So the comments on this thread https://community.bikehub.co.za/topic/178969-it-is-a-crazy-world-out-there/page-2 has prompted me to start this one. So we have 2 camps here, pro hunting and anti-hunting. There should be a third camp though, people that don't hunt themselves, but still believe hunting plays a role in conservation. Nowadays you dare not post a photo of yourself hunting on social media, for you will be attacked and hounded till the end of days. Just the other day I read the CEO of Panthera (a big cat conservation org) had to resign because someone dug up old photos of him hunting, and the greenies tore into the org. So a little background on myself first. I am a hunter, or at least I used to be. Now I'm too broke to hunt. BUT, I am also a conservationist working for a state conservation agency and I live on a game reserve. I have a Msc in Wildlife Management and 12 years’ experience working in conservation. So I think I'm qualified to debate this matter. I’m all for a healthy debate, so let me kick things off. Hunting has a HUGE role to play in conservation. For example: John Smith owns a 10 000ha game farm (Malema hasn’t taken it yet). This farm is his only source of income. Tourism alone doesn’t quite keep the bank manager happy and cover the costs of running the farm, so he allows a certain number of hunts every year. Without the hunting, his farm isn’t profitable anymore. So what’s he going to do? He’s going to change the land use and convert to agricultural farming, that’s what. And guess what happens to the bokkies, the trees, the grass and all of the associated biodiversity..?? It gets ploughed under and mielies are planted in its place. Or sugarcane, or whatever else is more profitable. Now, across SA you have thousands of John Smiths. Most have smaller farms where tourism isn’t profitable at all. So what must they do with their property if they can’t hunt? This is their livelihood and they cannot keep it in a natural state just for the sake of conserving wildlife. If all of them convert their game farms to agriculture there’ll be a MASSIVE loss of biodiversity. I cannot remember the figures now, but the majority of biodiversity in SA is actually found on private/communal land, not in protected areas/nature reserves as people think. This brings me to state owned game/nature reserves. Here we conserve for the sake of conservation, right? In the past, yes. In the new SA, NO. The old saying of “if it pays it stays” is now being applied. Most state owned reserves have been land claimed. The new owners demand compensation from their assets on an annual basis. Most state owned reserves (with the exception of Kruger) do not make enough money from tourism to run the reserve AND provide financial benefits to the land owners. Even where reserves haven’t been land claimed they are under immense pressure to provide some kind of beneficiation to neighbouring communities. Resource use, which includes hunting or culling and selling meat, is one way of providing benefits to these communities. To not have to hunt OR CULL at all on a property the property must be large enough for natural processes to take place. We have very few of those in SA, and I’d argue that Kruger is the only reserve large enough to be called “natural” whereby you do not need to control animal populations. Everywhere else you have to manage the wildlife populations. And that means either a hunter puts a bullet in bokkies (or predators) and pays the reserve/land owner handsomely for that privilege, or the land managers cull. Elsewhere in Africa you had large areas with game, whereby professional hunters could become concessionaires of an area. Not only did they hunt in these areas, but the protected the area from poachers, built infrastructure like roads etc and contributed financially to the local communities. Then the anti-hunting brigade managed to drive them out. Guess what happened? The bokkies had no more value to the communities other than filling their bellies, so there is NOTHING left. So, let’s here the opposing arguments
