Slaughter of the Innocents — Hunting the Big Five
Hunters pay big bucks to shoot lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, and Cape buffalo.
I was twenty three in early 1975 when I met my first professional hunter — Tony Challis. Rider Haggard, author of the Alan Quatermain series, would have called him a big white hunter. Tony was 40 then (and I 24), recently returned from escorting Henry Fonda, the American film icon from a hunting trip in Kenya.
Tony was not only the first professional hunter I met, but the last. I was shocked that he hunted animals, and I asked him about it. “The fees generated for hunting animals enable the government to keep the game reserves open,” he said. “The animals need to be culled, otherwise there would be too many of them, and they would destroy their habitat.”
It was half a century before I took the time to check that out. It turns out that the argument was put forward in the 30s when the South African government wanted to put an end to hunting. The hunters won the argument on the basis that hunters provided a service by culling animals. Today, with most of these animals nearing extinction levels, the argument is not so much about saving the animals and their habitat, as it is about the billions it makes for the hunting industry.
Hunting in the United States…
