Hunting Giraffes

[Monty]

I accidentally came across this while posting on the pigmy hog thread, and thought I might throw it on here: hunting bongos! Good grief.
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Interesting example that. The guide employed local staff who would kill those animals to eat anyway, that's why they are such good trackers. This way they still get the meat to eat without using snares as well as getting jobs. The hunting clients killing older males would also be better for the population than killing females and young as they would if only after meat and using methods such as snares.

Camp staff consisted of Bantu from Northern Cameroon, who also worked in Faro West’s Lord Derby Giant Eland camp, and local pygmies. The Bantu served as cook, laundryman, drivers, and skinner while the pygmies were the trackers and general laborers. The main duty of the laborers was to maintain the roads. The pygmies lived with their families, including 25 to 30 small children, in a small village on site. They supplemented their diets of meat from the hunting operation with garden crops. In addition to growing cassava, bananas, papaya and many other fruits and vegetables, they grew marijuana for their personal use. The pygmy trackers were constantly foraging for edibles during the course of the hunt collecting lizards, small crocodiles, mushrooms, poki (honey), and favored plants from the forest as they worked.

Governments particually in Africa want an income from the land. Without the fees received from hunters they might log the area.

Poaching is a serious threat to the game animals of the forests of Cameroon. Bush meat i.e., meat from the wild animals living in the forest, is a staple of the diet of Cameroonians. By law every Cameroon citizen is entitled to a duiker per day. This means that at any time they can have one duiker in possession. When that one is gone i.e. traded or eaten they can legally get another. Bush meat is sold openly in the villages and towns and served in restaurants. Much of this meat is obtained from professional poachers whose business is harvesting meat animals by any means possible. The most common technique of the poacher in the rainforest is the use of snares made of cable wire. The snares are ingeniously set and very deadly. A poacher may set 50 to 100 snares on a single run, returning later to harvest his catch. When he has enough meat or the snares are not sufficiently productive he often leaves the area abandoning the snares in place to continue to catch animals. The good news though, is that they do not poach for bongo, Sitatunga, buffalo or forest hog. Although these animals will step into the snares that have been set, they normally are able to break the snare which leaves them with a snare or scar on one of their ankles. 99% of bongo that are shot will have either a snare or a scar from a snare on its foot. Most of the poaching is for duikers, but luckily they reproduce very quickly. There are a lot of duikers there, and we had no problem at all calling in duikers, or seeing them on the roads

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Highly impressed by the photo of the hunter with that ferocious quarry species, the Blue Duiker.

He probably paid over $1000 for that Duiker, a percentage of with would go into poaching prevention.

 

[DavidBrown]

@Monty: is there any prospect of eliminating foxes in Australia, or at least parts of the country, or are they irreversibly now part of the landscape? Are there other introduced predators that you have to deal with like feral cats?

 

[Chlidonias]

Have you ever seen a fox caught by hounds? Being from NZ I don't expect you have much experience with fox control as you are lucky to live in one of the very few places without foxes.

I have seen stag hounds catch foxes and one shake and they are dead, one second.
Fox hounds though rarely catch foxes when we do fox drives as they are slower than the stag hounds. They just follow the scent and chase the foxes out to the waiting shooters. They usually arrive soon after the fox is shot and give the dead fox a munch to make sure it is dead, and one bite would be all it takes to kill a fox.
Both dog breeds will kill a fox immediately and what is not humane about that.

As for your second claim of it not being efficient to use fox hounds, they find hidden foxes in stubbles easily and drive them out and follow the scent to where they can be shot. Stag hounds are a sight hunter and will run down and kill any fox they see.

sorry Monty but we are talking at cross-purposes here, about different types of fox-hunting. You are talking about hunting introduced foxes as pests, which is fine (trying to flush and shoot as many foxes as possible, which in an Australian context I fully support), but TARZAN was talking about English fox-hunting which has nothing to do with fox control except in the excuses of the hunters themselves. It is one single fox chased by hounds and horses for miles -- the net result is one single dead fox. It is not control, it is just a blood-sport, and that is why it was outlawed as a barbaric practice. That was what my post was about (and what I thought you were talking about).

With regards to the bongo hunting link I posted, it wasn't so much the hunting that I thought repellent (I do think it repellent to hunt bongo but that is largely for aesthetic reasons, because really, why would you want to shoot a bongo!?). No, it was more the interesting contrast between the activity and the hunter's explanation for why he does it, namely "simply to go and to get one of the worlds most beautiful animals, the Bongo. Pictures do not do this animal justice, and until you set your eyes on a Bongo up close in the forest, you will never realize how beautiful and how special these animals really are." And then blow its beautiful special brains out all over the forest floor. As I said, while I don't particularly care if people want to hunt animals, I honestly don't understand the mind-set of trophy hunters at all!

 

[Monty]

@Monty: is there any prospect of eliminating foxes in Australia, or at least parts of the country, or are they irreversibly now part of the landscape? Are there other introduced predators that you have to deal with like feral cats?

Not a hope. All we can hope for is constant pressure keeping their numbers low enough that they have minimal impact. Shooting, dogs and poisons all need to be used as foxes learn to avoid threats. Some foxes wont touch baits and others are cunning enough to be unshootable.

Feral cats are a problem as well and are harder to control than foxes. They hide better and often wont look at a spoltlight and will not take most baits.

With regards to the bongo hunting link I posted, it wasn't so much the hunting that I thought repellent (I do think it repellent to hunt bongo but that is largely for aesthetic reasons, because really, why would you want to shoot a bongo!?). No, it was more the interesting contrast between the activity and the hunter's explanation for why he does it, namely "simply to go and to get one of the worlds most beautiful animals, the Bongo. Pictures do not do this animal justice, and until you set your eyes on a Bongo up close in the forest, you will never realize how beautiful and how special these animals really are."

I find art some people like is repellent as well, it is a matter personal opinion. Them being a beautiful animals is the reason some people want them in their house. I do not have any taxidermied animals myself, but do think when well done they are very beautiful and it is almost impossible to tell the differance between that and the photo of a live animal. There are poor examples as well which do not look good.

I bet the bloke in that article has a trophy room full of animals from around the world and spends about $100,000 a trip.

 

[IanRRobinson]

Not a hope. All we can hope for is constant pressure keeping their numbers low enough that they have minimal impact. Shooting, dogs and poisons all need to be used as foxes learn to avoid threats. Some foxes wont touch baits and others are cunning enough to be unshootable.

Feral cats are a problem as well and are harder to control than foxes. They hide better and often wont look at a spoltlight and will not take most baits.

To be fair, I would make an exception for hunters looking to deal with feral animals. Even then, I do find myself wondering: if there's revenue to be made from hunting (say) introduced Rusa Deer in Australia, will there be rigorous attempts to eradicate them as (presumably) damaging to native flora and fauna?

As Chlidonias has pointed out, Aussie farmers/conservationists are a world away from English fox hunters. I still don't have a problem with a shepherd or a farmer who sits up with a gun and deals with a fox that's posing a threat to his livelihood, assuming he knows what he's doing with the gun. The RSPB quietly goes about removing Red Foxes where necessary on their reserves.

All I'm saying is that pursuing an animal for self-glorification is something I don't understand.

 

[Hix]

The only way we will eradicate foxes from Australia is by introducing a fatal disease to the wild population, but that's not likely to happen because of the risk to domestic dogs and dingos. Same goes for feral cats.



Hix

 

[Ajlin]

On hunting disrupting the social structures of animals, wild giraffe do mourn dead calves. It's been observed. Giraffes living in zoos mourn for calves that die, but hey really get depressed if they lose their mate.

Like elephants, giraffes do communicate infra-sonically, their social networks actually are pretty complex.

I admit that my reaction to photos of giraffes killed by hunters disturbed me.

I am not anti-hunting as such. People all over still hunt to eat. I admit it's because giraffes are so beautiful. Still, I watched 'The Hunt', a film about ¡King people hunting a giraffe. I did not like to see a giraffe killed, but these people were doing it to eat. They wasted nothing. Giraffe also were more abundant then.
I don't like hunting an animal as a trophy, or for just one body part. Hats why elephants and rhinos are in trouble.
We have as humans an obligation to help preserve animal species.