The problem is that understanding why people hunt for pleasure would require in-depth psychological assessments of a large number of hunters against evaluative measures for a whole range of personality traits, before we could try to figure out what people are feeling and what their motivations are.
And that means we may never know why hunters are compelled to seek animal trophies for their walls. Indeed, we might be condemned just to watch and wonder about their motive and emotional capacity. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth.
Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Today there are people who hunt, and many more people who feel a deep-seated aversion to it; for whom the image of an animal slain by man — regardless of species, motive, legal status or even historical context — is nothing but repellent. Today, these fault lines are most often exposed when a picture of a hunter grinning above their kill goes viral, as it did last month for the US hunter and television presenter Larysa Switlyk.
Photographs of her posing with a goat and a sheep she had shot weeks earlier, and entirely legally, on the Scottish island of Islay went well beyond hunting circles on social media to be met with widespread disgust. Nicola Sturgeon publicly sympathised with the outcry and said the law would be reviewed.
And that was a goat. In the case of species that people travel to glimpse in the wild, or just watch on the Discovery Channel, the outrage can reverberate around the world. What would possess someone to want to kill these animals, let alone pay tens of thousands of pounds for the opportunity to do so? Hunters travel to experience different challenges. Zebras, for example, are tricky because they gather in herds out in the open and are watchful for predators.
The demand is reflected in the price tag. And rightly so, he adds. But if I could, I would. One name keeps cropping up in conversations about so-called trophy hunting: Cecil, the lion killed by Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer in Zimbabwe in Although it was legal to shoot him, he had been lured out of a national park where he was well-beloved, and Palmer, hunting with a bow and arrow, did not kill Cecil outright, meaning the animal suffered.
The stress that hunting inflicts on animals — the noise, the fear, and the constant chase — severely restricts their ability to eat adequately and store the fat and energy they need to survive the winter. Hunting also disrupts migration and hibernation, and the campfires, recreational vehicles and trash adversely affect both wildlife and the environment.
For animals like wolves, who mate for life and have close-knit family units, hunting can destroy entire communities. However, the concept of sport involves competition between two consenting parties, adherence to rules and fairness ensured by an intervening referee, and achieving highest scores but not death as the goal of the sporting events. With an arsenal of rifles, shotguns, muzzleloaders, handguns, bows and arrows, hunters kill more than million animals yearly — and likely crippling, orphaning, and harassing millions more.
The annual death toll in the U. Hunters also frequently use food and electronic callers to lure unsuspecting animals in front of their weapons. The truth is, the animal, no matter how well-adapted to escaping natural predators she or he may be, has virtually no way to escape death once he or she is in the cross hairs of a scope mounted on a rifle or a crossbow. Wildlife management, population control and wildlife conservation are euphemisms for killing — hunting, trapping and fishing for fun.
Discover World-Changing Science. Roosevelt shot the beast. Power play The slaughtering of large, dangerous animals as a spectacle dates back thousands of years, with records from the Assyrian empire about 4, years ago to around B. The high cost of hunting And then there's the money involved.
Conservation questions However, recent studies suggest that modern hunters may be overestimating their contributions to wildlife conservation. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber?
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