Most of these folks have no understanding of the fact that
THE ONLY REASON that there is any wildlife left in Africa at all is because of
the economic draw that these animals have.
African countries make big money selling hunts to bwanas that want to
come over and bag an elephant or a lion or so forth.
Tsetse flies in Africa decimate their cattle ranches
yearly. Cape Buffalo carry the tsetse
parasite, and that transfers into domestic cattle. We had the same problem here in the USA with
brucellosis in the native Bison, so we killed them all. The only reason that African countries put up
with this and don’t kill every Cape Buffalo pawing the ground is because they
make huge money off of safaris where bwanas come in to hunt them some dugga boy
mbogo.
There is a term for elephants that most of these latte
sipping jackasses will never hear, and that is “rampaging cull”. This is an elephant that has discovered that
it can get all it wants to eat by stomping the shit out of African villages and
eating all of their food supplies. Of
course, this means that these subsistence farmers are going to starve to death,
because an elephant can eat all of their food in a couple of days. There is no way that the African governments
would have put up with this bullshit if it weren’t for the fact that bwanas
come over to kill these rampaging culls to the tune of 50,000 to 75,000 a pop
JUST FOR THE TAG. Forget the daily rates
and other fees and things they buy while they’re there. If it weren’t for this, every elephant in
Africa would have been killed off long ago.
It is easy for them to denigrate these activities from their
gilded perch on top of some highrise in New York. It is a litte less easy to understand life in
an area where there is an overpopulation of lions, causing them to begin to
starve, meaning they begin eating anything they can find – livestock that these
people literally rely on for survival, and in some cases, the people
themselves. If it weren’t for the
reasonable wildlife management efforts created by these bwanas, there would be
no lions left, because these people fighting for their own survival would have
killed them off years ago…
City folk just can’t seem to get over the fact that they
know very little about life. They think
they know it all, but the truth is that they have lived their entire life on a
2 mile by 13 mile concrete island and are just pig damn ignorant of the truth
of day to day life outside their little bubble.
Of course, they’ll never admit that…
With you all the way except for one nit. The U.S. gov't, just post-Civil War, killed the bison to starve the Indians off the plains. It was genocide.
ReplyDeletehttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/gallery/photo/genocide-other-means-us-army-slaughtered-buffalo-plains-indian-wars-30798
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/gallery/photo/genocide-other-means-us-army-slaughtered-buffalo-plains-indian-wars-30798
ASM:
DeleteWithout a doubt, that is the current prevailing narrative, and also without a doubt, this was the government policy at that time.
That being said, the government realized that killing the bison would be a hardship on the Indians for one reason, and one reason alone: IT ALREADY WAS a hardship on the Indians at the time they came up with the policy, because white men had already been killing bison wholesale up to that point. By the time the government passed that policy, the bison herds had already been effectively destroyed.
Think about it logically – there are stories of the devastation that the big shaggies would wreak on the prairie in their wake. They would leave a miles wide path of destruction behind them as they moved through an area. They would also bring brucellosis with them as they moved through, meaning any ranchers in the area got a 1-2 punch in one unpreventable and foul fell swoop. Not only was their land destroyed for months, leaving their cattle to starve, but the cattle would then get sick and start dying.
If you’re a rancher in the American West in the mid to late 1800’s , you rely on your herd for your family’s survival. This isn’t about money and economics, it about starvation and death.
So you kill bison whenever you get the chance. You kill them and kill them and keep killing them until there are none left. Yes, somewhere along the way, your government notices that you killing them is having an effect that they desire, and pass a policy to encourage what you’re doing, but you’re already doing it, with or without the government, and you’re going to keep doing it until your family’s future is secure and safe from the scourge that threatens them.
We would have killed all the bison with or without that government policy. The path was already set in motion.
In similar vein, the reason big cats exist in Africa at all is largely due to the sport of hunting them. Up through the early part of the last century, they weren't just hunted for sport, they were marked for eradication, some humans having decided there just wasn't room for two apex predators. Bears, wolves, and cougars were marked for the same fate here in the states. Now I personally am glad they are still out there. They do make the western wilds a little more dangerous, and therefore more authentic, and I salute them as predators of great skill. The people getting riled up here? The love only the IDEA of big cats, elephants, wolves and bears. They certainly wouldn't be so supportive if it was their food being eaten, or their pets, or their kids. Another reason I want to reintroduce bears in the LA hills. After all, it used to be their habitat, right?
ReplyDeleteWolfman;
DeleteI had a similar rant up about the reintroduction of wolves in the lower 48. Here’s the link.
http://notboutthing.blogspot.com/2011/01/keep-me-from-being-one-wolves-pull-down.html
The upshot is that we DID eradicate wolves in the USA’s lower 48, for exactly that reason. We also eradicated Grizzly bears.
The only reason that they are here today is that the were either reintroduced (wolves) or have grown back from populations left in Canada and a few tiny leftovers in National Parks (Grizzly Bears).
The only reason we have Grizz here in Washington is because we border British Columbia, and the only reason that they have Grizz in southern Montana is because of Yellowstone.
The rant in question was about the reintroduction of wolves, and how they did it wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. And also how the entire thing was driven by city folk who had no idea what they were doing when they did it, and don’t care about the consequences because they don’t have to deal with them. Click over and read it. I think its good, although it probably needed broken up with pics a little…
At the very least, dang near. I grew up just south of Glacier, on the Flathead Reservation. The griz retreated up the hills from there, but they were never truly gone, and I expect that panhandle Idaho is about the same. There's places between Browning, MT and the Washington line that remain very nearly untouched. Also, although it has never been officially admitted, there have always been wolves in the Pistol Creek range, up behind my folks farm, and in the Ninemile Creek drainage, north of Frenchtown. In the Bitterroot, of course. The few remaining wild wolves are being displaced by the Canadian bred monstrosities they are using for reintroduction stock.
DeleteI've heard rumor about lower 48 wolves always having been around and never quite being wiped out completely.
DeleteIt's all from local anecdotal evidence as far as I know, because I'm pretty sure the prevailing narrative is that they were wiped out.
I know which I believe. I've always believed that there were a few left. There are caribou in the Idaho Panhandle for goodness sake. The frank church is so big that you can fit most of Washington State in it.
I assume you're somewhat local to me.
Yeah, the narrative... Reintroduction doesn't go as slick when people run around saying they are already here. I've not spent any time in the Frank Church, but know some who have, sounds beautiful.
DeleteI'm not local to the area anymore, but going by the area you describe, we may easily be.
Goober,
ReplyDeleteIn my area we recently had a similar problem with the idiots deciding we did not need bobcats anymore. See more city folk are moving out to the country, and fifi their little dog suddenly disappears on day after being left out al night. They figured out that the big (relatively speaking) kitties were the cause and so poisoned all the ones they could not trap. Guess what happened the next spring? The rodents had far less to keep them in check, which has leas to mouse/ rat infestations and peoples laws being torn up by squirrels, chipmunks stuffing exhaust pipes and intake manifolds with everything imaginable and why? Because some city idiot couldn't keep his carpet rat inside and it got eaten/ killed.
Hunters understand the balance of nature, farm folks doubly, city folks are just idiots in this regard.
This story reminds me of when they banned “body gripping” traps in the state of Washington because the bleeding hearts thought trapping was just so BARBARIC that it had to be banned.
DeleteOf course this made rat and mouse traps, and also mole traps, completely illegal. The infestation began, and within 6 months, the same folks that were bleating like sheep about how cruel body gripping traps were, began agitating to make special exemptions for what they defined as “pest” species. I was gobsmacked. If body gripping traps are cruel and unusual, they are cruel and unusual, regardless of what animal you use them on. Apparently, to these drooling morons, it isn’t cruel and unusual to use body gripping traps on animals that are bothering THEM; no, it’s only cruel to use them on animals that they like, and are only bothering OTHER people. So a guy with a cougar problem in Eastern Washington is shit out of luck, but at least they can still be cruel and unusual to the moles that are digging up their yard.
Also, a few years after that, since none of them learned their lessons, they banned hound hunting. Now the cougar and bear population has skyrocketed in our state, causing two things to happen:
Fifi the carpet dog is getting eaten quite regularly, and these folks scream their guts out, so the state PAYS someone to come in with hounds and hunt the problem animal, when before they got revenue from people paying THEM for the license to do it for free!
AND..
The WDFW started issuing cougar tags for free with the purchase of any hunting license. So every hunter afield carries a cougar tag, and we are asked in the nicest way possible to shoot them on site whenever we see them. This still hasn’t fixed the problem.
But the city folk won’t budge from their high horse on these issues. They are convinced they know better than us rubes and bumpkins how things should be done on our side of the state, and the problems just keep getting worse.
re: The elephant thing...
ReplyDeleteLook how berserk suburbanites get over a squirrel in the birdfeeder. Imagine how much more so if the squirrel could peek in the second-floor windows and weighed four minivans...
and on a whim, would often tear down your house to the foundation, because "fuck you" that's why...
Delete...or possibly because it wanted to eat all the food in your pantry...
...but that first thing, mostly.
I laughed when I saw the suggestion once that African villages put up solar powered electric fences up to keep the rampaging culls out of the village. I can't keep my one year old steer inside an electric fence to save my ass. He uses it to scratch his butt when he wants to get a rise (yeah, he was kind of a strange steer) How could you possibly get a solar powered fence to stop an animal that is ten times bigger than my steer? An elephant wouldn't even notice it. Again, absolutely no concept of how the world actually works outside of their bubble, yet completely convinced that they are infinitely more worldly and smarter-er than all the rest of us...
Oh, yeah...
DeleteTam just posted on my blog. I'm relatively sure that I get a cookie or something now... Right? Isn't there a prize or something?
Guys?