A recent CBS 60 Minutes segment focused on wildlife ranches in Texas where animals can be hunted—for a price. The hunters proclaim their actions in the name of conservation.
When Charly Seale, executive director of the Exotic Wildlife Association based in Texas, was asked by the correspondent, “Can you call yourselves conservationists when your purpose, your intent, the thing that's driving it is to hunt the animals and to kill them?”
Seale, who, according to the story, represents the interests of approximately 5,000 exotic ranchers in North America, responded, “Absolutely. That's, that's why these animals thrive it's because of that, that value that they have to the hunting community.”
So the value of these animals lies in their deaths and not their lives. The idea that to conserve something means you must kill that something seems a bit far-fetched. To breed an animal so you can charge people to come onto your property to kill that animal is not conservation, it’s hunting, plain and simple. To destroy nature is not to conserve nature. To mount the head of a wild animal in your trophy room is not conservation, it is repugnant.
Sadly, there are associations with a form of the word “conservation” in their titles who find hunting acceptable. Again, how can you conserve that which you kill? If we want to conserve a population of, for instance, people native to a particular section of our country, would we kill a few to conserve the others? Isn’t that saying the group is more important than the individual? Isn’t it saying the individual gives up his or her rights to life because he or she belongs to a particular group, a particular species? Each life—human animal and nonhuman animal—is an individual with an individual personality. Take a group of purebred puppies, for example—they may all look the same but they aren’t. They are their own individual beings with individual traits and personalities. Wildlife are individuals with their own individual traits and personalities. To say one is more deserving to live than another, in the name of conservation, bastardizes the word.
In commenting about people who would like to see Seale’s and all other canned hunting ranches shut down, Seale remarked, “…but there are a faction of people out there that would just as soon see these animals go extinct as to have us use them for sp- to hunt and after all, that is the bottom line. That's what these animals are all about. That's why they are here in the numbers that they're here today.”
Was he about to say “sport” and thought better of the word? Regardless of what he intended to say, what he did say is these animals were not put on this earth to live lives of their own choosing; they were placed here so he and others like him could breed them and then kill them.
If Seale and his colleagues really want to conserve wildlife through their breeding programs, then why not turn their ranches into sanctuaries that eventually restore some of these species to their native lands—assuming their native lands are still sufficiently habitable for them to survive. If there are no habitable places for a species, then maintaining the species safely in a reserve in their native lands is the next best choice for them. That’s conservation. Breeding for the purpose of killing them isn’t.
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