars?

I’m all for any solution that doesnt involve hunting. But the fact is that altruism has its limits, and pretending like that’s not the case is threatening the existence of these animals.

Nah...the only way to ensure their survival is to kill them. Makes perfect sense.

Actually it does. Why do we have so many cows and chickens? We like to kill and eat them and that provides incentives to raise them, provide for them, and protect them so that we can kill them.

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