These are the sons of Donald Trump on an African hunting trip.
The photographs are intense – images of the men proudly hoisting a dead leopard, smiling and holding a sawed off elephant’s tail next to the animal’s body, posing with a dead bull and waterbuck and an enormous, strung-up crocodile...Via Salon, which has details and commentary and a link to the hunting tour company (with a trophy photo library).
Yet the younger Trumps stand by their actions. In a joint statement, the brothers defended themselves, explaining, “We are both avid outdoorsmen and were brought up hunting and fishing with our Grandfather who taught us that nothing should ever be taken for granted or wasted. We have the utmost respect for nature and have always hunted in accordance with local laws and regulations. In addition, all meat was donated to local villagers who were incredibly grateful. We love traveling and being in the woods — at the end of the day, we are outdoorsmen at heart.”
I grew up on a farm. I can understand hunting for food or to stop an animal causing harm. But where is the satisfaction in shooting a lion or an elephant? It's like an expensive adult version of a computer game. Seeing them pose with the animals they look pathetic. If they want to be manly they should work to protect the environment.
ReplyDeleteA single elephant, let alone a herd, can wreak some havoc on a villages cropland just by passing through. If they think it's a tasty treat, it's gone. That said, I agree with you. I wonder what the cost would be for enough hesco bastion to enclose 10 or 15 acres?
DeleteI worked in Uganda years ago & the village was raided by gorillas one Sunday. If we'd shot them to save a life/livelihood I wouldn't have felt bad, but shooting them for sport would be unthinkable.
DeleteOh boy, leopard meat. Because that's edible.
ReplyDeleteBut the villagers were incredibly grateful! INCREDIBLY GRATEFUL!
DeleteLeopard meat's totally edible. Hence why the leopard's main human threat is not trophy hunters like these guys (who only shoot, like, 1 a lifetime), but rather bushmeat hunters, who kill as many as they find.
DeleteIn areas where leopards are not considered an expensive trophy hunting commodity, they basically don't exist any more, because they've all been eaten. Well, except outright game reserves of course, but [a] a lot of the money to keep those reserves open comes FROM trophy fees paid by dudes like the Trumps, and [b] animals are still culled in those reserves, for various reasons, but no money's made off them then.
Attitudes about hunting are somewhat like attitudes about gods. There is a chasm between the pro and con positions and neither side can understand the other.
ReplyDeleteThe Salon article is incredibly biased and I think unfair to the brothers. After all it wasn't their "arrogance" that caused the company to "decide to brag about their prowess." Though I don't understand the need to kill an Elephant, or any other "trophy" animals for that matter, it is legal and popular in some circles. Her assertion that the Trumps are "out of touch" may be true, but this is not the evidence as I don't see her vilifying the other clients of the company they guided through.
ReplyDeleteBeing legal (especially in Africa) doesn't make it right.
DeleteYep, those Africans can never figure out what should be legal or not...
Delete[/sarcasm]
Spoiled creeps. Judging by the fact that one of these goons retweeted: "Most of the people hating on you is because you are young, rich and successful. rock on!" they, like their dad were born rich and standing on third base (crossing home plate actually) and think they hit a triple to get there. If you read the Salon article, at least The Donald says he's not very comfortable what they're doing.
ReplyDeleteOh and "feeding the grateful villagers" how patronizing of these jerks. Did they toss the meat out to the "natives" as they passed by in their coach?
I wouldn't call it hatred of these two guys. I think it's just an illustration that for as much as many people think that we all have "equal opportunities" (or worse yet, that government is making things easier for the poor than for the rich), that is so unequivocally false.
ReplyDeleteIt's great that these two guys (and their father) hit the gene pool lottery and can fly to Africa to hunt leopards. It's not be great for them to actively try and change laws in this country to make it harder for others to get to where they are. It's also amazing that they can't fathom that at their age, they have had a bazillion more opportunities than most people have in a lifetime.
"Kicking the ladder away for the rest below" politics.
DeleteI can say with 100% honesty and certainty that I do not envy people who feel the need to murder animals for fun. Hunting should be for necessity, this is poaching.
DeleteA leopard? An elephant? To see what the wealthy spend their money on is heartbreaking.
If this doesn't make your skin crawl (regardless of your political beliefs) I am deeply frightened of you and anyone else who thinks the same way.
I can understand people hunting for deer/elk- it helps keep the population in a healthy balance plus it provides meat. I can understand from my own experiences that one has to sometimes kill rodents that destroy food crops or eat the wiring out of the car (pack rats).
ReplyDeleteBut hunting just for the thrill of killing? It's just sad.
When I was young, we lived out in the country in Wisconsin. I had a rifle, and used it for target shooting, but my dad decided I should use it to get rid of the critters that were eating stuff in the garden and the fruit trees. I shot the head off a bird, and was so appalled, I got rid of the gun and never shot again. Guess where I am on this issue?
ReplyDeleteThere are quite a few things I learned from Grandpa that took a long time to unlearn. ...Racism being one, smoking being another...
ReplyDeleteI do admit that I have jealousy of these boys absolute freedom that I will never know (and I am not saying that I want to do any these things):
Weather getting you down? Get on your plane
Wanna try drugs without a prescription? Get on your plane
Wanna kill things that are treasured here? Get on your plane
Disagree with the age of consent? Get on your plane
Tired of paying people a livable wage? Get on your plane
And the absolute worst part (just like the GoDady @sshole) is their justification in "we fed the hungry villagers with the meat."
ReplyDeleteIf they had used even half the money spent on their "safari" providing food to those same needy people, they could have fed them hundreds of times over. Evil.
I despise anyone who takes pleasure in the terror, pain and death of any animal. One could ask what differentiates these men from any others and why should their position make them subject to such media attention. Well.. its the fact that despite having so much opportunity for doing something useful and commendable with the time money and opportunities that they have. All they've done is spend it on themselves and kill animals in some pathetic attempt to prove their own importance. Sad.
ReplyDeleteWell said.
DeleteSo much money, so little class.
ReplyDeleteThis issue is so much more complicated than I think the writers of this article, or most of its readers, seem to understand.
ReplyDeleteSo, in the interest of full disclosure, I have been on hunts like this. Not all the same animals, not the same places, but the same deal. The person who took me on this trip is not part of the 1%, although I wouldn't say they're middle class either. These types of safari hunts are honestly totally common and totally normal for people who can afford it.
Most of the expenses on these hunting safaris are trophy fees. These fees go pretty much entirely toward sustaining the wildlife population. The wildlife management systems in most African countries that are stable enough for this kind of tourism are VERY sophisticated. Like, really, it was pretty stunning to me.
These safaris provide many benefits to the local people and environment. First of all, and most obviously, everything is done on the local level with local employees. This includes all the housekeeping and foodservice people for the lodges, the trackers, the people working to clean the game, the drivers, etc. And usually these game ranches also have farms or other ventures that they're able to fund with their safari revenues, which ALSO employ local people. They also almost always get most or all of the meat.
Secondly, there's the issue of sustainability of wildlife populations. The fact is that most of the people in these areas do need real, concrete incentives to not just kill all these animals for food or because they're pests. For example, leopards aren't just pests--they're killers. They kill livestock. They kill children. If there isn't [a] a mechanism to keep their population under control (i.e. controlled hunting) and [b] a financial incentive to not just hunt them down whenever, people are going to do just that. And they have, in the past. We're having this same problem with grey wolves here in the US.
I think people here in the US have a hard time picturing and understanding what it's like to live in a place where there's that high a population, and that much diversity, of large mammals wandering around. Things are much more spread out in Africa, and as a result there is a lot more interaction between humans and wildlife. As a result, things do have to be really carefully managed to keep people reasonably safe and keep animal populations reasonably high. And at the end of the day, hunting tourism's a pretty good way of keeping those two balanced.
I take offence at the title "the 1% at play".
ReplyDeleteIt may be because of their wealth (and the attitudes it creates) that these guys are able hunt animals and boast about it like this. But this says nothing at all about other wealthy people - I think its extremely disingenuous to imply (which it seems you are) that it is because they are in the top 1% of wealthy Americans that they hunt African animals for sport.
This is not to mention that so much hunting (and poaching) around the world is likely done by people without wealth. How many Africans hunt these animals, for example? How many average Americans hunt local wildlife in America?
At best it is a careless title.
I'd like to see the heads of this Trump spawn mounted on poleaxes and paraded around Nairobi before being fed to the hyenas. For added entertainment, add the head of their pathologically narcissistic great American embarrassment of a father Donald.
ReplyDeleteOr just give me some of their filthy money.
The Trump slaughterers have now added to their ranks the great Melissa Bachman. The disrespect for the animal the Trump "boetie" (Afrikaans for "brother") is holding up is sad. They are in essence poachers and nothing else. To negotiate with Zimbabwean authorities is to negotiate with illegality per se, because of the country's bad reputation. You all are an embarrassment for us living in Africa. I hope a divine intervention would wipe people like you from the earth. You are rich rogues and nothing else. We want to see animals alive, not sharing in your fetish for dead animals. Shame on you!
DeleteWildlife has to pay its way, or else the locals will kill it either for food or territory or self-defense. Ducks Unlimited has been responsible for saving huge amounts of wetland that would otherwise be plowed under for subdivisions/Walmarts/parking lots. It would be nice if non-hunters were also willing to pay to save wildlife, but it appears they are not or not as much.
ReplyDeleteAlso, many wild animal species breed in excess anyway: the limiting factor is habitat, not reproduction. Zoo lions sometimes need to be fitted with IUDs; elephants in Botswana often overgraze their habitat. If we don't let the 1% kill some of them for money to save the rest, either they'll starve or be killed by local villagers who care nothing for conservation.
If only that leopard had a chance to kill those two for fun... I'm sure she would 've ignored them.. Go buy your selves something expensive and leave this planet alone!
ReplyDelete