Here’s another photograph from my trip to the Northern Territory of Australia (NT), view image (90KB). This crocodile had just snatched a barramundi for afternoon tea.
There was much talk in the NT about federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell’s decision to not support safari hunting of crocodiles.
Federal government approval is needed for the export of skins and heads. Of the 600 crocodiles culled each year, the NT government wants to let 25 be shot by overseas tourists who would apparently be willing to pay $10,000 for the privilege to shoot a croc – as long as they can take the head and skins home with them.
The Minister has said “No” on the basis that such a plan would send the wrong signal to the world, like that we don’t care about our wildlife.
I have been re-reading ‘At the hand of man: Perils and hope for Africa’s wildlife’ by Raymond Bonner (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1993). Bonner writes about the early history of WWF and other conservation groups that have their origins in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. WWF was launched in Tanzania in 1961. The panda symbol was just a symbol, that animal chosen in large part because it reproduced well in black and white. The African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (now known as the African Wildlife Foundation) was also founded in 1961 and by rich Europeans and Americans who were avid big-game hunters. They loved the big animals and wanted them protected, including so they could shot them.
For example, according to Bonner, Russel E. Train was an American tax court judge and avid big-game hunter, founder of the African Wildlife Foundation, first chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, has been head of the Environmental Protection Agency and in the early 1990s was chairman of WWF in the United States.
WWF now supports a Russel E. Train Conservation Program.
I guess the point I am wanting to make, is that at least historically, safari hunting has been synonymous with conservation.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
The Giant Panda, almost impossibly cute and teetering precariously on the brink of extinction, won it place as an icon of global environmentalism; notwithstanding its black and white promotional advantages.
The Southern Cassowary is far less secure, but according to Wet Tropics Management Authority marketing research, is perceived publicly as intimidating and so it was replaced as the symbol of rainforest protection by a caricature of a treefrog, with big eyes and twenty toes – representing the twenty indigenous clans within the wet tropics region.
Popularist environmentalism harks on about conservation values but seems reluctant to quantify these values economically.
A big game hunter will pay $10,000 to bag an NT croc in the wild, enunciating conservation value to the extent that the animal is there to be hunted and with a status that reflects population abundance.
The payment, presumably, would be made to government and despite being absorbed into consolidated revenue, would (at least ethically) have to reflect an allocation to crocodile conservation.
However, the hunter would also contribute substantially to relevant economies for food, accommodation, transportation, guidance, etc and so the two definitive criteria for ecotourism are met – travel that contributes to the conservation of the attraction and improvement of the well-being of local people.
Where we live, we have a few dams and water birds make themselves at home, as they do.
Visitors are impressed by the happy scene of birds ducks fowl with chicks splashing around.
Over the road, in some “remnant bushland”, is a nest of sea eagles. Every year they have their chicks and those chicks they gotta eat. So when the wind is right the eagles hover over the dams and pluck out water birds for their brood.
Only last week we drove out as an eagle flew past with a cute grebe dangling from its talons.
Is this behaviour acceptable?
I would question the acceptability of the adjective “cute” in the circumstances.
Diminutive “diving ducks”, as the Warlpiri call them in their aboriginal english, might better be called sitting ducks by their adolescents with dead-eyed accuracy with slingshots fashioned from football bladders.
I grew up enjoying the annual arrival of grebes for nesting on one of our property’s dams and I can assure you that observing their death as described draws at the very core of responsibility, however, like the sea-eagles, the Warlpiri have to eat, also.