Get stuffed

On my way back from an amazing weekend of riding my mountain bike in the Tuli block on the SA/Zim/Botswana border, I passed a number of hunting farms on the endless straight road to Alldays. It got me thinking about the old debate about the merits of hunting, its role in conservation and the kind of people that want to pay big money to hammer a chunk of lead into a fellow being.

At the outset, let me say that I am fully aware that to hunt for food is perhaps many times more noble than the cowardly purchasing of that trimmed and packed beef fillet from your nearest Woolies. When you hunt for your meat, you cannot hide from the death that is required and that we are so perfectly shielded from in our modern lives of convenience. I will not dig further into this aspect except to say that even a sense of pleasure from the kill could be justified when the result is food on the table. We are predators, as evidenced by our teeth and the fact that our eyes are on the front of our face and not the sides - we stalk prey looking straight ahead.

My beef, so to speak, is with hunters that hunt to put trophies on their wall. Presumably, this means that they wish to make a statement about their courage, their cunning and their power over all beasts. They will tell you that it requires many hours of walking, lying still and sometimes coming home empty handed...doesn't sound like a whole bag of awful suffering to me! Sounds a lot like a game of golf to be honest.

Once this justification of the hardship of the hunt has been shown up as weak at best, the trump card is usually to highlight how dangerous a wounded animal can be thereby implying the courage of the hunter to be out there pitting his wits against the savage beast with nothing but a 458 with high quality telescopic sights allowing accurate kill shots from hundreds of meters away. To this epic display of knightly bravery I would like to propose the following - if this is all about proving your courage, why not leave the gun at home, leave the professional hunter and the backup guns, leave the telescopic sights, pick up a knife and go out there pick a fight with a grumpy lion. Not so keen any more? No doubt that is because the chance of you winning the fight have dropped from roughly 99.99% to about 25% assuming you are an ace with a knife and don't flinch when that 250kg beast launches itself at you. Can you then really claim that shooting something like an elephant or a lion is an act of courage? I think not. The Masai kill lion with spears and the pygmies in the Congo attack and disembowel elephants with sharp blades by running underneath their bellies and cutting them open. They do this to protect their flocks and feed the village respectively and it doubles as a display of manliness.

So, by my estimate, if I was giving awards for the lion hunter of the year, it would go to a young Masai who walked out on his own to face an angry lion with nothing but his toothpick of a spear, his courage and his conviction. I don't see wealthy American and European hunters lining up to try and win my fictional award this way. Yet they insist on running the old courage line past us to justify their barbaric 'sport'. Shoot lions if you must, you insecure children, it adds money to the overall conservation effort, but please spare me the photos of you posing on the body of the culled animal, smiling like a triumphant buffoon who thinks he has proven his courage. All you have proven is your lack thereof. Congratulations, what a man, get stuffed!