I mean, I never said it did. I said that money from trophy hunting promotes conservation.

The source you linked seems to have its own bias, in that it promotes Compassionate Conservation, which is more of an ideological argument than a conservation-minded one. I don't have a problem with taking an ideological stance here, but I think it should be recognized as such. And it seems to me that this organization is telling some half truths in the service of its ideological goals.

For example, the headline of the article is that trophy hunting money is not reinvested in communities. But to me, this is moving the goalposts. If the goal is to preserve lions and elephants and their natural habitat, then it is great if we can do that while also investing in local communities. But if the money flows into the pocket of some local corrupt bureaucrat, and that bureaucrat then posts guards to protect the animals from poachers and doesn't sell the land to local farmers, then the goal of protecting the lions and elephants has been achieved. This is why I specified that we must make economic appeals to the people who control the land - which is not necessarily the general public. It is also why I specified that we do not live in an ideal world. If the idea of funding a corrupt bureaucrat while the locals around the preserve remain impoverished turns your gut... well, yeah. The world is full of injustices. We can definitely say it would be better if these people benefitted economically - but we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Demanding that every single problem in the world be solved all at once while sitting on our couches in wealthy western nations is most likely not a great strategy for achieving any goal.

Later, the article states that an elephant is worth more over its lifetime for tourists to see and photograph than it is worth as a trophy hunt. Which would be compelling if preserves were issuing hunting licenses on random elephants. But as far as I have heard, they don't do this. The impression I get is that most preserves have strong ties to foreign NGOs which provide both a lot of funding and a lot of oversight. And then of course the preserves themselves know that the elephants being in a lot of tourist dollars by being alive. So of course they aren't going to issue licenses to hunt young, healthy elephants. As far as I am aware, the licenses for hunting species like elephats are issued to individuals to allow them to hunt a single, specific animal which is sick, injured, or otherwise dying. From an economic standpoint, the animal has already provided the full benefit it would provide to the park for safari/photography money, and now the best use of the elephant is for trophy hunting money. And, again, from a humanitarian view, the elephant is being saved from a slow, painful, and often gruesome death.

So if you want to make an ideological argument against hunting, go ahead and make it. But the arguments presented by your source seem disingenuous to me.

I'll respond earnestly, even if my comment won't be taken that way.

The point of view I try to adopt is not about who is to blame, but what should be done.

Kept in a condition where they have to prioritize eating before conservation.

Suppose we murder all the evil western capitalist elites keeping them in poverty. Now what? There are still millions of people who cannot be supported by the land via a hunter-gatherer or subsistence farming lifestyle. As Smith wrote more than 100 years ago in The Wealth of Nations, a nation and its people do not gain wealth by extracting things from the ground, but by adopting technological innovations and creating lasting institutions. These things take time. And during that time, the impoverished will still see poaching elephant tusks as a good way to bring their family out of poverty. So what do we do? Well, we protect the elephants until the population is not so impoverished that they gain an appreciation for elephants beyond their economic value.

Meanwhile, the people working at the western NGOs which do a lot of the funding of these preserves (and which have done and continue to do a lot of the work to being average Africans out of poverty) do indeed care a lot about not taking a colonialist stance. But a common problem they run into is corruption. Whether you are digging wells or building hospitals or saving the lions, it is common that any given official at any given level will step in to take their cut. While NGOs will do their best to avoid these losses, they are inevitable to a certain extent. And trying to circumvent or oust government officials would be very, very colonial.

So the NGOs play ball, and generally try to find common ground with the governments and the preserves. Of course, not all Africans are poor and nature-ambivalent, just as not all westerners are colonizers. And typically, the Africans involved with the preserves do care about protecting the animals and ecosystems in them quite a bit. And importantly, the preserves are the ones issuing the hunting permits. The locals who direct, organize, and run the preserves on a day to day basis have determined that from the position they are in right now, yes, they do want to issue these hunting permits. So challenging this issuance seems somewhat colonialist to me.

Also, big game hunters are not bloodthirsty killers, they pay millions to kill animals not for bragging rights, but to help conservation.

No population is a monolith, and people can have multiple reasons for doing what they do. Talk to a hunter in an open minded way about the last hunt they went on, and they will give you any number of reasons they enjoyed it - exercise, fresh air, camaraderie. But also possibly the thrill of the moment they successfully took the shot, and the pride they feel about the trophy they took home. Still, I don't think this necessarily makes any individual a bad person - hunting is a ritual humans have engaged in since before we were human. And hunting has long been not only a necessity, but a mark of status in indigenous tribes around the world for millenia. Should we also cast an indigenous person who specifically pursues the largest and most dangerous boar near his villiage, so he can boast about his kill and wear its tusks as a necklace, as an evil, frothing, bloodthirsty killer?

Just ask Don Jr.

He also plays golf, combs his hair, and breathes air. The association isn't a ding against your doctor, who also golfs.

They even do a lot to minimize the suffering of the animal, out of the goodness of their hearts apparently, and not because that’s a basic rule of hunting that you have to follow if you wanna keep hunting.

This is a norm enforced by... other hunters... Who else would enforce it? It isnt hard to go into the woods and shoot an animal in the leg and then torture it to death if you feel like it. There's not a game warden hiding behind every tree in the forest. Really, the fact that all hunters know about this norm seems like a point in their favor.

Those dumb Africans need sensible hunters to teach them about conservation, don’t you know?

Well, no. The pragmatic and conservation-minded Africans reached a mutually beneficial agreement with the hunters to help fund their preserve, to protect the species there against the actions other Africans might take due to the pressures of poverty, which is a difficult and complex issue to deal with, but in which both Africans and foreign governments and NGOs have been making slow - but steady - progress on for the last half century.

I mean, this is a broad justification in favor of trophy hunting that applies to bucks in New Jersey as well as it does to antelope on the savanna. I'm not saying we shouldn't fund and support the reintroduction of apex predators. But, like, it's complicated.

One of the biggest hurdles is that typically the rural people living in these areas don't want these predators reintroduced. "Lions eat people" is a very reasonable concern in Africa. Ranchers in Wyoming hate wolves because the wolves will hunt their sheep and cows (though research has shown that this fear is typically overblown). And reintroducing apex predators into areas with a large and porus rural-urban interface (like New Jersey) would create a lot of problems for both residents and the predators themselves. As an example, a small rural town near me has had a rash of mountain lion attacks in the past few years, where the mountain lions would kill peoples dogs when let out in their back yards.

We had a bill proposed in the last few years in Colorado to reintroduce wolves. I was surprised when my friend who is a wildlife ecologist was opposed to it. "Some dumbass tourist is going to try to pet them, get killed, and set the public perception of wolves back 100 years - we need to increase reintroduction efforts along contiguous wildlife corridors in sparsely populated areas, not just where voters are the most liberal."

So, like, it's a good idea. But it will take a lot of time and effort, and faces significant political challenges. And in the meantime, we already have a functioning system of hunting for population control.

If you take a minute to think about it, of course hunters would be interested in preservation. They want a place to hunt and things to hunt. There will always also be the douchebag manosphere style people that just want the biggest sport kill.

i'm for killing dollar millionaires no matter the context tbh