I flew home on a plane full of killers, and the TSA didn’t even seem to mind. Then again, when the world’s biggest gathering of big-game hunters ends, they all have to get home somehow. The gathering was the annual convention of Safari Club International, in Reno, Nevada, and if you had taken the time to attend, you would have heard a solid, reasoned argument why saving the world’s most amazing animals requires killing at least a few of them.
You can see at the local level why it’s better for hunters to harvest a carefully controlled number of deer and elk: Would you rather have them starve in the woods during winter when the food won’t support the population? Similarly, when countries like Botswana have elephant populations north of 125,000, letting big-game hunters take a few hundred of them makes perfect sense. The hunters can spend $25,000 or $30,000 on a hunt like that, generating jobs for the residents. The hunter takes home a head and horns and leaves behind six tons of meat. The country protects its game population, prosecutes poachers, and preserves habitat. Everyone wins.
There was a lot of talk at SCI about the new U.S. ban, under the Endangered Species Act, on bringing polar-bear trophies into the United States from Canada. The Canadian government grants native people several hundred permits per year to take polar bears. They can sell the privilege to foreign hunters, who in the years before the ban would sometimes spend tens of thousands of dollars on a hunt and pay the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service thousands more to bring back the skin. Foreign hunters want mature males for the most part, but with the trophy ban on, the natives will hunt bears themselves, often taking females and cubs. So a change calculated to “save” the polar bears will likely result in diminishing their numbers.
Pres. George W. Bush spoke to 4,000 people at dinner Saturday night and received a standing ovation. Nebraska’s Sen. Ben Nelson, scheduled to receive honors for his pro-hunter work, was a no-show at SCI, and when his name was mentioned, the crowd booed. Conservative celebrities like the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre and actor Tom Selleck couldn’t walk though the show without drawing applause and requests for autographs. I didn’t see a single Obama sticker on the cars in the parking lot.
I know it sounds crazy to non-hunters that the best way to preserve the world’s most prized animals is to put a price on their heads. But here, as in many other cases, conservatives understand that applying basic economics works better than relying on sentiment.
– Lars Larson hosts the Lars Larson Northwest Show from noon to 3:00 P.M., and the Lars Larson National Show from 3:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M., daily (Pacific time) on Newsradio 750 KXL in Portland, Oregon, and other stations.