jan
i agree with everything you posted but not with the comparison humans to animals when it comes to multiplying themselves!
there are many animal species which don't breed when food is scrace due to missing rain etc. in this context i would wish humans would react as these species do - even in europe this would be fine!

Pippa:

I agree with you completely. And with elephants, they have only one baby every 4 -5 years where a native woman can have 5 - 8 in that time period. At times wildlife is more "human" than the humans themselves.

Last weekend I read an article in the Nation of a man raping his 5 MONTH OLD daughter. She was so badly injured and infected they had to performed a colostomy to save her life. Her father fills the definition of a true BEAST. He should be hung by his testicles and beaten to death so he can't do this to another female baby. In many animal families that would not have been possible - other family members would have prevented it.

Carsten:

I just re-read your introduction and there were several statements in it that grabbed at me right away.

"The fact that legal ivory stock piles cannot be sold is a travesty in itself as the money so raised could be ploughed back into conservation efforts. It would also lower demand for illegal ivory so by default slow down poaching of ivory".

I couldn't disagree with you more on this score. This is presently no way on God's earth that one can distinguish legal ivory stockpiles from ivory from poached elephants, and even if there were, the poached ivory would miraculously find its way to the "legal" stockpiles. As long as ivory is sold anywhere in the world poaching will be a problem. Remember, it wasn't long ago that the game/wildlife departments were themselves guilty of poaching and selling ivory for their own personal benefits and they were not plowing the money back into wildlife protection.

I see many articles for sale on Ebay termed "bone jewelry", and I can't help but wonder how many are really bone and how many might be ivory. Does anyone know how one could tell the difference?

The other statement I couldn't buy was "rebuild what humans destroyed in the past". I think the only possible way that could be done is by getting rid of millions of people, and we all know that isn't going to happen. Thus I have to agree with most of you that education for the people, and trying to force the governments to pass rules beneficial to wildlife is the only way to go forward.

Carsten let me tell you something about the ivory stockpiles. As you may know the hunting fraternity and their accomplices in S.A. conservation persuaded Government to allow the fences on the western boarder of Kruger National Park to be removed so that animals from the National Park could roam freely onto the hunting conservancies where they are killed for the private financial benefit of the hunters. In the last decade or so the S.A. Government has been lobbying to have the ivory ban lifted so that it can sell its stockpiles and it has argued that even without hunting animals die from natural causes and one should expect an increase in the stockpile of at least 5% per annum. So what has happened?? Government statistics show that the Government stockpile has remained static for 10 years whereas the private stockpile owned by the hunters has increased ten fold. The statistics would indicate the unlikely scenario that not a single elephant has died of natural causes in Kruger Park in the last 10 years whereas they are dying like flies in the hunting conservances bordering Kruger Park. The sale of ivory stockpiles will therefore not benefit conservation much but it will certainly benefit the commercial interests of the hunting industry. The corruption is revealed in the statistics.

Reading your initial statement in this thread in which you desperately look for common ground between hunters and animal welfarists, I am reminded of the similarities between the abolition of the slave trade and our movement to ban sport hunting. The hunters claim that wildlife numbers will collapse catastrophcally if hunting is banned. The same claim was made by the slavery industry, arguing that the entire food production of the western world depended upon slavery and that whole economies would collapse if slavery were abolished. Everyone in 19th Century Europe agreed that slavery was morally wrong but disagreed on how to deal with it. The abolitionists wanted it banned completely because it was morally wrong. Many people however accepted the slaving industries' scaremongering, so they therefore looked for middle ground between the abolitionists and the slave-based industries, and proposed legislation to keep slavery as an institution, but to regulate the worst abuses out of the system and make slavery kinder to the slaves. In the event the abolitionists prevailed, but only after a horrendous civil war in USA.
So it all comes down to this with hunting. Do you think that hunting - like slavery - is an evil which must be abolished? If not then of course you will look for ways to regulate the cruelty without banning it completely. At the end of the day it is a moral issue and you take your stand accordingly. We of course believe that killing sentient animals for FUN is an evil, like slavery, and must be abolished regardless of the financial debate because we do not equate money with a proper reverence for life.

at Jan and Chris:
the sentence about legalizing the sale of ivory is NOT from me. The introduction of this topic is a summary of a conversation BwanaMich and I had on another forum and because I was sure that many of you would be interested in it, we continued here on bushdrums. To give you an idea of what had been spoken so far, I made this write up. Please take note of who said what because this is definitely not my opinion

The same applies to the opinion towards hunting Chris projected onto me. No, this is definitely not my opinion

I shall express my opinion on hunting in general once more for clarification, although I find it a little bit beside the point. Beside the point because the aim of bushdrums is to find a neutral platform for ALL parties involved in wildlife protection to sit down and discuss the problems with possible solutions and to find solutions that all sides can agree on. This requires that we need to listen to all sides first. A solution based on one party disregarding others will always have opponents and is therefore likely to fail on the long run. Also, all parties involved have some knowledge that is worth listening to and learning from. For example a professional hunter that spends months in the bush observing wildlife to select the right animal for his client, will know a lot about animals that some of us who only spend a couple of days of our holidays in the bush, will never know.
Nico and I do not wish Bushdrums to become a pro-hunting site, but neither a contra-hunting site. It´s aim is to remain neutral and give all parties the chance to express themselves. Of course this does not mean, that the members need to become neutral Surely everyone has the right to express his/her opinion but we would appreciate if we all took the chance to learn from each other. Statements like describing another member mentally ill and prejudiced makes you predjudiced, too, but more important, it doesn´t bring us any further in the finding of a solution. It may well be your opinion and no-one is asking you to change it, but it isn´t a very productive comment, is it?

But now for clarification my personal opinion towards hunting. I make a very clear differenciation between professional hunting for the sake of conservation of specific species and the touristic or sport hunting. For me, people that fly to Africa to kill wildlife for the fun of it, are mentally ill. I have no other explanation for it because I seriously believe that these people have a psycological problem that should be taken care of by a professional. For me this has nothing to do with sport. Ethics are self declared rules for action, so there is no point in discussing whether it is ethical or not. Anyone can set up his own ethical rules and therefore the word actually doesn´t mean anything. It is another way of saying "our rules of conduct", hence making your own rules of conduct and then complying to them makes you ethical. (Reminds me a bit of politics :-O ).

Some of the ecosystems remaining for wildlife have become too small for the wildlife in it and hence problems arise. The smaller the ecosystem, the more humans need to interfere. For those of you who have ever had an aqarium, will know about this. You constantly interfere by using and cleaning a filter, you change the water, you control temperature and hours of light, you feed, clean and use chemicals all the time. Without this, the fish will be dead in a couple of weeks. In a lake nobody does any of this.
It is us humans that reduced the size of one ecosystem called Africa into many, comparatively small ecosystems we proudly call national parks. Having done so, we need to take the responsibility and take care of these ecosystems to make sure, the weakest species don´t suffer. For example the elephant is a very dominant species that, as it multiplies, will destroy all vegetation and if we do not interfere, we will end up one day with a park full of elephants but nothing else. For this reason we need to keep an eye on what is happening and, if neccessary, control the stock of certain species. On the long run I believe the aim should be to enlarge the ecosystem to provide a base for more wildlife. On the short run, I do support professional hunters to take care of the stock. I support the idea of a handful of professionals that observe the development of wildlife and evaluate all options before making use of the last option to kill some specific animals to control the situation. Nothing else!!

In a nutshell using the example of the aquarium again: I believe we should take care of the ecosystem to assure all species will survive whilst creating a new lake where we can one day release our fish back to where they belong and where they will be able to live without our interference. This is a very distant goal and therefore we need to consider intermediate solutions, whether we like them or not.

carsten,
a professional hunter won't be able to take care of any stock as he/she is driven by the passion to kill
as i said earlier: hunting is killing and therefore i won't be able to comprehend! in case a human being is against any kind of killing one just cannot differenciate between goog killing and bad! who are we that we reserve the right solely for ourselves to decided what is good to be killed and what's not? or what's a good reason for it and what's a bad one?
ask two people for theirs reasons and every one will present a "good" one!

and instead of creating a new lake we should take care of the ones we have got in order not to extinguish any!