Brent Stapelkamp, the UK researcher who has been tracking Cecil (and other lions) for years in Zimbabwe, does not want a ban on lion hunting. From the article:
"Hunting can be a valuable component to conservation. If a property has a hunting quota and that money comes back from hunting into the management of the land, it's not going to be at risk," he said.
"So we have to be careful. The world reaction might polarise things and hunting might be banned outright.
"I think we have to be very cautious about how this momentum can be used."
Many people have claimed that sport hunting can actually help conservation efforts, in large part because it gives landowners an economic incentive to try to protect and preserve populations of game animals, but it's interesting to hear similar thoughts being expressed by a researcher on the ground who was actually working with Cecil.
3 comments:
Actually, I don't see any quote from the researcher in support of *lion* hunting specifically. Stapelkamp says this initially: "Personally I don't want to see lion hunting ever again - just because of the way lions react to it."
At the end of the video, the segue from the "Hunting can be a valuable component to conservation" quote is to show elephants onscreen and assert, "Trophy hunting is a small part of the threat to their survival; poaching for ivory... is a much, much bigger problem", which can't be in regard to lions.
The quotation you cite is directly before the passage I quoted from in the blog post. I interpreted Stapelkamp as saying he personally morally disapproves of lion hunting, but that he believes a ban on lion hunting would be counter-productive. While he doesn't say "lion hunting" specifically in the passage I quote from in the blog post, his previous sentence (which you quote) was about lion hunting, so when he says "hunting" in the very next sentence it seems fair to assume he is referring to lion hunting, at least in part.
Also, while Stapelkamp never directly says "I support lion hunting" or "I oppose banning lion hunting," he does say "Hunting can be a valuable component to conservation," which implies that he supports hunting, because he supports conservation. He also says, "So we have to be careful. The world reaction might polarise things and hunting might be banned outright," which implies that he opposes banning lion hunting as a result of the polarized discourse surrounding Cecil's killing. Otherwise, why would he say "we have to be careful"? It seems he wants to warn people against banning hunting as a result of their outrage about Cecil's death, because this could actually hurt conservation efforts.
This argument is nothing new. People have been arguing for a while that legally permitted hunting can actually give people an incentive to create habitat for game animals and to try to manage populations of game animals responsibly (because if the population collapses, then it is impossible to make money off of them by charging hunters a fee for hunting on your land). Of course, in the Cecil case, there was illegal poaching involved, not legally permitted hunting.
Quote to a different news service, headline, "Cecil researcher Brent Stapelkamp calls for lion hunting to be banned"... "My personal feeling is lion hunting shouldn't exist. They're too rare, they're too sensitive, and the repercussions felt after that hunt far exceed anything in any other species," Stapelkamp told Sky News.
https://news.yahoo.com/cecil-researcher-brent-stapelkamp-calls-092003138.html
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