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What do members think of this move by the Government of Botswana.

Maybe Dick Cheney could take Trumptoad Elephant hunting & pot Trumptoad instead of Dumbo.

I have been to Zambia juts Nth of Bots and seen what elephant overpopulation in a small area can do..it is devastating and you cant just heard or encourage those fukkkers to move on. so no no prob really. Also in a country were poaching is bad controlled hunting and killing gives more money to the locals so they can live and survive beyond a subsistence level and allow us to encourage our privileged western views and outraged morals to take root.

PS Im going back to africa next year on a shooting trip...photographs that is not hunting..

I would not personnaly go hunting elephants but I honestly cannot say hey stop that to a country that has elephants when we cant even treat our aboriginal population with fairness or allow the kiwis to take 500 men we have imprisoned in detention centers. So its kinda hard to take the moral high ground in the elephant debate.

The Botswanan government know more about elephants than the average american or austrailan or do we think we know more because we are " Educated and White " ??

They are smart enough to realize that wild life tourism will be a great thing for them in the long run! GREAT STUFF!

Elephants are the most intelligent animals on the planet and mourn their dead. I'd rather they not be shot to entertain tourists.

I haven't formed a firm opinion on this issue. Is shooting elephants the only choice there is ? They could sell some or lots, alive to us wealthy westerners perhaps.

The elephant population has to be controlled but I disapprove of tourists gunning them down as a form of exotic entertainment.
I remember in South Africa rangers would cull the old ones not some random amateurs shooting anything that moves. There again South Africa wasn’t so desperate for any method of attracting tourist dollars.
The parks were beautifully managed & were a big enough attraction for folks that just wanted photographs.
The truth is that this is easy money & African governments like that commodity. There’s little chance the people of Botswana will benefit. There’s plenty of alternatives but few as lucrative as a well heeled western tourist...

Maybe killing ban could stay while authorities are controlling the elephant population. Complete repeal can encourage some hunters to consume populations too fastly.

yavuzovic wrote: ↑

Sat May 25, 2019 12:14 pm

Maybe killing ban could stay while authorities are controlling the elephant population. Complete repeal can encourage some hunters to consume populations too fastly.

Exactly. Once the population is low enough for acceptable damage to the habitat then the elephants should be left alone. Also the older males are the ones to cull as they will often have become solitary & the breeding herds are unaffected. I’m sure western nations would sponsor the management programs if the country is poor. I’m also sure there are greedy government officials keen to make a quick buck...

Surely one part of the problem is us, the sheer number of humans now on the earth, and our insatiable demands for more land. Why do we continue to believe in the primacy of human life above all other forms of life ? If there's nine billion plus humans and only a few thousand orangutans then surely an orangutan is more valuable than a human. Particularly me.

MajorMitchell wrote: ↑

Sat May 25, 2019 3:55 pm

Surely one part of the problem is us, the sheer number of humans now on the earth, and our insatiable demands for more land. Why do we continue to believe in the primacy of human life above all other forms of life ? If there's nine billion plus humans and only a few thousand orangutans then surely an orangutan is more valuable than a human. Particularly me.

Major, I often disregard your posts, but there’s none truer than this!
We have environmental damage occurring on enormous scale often in the name of providing a few jobs for some of the “billions of inessentials”. Nobody cares.

Have an accident with human mortalities & it makes international headlines!

I know it will be hard to change the mindset but the primacy of human life has to end. The truth is we simply don’t matter compared to the damage we do.
It’s not as if we don’t know the solutions. Contraception is no longer a novel idea & we don’t need to move heaven & earth keeping folks alive in care homes (when they forgot their address decades ago).

I know it sounds brutal & evil, but a few less of us would do everyone a favour. Not implying Eugenics or that kind of crap but there are reasonable steps that could be taken.

An orangutan only has value because humans value them. There have been countless ape like creatures that have existed and then ceased to exist over the millennia, and they have zero value as they don't exist in the human consciousness.

And at the end of the day if there was a fire in a room with a baby human and a baby orangutan no-one is going to save the ginger monkey. Even if it was the last female orangutan on earth it's still no contest.

I'm not fully sure how to reply to this. But I feel someone needs to offer a dissenting opinion.

I am saddened that anyone would believe that the primacy of human kind needs to end. I as much as the next guy want to take care of the environment, but that can, and must, be accomplished in ways that do not include anything resembling eugenics.

First, saying that human life should not be paramount is tantamount to straight up murder. Think about it for a second. While I agree that some forms of birth control are not really murder, everyone must agree that at some point killing a child in it's mother's womb is murder. This is discussion for another place, so I will operate on the assumption that we can all agree that killing a child(whether just about to come out of the womb or already born) is murder. You cannot advocate any form of murder to keep some elephants alive, no matter how great elephants are, humans should always be held in more importance. A paramedic dispatched to the zoo should always save the human before he saves the elephant.

To Major's argument about the value of human life, I say this. Do you really think the value of a human life should be based on how many of us there are? If we take the position to it's logical conclusion, we all too quickly arrive at a place where it is perfectly ok to kill people because they are part of a majority group. People in this hypothetical future where MajorMitchell is the greatest philosopher ever could say something like this, "Since there are more of them it is perfectly morally right for me to kill some of them, they have less value then me, why should I treat them the same way I treat my own.

I also think there are several other arguments for the primacy of human life, found both within Christian tradition and evolutionary thought. If you know anything about Christianity you will know that every single individual is equal and valued above all other creation by God, you don't have to agree with this, I just think there is some usefulness in mentioning it. The evolutionary argument is obviously survival of the fittest. Us humans are the fittest of the "evolved" beings on this earth, therefore we deserve to get the best portion of the resources.

One last point. I agree that the human race does a great deal of damage to the material world, but I believe it is simply wrong to attempt to "cure" us rather than teach people how to treat their planet right. I realize that we have been trying that for a while, but in the grand scheme of things it has been a very short amount of time(~50 years, idk because I wasn't alive for most of it) that we have been talking about our environment and trying to stop people from destroying it. I think that instead of killing the next generations before they make it out of the womb we should try to teach them first.

This, of course, has little bearing on whether or not Botswana should let people shoot their elephants. I believe, however, that the moment people begin to think that humans are no longer primary would be a dark one for all of us.

@Octavious, I wrote this before your post, thank you for weighing in, I agree entirely.

@Senlac and Major, I would like to know if you have any better arguments for your point of view. Arguments other than "there are more of us," that is.

Well, there are clearly too many humans, but there are a lot of ways to address this beyond killing people. Simply reducing the number of births is a good start. Heck, educating girls is a good start.

Here, the answer to crop damage is not to go killing things. The ban (and the shoot on sight policy toward poachers) has been quite successful.

The issue is to tailor a response adequate to the problem, but this notion of killing a species that's already under threat seems pretty wrong headed.

Thanks Ogion for your contribution, and Senlac.
. I think, with respect Octavious that extinct species have been and are of value to us, one example is that we have a much better understanding of evolution through the process of natural selection. The long dead people of the Easter Islands are another example of how population growth that outstrips resources leads to undesirable results. We have countless examples of introduced species wrecking ecosystems.

@ Ubercacher. Not sure why you have conflated abortion into this, but I'll take a run at your (imho) illogical contribution.
First you have (deliberately for emotive persuasion?) confused child with foetus, a common tactic of the "anti free choice for women with regard to abortion" because that, not "pro life" is a more accurate description imho.
Using the USA as a salient example, let's look at the hypocrisy and inconsistencies.
An illegal immigrant woman is raped and becomes pregnant. Trump and his acolytes will insist the woman has the child and then happily deport both if allowed.
Oh you'll let them stay? What welfare support will you give that child, a supported free education through college and university?
I agree that adoption should be promoted as a choice, but ask, will those opposing women's rights to the choice of abortion take personal responsibility for the unwanted foetus when it becomes a child at birth ? Will they at even arms length, if they're not prepared to provide a home and family for those children, be happy to pay higher taxes to fund orphans homes that are well resourced & properly run.as well as ongoing taxpayer funded support for the mother ?
I'll post this & continue

Will the anti Women's choice on abortion brigade step up to properly care for children they insist be born to women who would choose abortion ? I doubt it, there's thousands of children dying of starvation globally already, but if they're in some distant place, another continent or a poverty trap suburb they don't visit, do they really care about human life if it means higher taxes, redistribution to global wealth and more expensive petrol for their SUV, pickup truck and a less consumptive lifestyle ?

Now back to the original question about the global population. Rather than following suggestions like Ogion made about curbing population growth is it more humane to allow, encourage continual population growth until the number becomes unsustainable and we have resource wars and starvation and pestilence on a hither to unseen scale?
We have hundreds of thousands, millions globally already experiencing combinations of those three, so is it more humane to go for an even bigger human catastrophe?

Back to Ubercacher & abortion for one more shot.
When you've adopted two orphans and are providing for them personally you might have some credibility.
I took the easy path, and sponsored through well run, well governanced charitable organisations several young girls in villages where Islam was the dominant religion, for many, many years. Have you, Ubercacher even done that?
This idea that you have some moral superiority because you insist that women must give birth when it's against their choice and then you leave women and children to subsist in poverty or great difficulties, that the women sacrifice their future opportunities is only a superior form of hypocrisy and selfishness inho. You get to smugly sleep well feeling virtuous while the women and children can be homeless, destitute and probably condemned to a life of crime. Don't come whining to me if the criminal offspring of some unfortunate women bust down your doors and shoot your family, or wipe you out when drug driving in a decade or two.i hope it doesn't happen, but if that's​ what it takes for you to wise up, then maybe your God should inflict that upon you, rather like Job.