IMAGINE conservation as a three-legged stool. You need the wildlife, you need local people to be committed to conservation… and you need people to hunt down rare animals and kill them.
“When one of those legs isn’t there, the whole thing falls apart,” says Joe Hosmer, vice-president of Safari Club International, a hunting advocacy group based in Tucson, Arizona. Yes, the way to save wild animals, hunting advocates say, is to hunt them – or more precisely, to extract astronomical sums from rich hunters for the privilege of shooting a few prize specimens.
Perhaps more surprisingly, many conservation biologist see hunting…
