Do-Gooder Animal Welfare Idiots Cause Deaths of Thousands of Animals in Africa
Starting with my post from December 2006 For Gods Sake - Stop Helping Africa, I have written more than a few dozen articles documenting America's and Europe's great failure over the past eight decades trying to help the Dark Continent overcome disease, famine, water scarcity, political instability, poverty, malnutrition, drought, soil erosion, joblessness, lack of development, illiteracy, and a myriad of other problems.
After all the aid and outreach programs, moneys, NGO's, awareness-raising concerts, free food, land terracing and soil improvement efforts, water boreholes drilled, new hospitals built, free medicines, free mosquito nets, after all that, the Continent today is filled with even more hungry, poor, disease-ridden, unemployed Africans who have even less access to clean drinking water, more HIV, tuberculosis, malaria (even non-communicable diseases are on the rise in Africa), a constantly declining Gross National Income, 40% of its arable land degraded, rising ethnic tensions, and even more war.
After the billions spent on education, new schools, and teacher training, the result is Africa today is the only continent where more than half of parents are not able to help their children with homework due to illiteracy.
OK Bernie, We Get It - Aid to Africa is a failure - What About Wildlife?
But it's not just do-gooders who have made Africa an economic basket-case, animal welfare advocates are destroying Africa's wildlife as well. All of Africa is seeing dramatic declines in its wildlife population the past few decades. While some of the losses may be attributed to our food aid which helped increase the population without helping Africans grow their own food, our interference in land and soil management has made droughts worse than they would have been, but worst of all, animal rights groups have forced many African governments to ban hunting which has led to increased poaching.
That's right, banning hunting leads to more poaching. Hunting preserves, which had millions in revenues, always made sure that there were always enough animals to keep their businesses going. By hiring thousands of locals to work on their safaris, keep poachers at bay, protect and help breed more wildlife, they put enough money into local economies that these paid employees could buy food instead of resorting to poaching themselves and killing an elephant just to get a few pounds of meat.
Do you understand what you just read? When a hunter employed one African to help him hunt an elephant, that African never had to resort to poaching to survive. That led to abundant wildlife on hunting preserves. It is the same as the timber industry in America. To keep supplying all the lumber we need, timber companies planted more trees than they cut down to ensure supplies. Want to see trees disappear in America? Simply ban timber companies from cutting trees. People who need lumber will then illegally cut trees down without planting more trees.
Wildlife in America Flourishes Due to Hunting
Luckily for wildlife in America, hunting is not banned so that there is funding for the perpetuation and conservation of wildlife and natural habitats - read Hunting in America: An Economic Force for Conservation (January 2013).
Because hunting in our country is a billion dollar business and not banned, North America went from a mere 41,000 elk a hundred years ago to more than a million elk today.
Because hunting in our country is a billion dollar business and not banned, North America went from a mere 500,000 whitetails a hundred years ago to more than 32 million whitetails today.
Because hunting in our country is a billion dollar business and not banned, North America went from a mere handful of ducks a hundred years ago to more than 44 million ducks today.
So while these animal protection groups supposedly want to save a few animals from being hunted, the end result, if their efforts prevail, will be the extinction of every animal species hunted and preserved today.
In areas where hunting is legal in Africa, wildlife flourishes:
Conservation Magazine, 14 Jan 2014, Can trophy hunting actually help conservation?
In 2006, researcher Peter A. Lindsey of Kenya’s Mpala Research Centre and colleagues interviewed 150 people who either had already hunted in Africa, or who planned to do so within the following three years. Their findings were published in the journal Animal Conservation. A majority of hunters – eighty-six percent! – told the researchers they preferred hunting in an area where they knew that a portion of the proceeds went back into local communities.
...
Better evidence would come from proof that hunting can be consistent with actual, measurable conservation-related benefits for a species.
Is there such evidence? According to a 2005 paper by Nigel Leader-Williams and colleagues in the Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy the answer is yes. Leader-Williams describes how the legalization of white rhinoceros hunting in South Africa motivated private landowners to reintroduce the species onto their lands. As a result, the country saw an increase in white rhinos from fewer than one hundred individuals to more than 11,000, even while a limited number were killed as trophies.
Africa has a devastating plague: it's called westerners with good intentions. People who want to feel good that they are doing something noble. That their efforts result in negative consequences does not concern them. It's the thought that counts.
Hopefully one day we will eliminate and destroy all these kinds of idiots with good intentions.
