Quote: (01-28-2017 12:00 PM)Seadog Wrote:
He was actually hugely in favour of legalizing the Rhino horn trade, namely since prohibition isn’t working, horns can and are cut in due course to keep the animals safe (and it just goes in storage), and no private land owners want to breed them since there is no profit for them. Legalize it, and market would get flooded with all the stored horns that have been cut over the years, people would now have a motivation to farm them like they do for all other endangered game species, the price would drop, populations would expand, and thus not making it worthwhile to poach. Also had a ton of words for people upset about targeted rhino hunts and the Cecil the lion debacle a few years ago. Essentially when these animals are old and done reproducing, or worse; acting like asses toward young bucks, it does far more good to get a 6 figure cash influx for conservation, then it does to just let them do their thing for another year before dying naturally. Apparently the guide who brought the whole Cecil thing to light is a pariah in the guiding community, purely because hunting this old lion in terms of cost/benefit was the best thing for the lion population, but instead this guy capitalized on American sentimentalism to fill his own ledger with high paying clients who want to work with the guy who speaks up for lions.
Reminds me of the Ted Turner solution for regenerating the American Buffalo population. An African Ted Turner would be hamstrung by the ban on ivory though, so this probably won't happen.
re: Bolded, the whistleblower dude is playing the game too, so I can't really hate.