Many of you probably watched the recent CBS 60 Minutes segment on the Texas ranchers who have saved a number of species of African exotic wildlife by bringing them to Texas and providing incentives for their propagation by marketing their harvest as hunting trophies. The populations have now reached the extent of over a quarter million exotic animals from Africa and Asia, including at least three species that have been rescued from extinction in the process. The market for the animals makes the system work and in many cases there are now more representatives of the species in Texas than in their native countries.
But as you might guess, this is not good enough for the animal rights crowd. They deeply resent the application of market principles to their supposedly purely altruistic motives and are working fairly successfully to hinder the permitting to hunt certain species, which will of course dampen the market and significantly shrink the population. One activist said in effect that she would rather whatever numbers of the various species are left be returned to Africa. In other words, she would rather have them dead in Africa than alive and propagating in Texas if it means that otherwise someone is profiting from the process.
The true motives of these people are exposed here. They have no real interest in the animals at all. It’s all about the notion of the pristine wilderness “uncorrupted” by the social constructs of man, the romantic invention of Jean Jacques Rousseau that permeates animal rights activism as well as its cousin, radical environmentalism, to the detriment of both man and beast.
